Cure Without Insight
Warren Poland and Thomas Ogden
I was seventeen, in the last month of my freshman year at college when I heard my father died. I headed home for the week of formal mourning, returned to campus to take my final exams, and still shocked and confused then returned home for the summer to help in the corner “Mom and Pop” grocery store that had suddenly become just a “Mom” store.
Back at college in the fall I found myself having a new custom, one strange for someone who always loved school. Not knowledgeable enough to think of it as a symptom, it simply seemed a new and surprising habit. In short, I avoided all scheduled examinations. It was not that I felt afraid of them; this was not a newly developed phobia. I just stopped showing up whenever a test was scheduled.
My skipping exams had not yet gone on long enough for professors to become suspicious as I always did appear for the make-up examinations that were routinely scheduled. At least such was the situation with the first round of tests.
It all became more complicated when time came for the second series of exams, and the complication arose first with my German class. After once more I failed to appear for an announced test, my teacher yet again scheduled a replacement exam. Unlike with the first set of tests, however, this time not only did I not keep the new appointment but during the subsequent class meeting I offered neither apology nor explanation, not even acknowledgement of my broken appointment.
At the end of the next regular class session, when dismissing the others Miss Hammerschmidt added, “Mr. Poland, please remain behind.” Expecting to face angry criticism, I was surprised when, with accepting warmth, my teacher simply declared that I was to take my test that very moment. As soon as the classroom emptied, she sat me opposite her at her desk, gave me a page of German text, and told me to translate.
I stared at the page but sat mute. She waited patiently during what felt like a painfully long silence and then calmly said, “Let me start for you.” Taking the page, she herself translated the first two sentences. After that, still with a warm tone, she returned the text to me and asked me to finish the translation. At that moment it felt to me as if something important about the whole world suddenly had changed. I picked up where she had left off and readily completed what struck me as a rather easy translation.
I never skipped any examinations after that in any of my courses. Sadly, I do not think I ever thanked Miss Hammerschmidt, but now more than seven decades later I know that I still remember her. And I still love her.
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Warren, on reading your account of your experience with Miss Hammerschmidt, I am reminded of a close friend, Jane Hewitt, who died in middle age thirty years ago. She was a psychoanalyst who was particularly gifted at working with severely disturbed patients. She’d been working for a couple of years with a psychotic patient who lived in a half-way house and came to see her at her office five days a week. He had a habit of defecating on the sidewalk outside the door to her building.
One day, from the waiting room, he saw her leave her office and walk down the hallway in the direction opposite him. He stole into her office which she’d left slightly ajar. He opened her pocketbook and found her driver’s license on which her home address was printed.
Some weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, Jane saw him standing on the street outside her home. She went out and invited him to come in for tea and cookies. He looked confused by her invitation. They talked for a while and then he left. He did not again feel it necessary to come to see her at her house.