The Other Side of Desire Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the bookcases in his office. The psychiatrist seemed all-knowing. He seemed unconditional in his forgiveness and sympathy. His mansion felt like Toronto, a haven.
    Berlin reviewed the tests and called Jacob into his office to talk. Jacob showed him the copy he’d kept of the article from Psychology Today : an offering. The snow boots and socks and first memories of desire at the age of seven, the phone surveys taken sometimes several times in a day, the electric effect of the feet on the dashboard, the terror of late spring, the unendurable mortification—Jacob gave his history.
    “I think I can help you,” Berlin said.
    “You do?”
    The doctor talked of a patient drawn to earlobes, assuring Jacob that he was not so strange. “I think I can help,” he repeated.
    “I don’t,” Jacob said.
    “I can’t cure you. I don’t want you to have false expectations, because this will always be there. But I can help.” Berlin explained the anti-androgens, their effect on the sex drive, on physical arousal, and, too, their side effects, the possibility of developing breasts, the chance that his bone structure would weaken and warp.
    Jacob was too desperate to take pause. “You might be able to control the physical, but not the mental,” he insisted, trying not to hope, straining to protect himself against disappointment. “You can’t control my thoughts.” And it was his thoughts, as much as anything, that he wanted to purge. He wanted to poison their source in what felt like the center of his hideous being.
    “You’re wrong,” Berlin said.
    “I hope I’m wrong.”
    “You are. There will be a difference mentally.”
    Jacob thought, You’re full of crap. You don’t know how strong this is. He said, “I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. I’ll pay you whatever it is. I just can’t take this anymore, I just can’t be this way anymore. Just tell me what to do.”
    “I’ve never met someone so agreeable.” Berlin laughed gently.
    “Usually I have to fight with people.”
    “You’re not going to have to fight with me.”
     
     
    BERLIN hardly knew why he’d begun to steer, in college in the 1960s, from psychology to psychiatry—and toward a vision that focused on the biological, that saw nature as a more promising area than nurture in which to search for understanding of the sexual mind. He recalled learning, as an undergraduate, about a scientist who was altering drives like thirst by implanting electrodes in the brain, and he remembered studying the Heinrich Kluver and Paul Bucy experiment on the brains of monkeys: the surgical lesions inflicted on the monkeys’ temporal lobes, followed by the eruption of crazed sexual activity, not only with other monkeys but with an array of inanimate objects. And injury to the same region in the human brain could lead to the same sort of indiscriminate and unrestrained desire.
    But in Berlin’s own telling, there was no moment, or series of moments, of decision or inspiration that had formed his vision. He didn’t seem to think in such terms. It was as though his way of seeing had happened to him for reasons impossible to know—exactly as he thought about the erotic directions of his patients. All the talk and introspection in the world couldn’t unbury the causes. When Jacob asked, during their first meeting, “Why am I like this?” Berlin answered, “It’s the way you’re wired.” When Jacob asked, at every meeting afterward, “Why? Why? I want an answer why. I need an answer why,” Berlin gave the same response, sometimes adding rhetorically, “Why are people gay?” When Jacob tried Berlin with a theory offered by his first therapist, that back in the second grade, frantic to avoid being called on because he couldn’t read, he’d kept his eyes on the floor, and that somehow, in those highly charged moments of yearning for escape, he’d started to eroticize his classmates’ feet, Berlin dismissed it.
    And probably most in his field had grown