During a belated New Year’s cleaning, I come across my grad-school coursework on the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. Scanning my notes, I begin to remember his story.
Frankl was born in 1905, and as a boy, he became intensely interested in psychology. By high school, he began an active correspondence with Freud. He went on to study medicine and lecture on the intersection of psychology and philosophy, or what he called logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, or “meaning.” Whereas Freud believed that people are driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain (his famous pleasure principle), Frankl maintained that people’s primary drive isn’t toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives.
He was in his thirties when World War II broke out, putting him, a Jew, in jeopardy. Offered immigration to the United States, he turned it down so as not to abandon his parents, and a year later, the Nazis forced Frankl and his wife to have her pregnancy terminated. In a matter of months, he and other family members were deported to concentration camps, and when Frankl was finally freed, three years later, he learned that the Nazis had killed his wife, his brother, and both of his parents.
Freedom under these circumstances might have led to despair. After all, the hope of what awaited Frankl and his fellow prisoners upon their release was now gone—the people they cared about were dead, their families and friends wiped out. But Frankl wrote what became an extraordinary treatise on resilience and spiritual salvation, known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he shares his theory of logotherapy as it relates not just to the horrors of concentration camps but also to more mundane struggles.
He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
Indeed, Frankl remarried, had a daughter, published prolifically, and spoke around the world until his death at age ninety-two.
Rereading these notes, I thought of my conversations with Wendell. Scribbled in my grad-school spiral were the words Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose our response, Frankl was saying, even under the specter of death. The same was true of John’s loss of his mother and son, Julie’s illness, Rita’s regrettable past, and Charlotte’s upbringing. I couldn’t think of a single patient to whom Frankl’s ideas didn’t apply, whether it was about extreme trauma or an interaction with a difficult family member. More than sixty years later, Wendell was saying I could choose too—that the jail cell was open on both sides.
I particularly liked this line from Frankl’s book: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I’d never emailed Wendell for anything other than scheduling issues, but I was so stunned by the parallel that I wanted to share it with him. I pulled up his email and typed, This is what we were talking about. The trick, I suppose, is to find that elusive “space.”
A few hours later, he replied.
I’ve always appreciated Frankl. Beautiful quote. See you Wednesday.
It was typical Wendell—warm and genuine but clearly stating that therapy takes place face-to-face. I remembered our first phone call, when he’d said almost nothing, and how surprisingly interactive he was once we met.
Still, I carried around his reply in my head all week. I could have sent that quote to various friends who would have appreciated it too, but it wouldn’t have been the same. Wendell and I existed in a separate universe where he saw me in ways that even those close to me didn’t. Of course, it’s also true that my family and friends saw aspects of me that Wendell would never see, but nobody would quite understand the subtext of my email as precisely as Wendell would.
The following Wednesday, Wendell brings up the email. He tells me that he shared the quote with his wife, who, he says, is going to use it for a talk she’s giving. He’s never mentioned his wife, though I know everything about her from my long-ago Google binge.
“What does your wife do?” I ask as if I haven’t seen her LinkedIn profile. He tells me about her work at a nonprofit.
“Oh, interesting,” I reply, but the word interesting sounds unnaturally high-pitched.
Wendell watches me. I quickly change the subject.
For a split second, I think about what I might do if I were the therapist here. Sometimes I want to say, I wouldn’t do it that way, but I know that’s like back-seat driving. I need to be the patient, which means I need to relinquish control. It may seem like the patient controls the session, deciding what to say or not, setting the agenda or topic. But therapists pull the strings in our own ways—in what we say or don’t say, what we respond to or hold on to for later, what we give attention to and what we don’t.
Later in the session, I’m talking about my father. I tell Wendell that he’d been in the hospital again due to his heart condition, and though he’s okay now, I’m afraid of losing him. I’m aware in a new way of just how frail he is, and I’m starting to absorb the reality that he won’t be here forever.
“I can’t picture a world without him in it,” I say. “I can’t imagine not being able to call and hear his voice or ask his advice or laugh together about something we both find funny.” I think about how there’s nothing in the world like laughing with my dad. I think about how knowledgeable he is on almost any topic and how fully he loves me and how kind he is—not just to me, but to everyone. The first thing people say about my father isn’t how smart or funny he is, though he is both. The first thing they say is “He’s so sweet.”
I tell Wendell about the time I was in college on the East Coast, missing home and unsure if I wanted to stay there. My father heard the pain in my voice and got on a plane and flew three thousand miles to sit with me on a park bench across from my dorm, in the cold winter weather, and just listen. He listened to me for two more days, and I felt better, and he went home. I haven’t thought about this in years.
I also recount what happened this past weekend after my son’s basketball game. As the boys ran off to celebrate their victory, my father took me aside and told me that he’d just been at a friend’s funeral the day before. After the funeral, he explained, he’d gone up to the friend’s daughter, now in her thirties, and said, “Your father was so proud of you. Every conversation we had, he’d say, ‘I’m so proud of Christina,’ and he’d tell me about all you were doing!” This was absolutely true, but Christina was shocked.
“He never told me that,” she said, bursting into tears. My father was floored until he realized that he wasn’t sure if he’d told me how he felt about me. Had he done it at all—or enough?
“So,” my father said outside the gym, “I want to make sure that I’ve told you how proud of you I am. I want to make sure you know.” He said it in such a shy way, obviously uncomfortable having this kind of interaction; he was used to listening to others but keeping his emotional world to himself.
