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I once had a girlfriend who was a psychiatrist. Her name was Betty Berzon and she lived in a clean, very expensive, white plaster home high on a hillside in La Jolla. The best feature about the home was the large redwood deck facing (or course) west. Anyone who built a home high over the Pacific and faced it east was probably someone to be avoided. We would meet there several evenings a week after our respective jobs (she, a psychiatrist, me, a senior clinical psych major at San Diego State with a part-time job) and sip martinis and watch the sunset over the Pacific Ocean, far below. We were so high above the ocean the lines of surf looked like long motionless wrinkles, but if you watched them closely, and long enough, they did indeed move. If you've ever flown over the ocean in a commercial airliner and bothered to look out a window, you know what I mean. Even up that high, on Betty Berzon's redwood deck, you could still smell the ocean, and for me, a young man who had been living in the desert, a hundred miles to the east, it was the scent of a mysterious, unknown, romantic world. Out there, somewhere, if you plowed westward, week after week on a rusty tramp steamer: The Orient! We met at a party thrown by the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, also in La Jolla, where I worked part time two evenings a week. WBSI was a weird place to work because they didn't study the mentally ill, they studied sane, normal, well-adjusted, everyday people. They had this idea that, as psychiatry studied mentally ill people and, while that was certainly psychiatry's apparent mission, what psychiatry needed to do now was to also study healthy people in hopes of learning what it was that made them so healthy. Somehow, and I was never clear on this, such study and observation would surely produce great insights into the mentally ill. Four groups of completely normal people would meet at the Institute one night weekly. Each group consisted of four or five people. I worked in a room that had four one-way glass windows, each facing one of the rooms in which a group met. The room was wired for sound and there were eight of us. We wore earphones so we could only hear the sound coming from 'our' room. Two of us were assigned to each room. My partner was Emily, a catholic girl from USD. Each group member was identified by his or her first name. In the event of same first names, it would become Marcia R. and Marcia G. When a person spoke to another member of the group, we were supposed to divine its non-verbal emotional content. Was it friendly, was there a subtle, below the surface hostile edge, was it attention-getting, was it a veiled pass - just what the hell was it? And to whom was it aimed? Why did one person talk mainly to the same person? Why did the members of the group ignore one of its members? Who was, for want of a better term, the socio-emotional leader of the group? And could you trace how he or she had emerged as a leader? One thing that became clear to both of us novice human behavior assessors was that each group always had a leader. During each session, as we observed and listened, each of us would scribble furiously in a made-up short hand code our responses to their responses and after the session ended we could compare notes, as it were, and see how closely we had assessed. If there was a difference we would argue, sometimes furiously, until one of us caved in or we agreed to disagree. Without too much thought on the matter, you can see how rigorously this whole scheme adhered to the scientific method. But we didn't care, we were getting well paid and it was good fun, voyeuristically watching our group's behavior and how it changed over time, and it was a hell of a good job for college seniors and graduate students. I don't know what Betty Berzon did at the Institute and I didn't care. We had met at the party and immediately hit it off. She was 48, short, dark, Jewish and brilliant. I was 28, blond, naïve, innocent of religion, and in the middle of my first (is there a second?) intellectual awakening. What we discovered in each other, and what bound us together at once was that elusive cerebral skill: humor. Books have been written about it, as if you could learn the theories of humor and become, through concentrated study, a funny guy or a funny girl. I think they're a waste of time. You either have it or you don't. Some of the worst moments in my life have been spent listening to someone, bereft of it, tell a joke. This is a truly agonizing experience, especially if you're among the witty. Berzon and I never told jokes to each other. Our acerbic comments on the human condition and contemporary culture, our shared observations on what we had observed during the day, sufficed to roll us in our respective aisles as we lounged on the deck, barbecuing steaks, drinking martinis and watching the inevitable sunset. She told me one evening that she had a liver problem, cirrhosis, she said. I didn't know what that was, but it didn't sound promising. I thought it was an alcoholic's disease, but she was by no stretch of the term a drunk. I made a point that night to look it up the next day. What I read was not reassuring. In June I graduated, moved away, worked for a couple of years and then tried the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. After the first semester, a grueling, relentless, 16 hour-a-day sustained attack on my mental and physical well-being, Christmas break finally arrived and I drove my 1961 Volkswagen back to California, spent a few days with my folks in Brawley, and then drove to La Jolla to visit Betty. It was an unseasonably warm evening on the redwood deck. I wore a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, I suppose in vogue at the time, sipped my martini, waited for the filet mignons to marinade and stared, hypnotized as always, at the blood-red globe settling into the lacquered sea. Betty came out on the deck. She had dark circles under her eyes. She had always been slim. Now she was too slim. She
observed me for a moment with that clinical, appraising stare honed
over two decades of private practice. "You seem depressed,
Ted," she said. "Come
on, Betty," I said, "don't start that crap, this is your
day off, and besides, you sound like Carl Rogers." But I felt
angry and vulnerable at the ease with which she had assessed my
mood. The next thing I knew I was unloading all my fear and loathing and anxiety over being in the program at LSU and being a TA teaching Psych 101 and doing an internship at a nearby mental hospital trying to rid a paranoid schizophrenic of his notion that the entire resources of the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc., were concentrated on him, that it was, well, silly to believe thusly, and really just all in his head (which it no doubt was). He would look at me for a minute, nodding appreciatively at my brilliant summing-up, then say, "Yes. I can see the logic in what you say. You are undoubtedly right, doctor." We would part amiably. Later I would learn, accidentally from an orderly, that after I left he would say, "He's one of them." Clearly, I was out of my league. So I blurted all this out to Betty in one long half-hour purge. It had gotten dark and the steaks, thank God, were still in the marinade and not on the grill. I felt at once exhausted and profoundly relieved. Betty came up behind me, put her small hand on my shoulder, and uttered a one sentence that irrevocably altered the direction of my life. "Well, Ted, if you want to spend the rest of your life listening to other people's problems, you've chosen the right profession." I remember leaping up and pacing around the deck. "Not me," I said, "not for the rest of my life. And besides, I'm not very good at it." It was a cathartic moment, and I broke down and cried with relief. She held me. After a while it was okay and we ate. She went to bed and I sat in the lounge chair, smoking my pipe, drinking myself sober, watching the night pass into dawn, and realizing that I had been in psychology more out of curiosity rather than from any calling, and mostly because I had read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams the summer before embarking on my junior year and had to declare a major of some kind. Although I had always gotten A's in English courses it didn't seem like anything I could make a living at. Dawn
came and I went inside to say goodbye. I had to return to Baton
Rouge, finish the semester, withdraw from the program, and figure
out what to do with the rest of my life. Wrapped in a confusion
of blankets my mentor slept, snoring softly. I kissed her on the
forehead. She stirred, mumbled, rolled further into her chaos of
blankets, and began again the soft snoring. In the day's first light,
her face, even though in sleep, seemed tired and pale. I left her
a note. I don't recall what I wrote, but I hope it had a bit of
class to it.
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