“I know,” I said, because my father had communicated his pride to me in countless ways, though I wasn’t always listening as well as I should have been. But that day I couldn’t help hearing the subtext: I’m going to die sooner rather than later. We stood there, the two of us, hugging and crying as people passing by tried not to stare, because we both knew that this was the beginning of my father’s goodbye.
“As your eyes are opening, his are beginning to close,” Wendell says now, and I think about how bittersweet but true that is. My awakening is happening at an opportune moment.
“I’m so glad I have this time with him and that it can be so meaningful,” I say. “I wouldn’t want him to abruptly die one day and feel like it’s too late, that I waited too long for us to really see each other.”
Wendell nods, and I feel queasy. All of a sudden I remember that Wendell’s father had died ten years ago very unexpectedly. In my Google search, I’d come across his father’s obituary after I read the story of his death in his mother’s family interview. Apparently, Wendell’s father had been in seemingly perfect health when he’d collapsed at dinner. I wonder if my talking about my father this way might be painful for him. I also worry that if I say any more, I’ll give away how much I know. So I pull back, ignoring the fact that therapists are trained to listen for what patients aren’t saying.
A few weeks later, Wendell comments that for the past couple of sessions, I seem to have been editing myself—ever since, he adds, I sent him the Viktor Frankl quote and he’d mentioned his wife. He wonders (what would we therapists do without the word wonder to broach a sensitive topic?) how the mention of his wife has affected me.
“I haven’t really thought about that,” I say. It’s true—I’ve been focused on hiding my internet search.
I look at my feet, then at Wendell’s. Today’s socks are a blue chevron pattern. When I lift my head, I see that Wendell is looking at me with his right eyebrow raised.
And then I realize what Wendell is getting at. He thinks that I’m jealous of his wife, that I want him all to myself! This is called romantic transference, a common reaction patients have to their therapists. But the idea that I have a crush on Wendell strikes me as hilarious.
I look at Wendell, in his beige cardigan and khakis and funky socks, his green eyes staring back at me. For a second, I imagine what it must be like to be married to Wendell. In a photo I’d found of him and his wife, they were at a charity event, arm in arm and all dressed up, Wendell smiling at the camera and his wife looking at him adoringly. I remember feeling a twinge of envy when I saw that photo, not because I was envious of his wife but because they seemed to have the kind of relationship I wanted for myself—with someone else. But the more I deny the romantic transference, the less Wendell will believe me. The lady doth protest too much.
There are about twenty minutes left in the session—even as a patient, I can feel the rhythm of the hour—and I know that this façade can’t last forever. There’s only one thing to do.
“I Googled you,” I say, looking away. “I stopped stalking Boyfriend, and I ended up stalking you. When you mentioned your wife, I already knew all about her. And your mother.” I pause, especially mortified by this last part. “I read that long interview with your mom.”
I get ready for . . . I don’t know what. Something bad to happen. A tornado to enter the room and alter our connection in some intangible but irreparable way. I wait for everything to feel distant, different, changed between us. But instead, the opposite happens. It feels as though the storm came in, passed through the room, and left not ruins but a clearing in its wake.
I feel lighter, relieved of a burden. Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost—the need to face them—but there’s also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.
Wendell nods, and we sit there in a wordless conversation. Me: I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. That was so invasive. Him: It’s okay. I understand. It’s natural to be curious. Me: I’m happy for you—for the loving family that you have. Him: Thank you. I hope you will have this one day too.
And then we have a version of that conversation aloud. We also talk about my curiosity. Why I kept it a secret. What it was like to hold that secret and also know so much about him. What I imagined would happen between us if I revealed it—and how it feels now that I have. And because I’m a therapist—or maybe because I’m a patient and I just need to know—I ask him what it’s like to learn that I stalked him. Is there anything I found that he wishes I didn’t know? Does he feel different about me, about us?
Only one of his answers shocks me: He has never seen the interview with his mother! He didn’t know it existed online. He knew that his mother had done an interview for that organization, but he thought it was for their internal archives. I ask if he worries that other patients might come across it and he sits back and takes a breath. For the first time, I see his forehead scrunch up.
“I don’t know,” he says after a beat. “I’ll have to think about it.”
Frankl’s quote pops into my mind again. He’s making space between stimulus and response in order to choose his freedom.
Our time is up, so Wendell gives his legs the usual two pats and stands. We head for the exit, but at the threshold, I stop.
“I’m sorry about your father,” I say. After all, the jig is up. He knows I know the whole story.
Wendell smiles. “Thank you.”
“Do you miss him?” I ask.
“Every day,” he says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him.”
“Not a day will go by that I won’t miss my father either,” I say.
He nods, and we stand there, thinking about our fathers together. When he steps back to open the door for me, I see a hint of moisture in his eyes.
There’s so much more I want to ask him. Is he at peace with where things were left when his father collapsed? I think about the ways in which sons and fathers can get tangled up in expectations and yearnings for approval. Did his father ever tell him he was proud of him, not despite his rejecting the family business and carving out his own path but because of it?
I won’t learn more about Wendell’s father, but we’ll have many discussions in the coming weeks and months about mine. And through these discussions, it will become clear that by seeking a male therapist, I had hoped to get an objective opinion on the breakup, but instead, I got a version of my father.
Because my father, too, shows me how it feels to be exquisitely seen.