A friend of mine was cursed by his analyst!
Yes, after 20 years of working wonderfully together, it seems that a piece of madness was jarred loose and the analyst, apparently fed up with a difficult impasse they were both experiencing, called my friend David, a chazer, Yiddish for pig. If that weren't enough, the analyst added "you're much more deeply disturbed than I thought" and "You need a lot of help" and he clearly implied that David would never amount to much.
According to my friend, this was not a momentary break of empathy that was designed to penetrate levels of defenses, but a mean-spirited exchange that devolved to a kind of a sibling fight, a shouting match with insults traded and name-calling. A pair that had "grown" together over two decades and many successful experiences in treatment together and in life (separately) ground down into something out of Billy Crystal's fight with his brother in the film Mr. Saturday Night.
My friend's fortitude and sense of humor notwithstanding, he was understandably devastated. This was a curse of biblical proportions like the curse of a father. 6 months later and David still experiences intrusive thoughts of the fateful meeting -- a trauma in the full sense of the word.
What a horrible end. David's analyst was like a father to him, someone who was an extremely helpful and positive person in his life, but now the damage is irreparable. By degree David is painfully coming to terms with what happened even as he does this, I wonder: what is the psychological purpose of a curse? Why did the analyst curse David? Why bother to curse at all? If they were at an impasse, why not just walk away and say nothing? Certainly in David's case "nothing" would have been more therapeutic than "something."
To be sure, curses have been around for a long time -- and blessings too. (They seem to be two sides of the same coin) The first of these are famously recorded in the Bible: Gd blessed Adam and Eve and He said to them, "Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it..." and then later, when they betray their Creator:
"Cursed be the ground because of you
By toil you shall eat
all the days of your life,
Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you
By the sweat if your brow shall you eat
Until you return to the ground
For dust you are and to dust you shall return"
Of course there are curses throughout the Bible. Noah curses his son Ham and his descendants. Jacob curses his sons and so on. God Himself curses various peoples and nations. Nor did curses cease in ancient times. To talk of the mundane together with the sacred we have in modern times the "curse of the Bambino" Babe Ruth's famous curse against the Boston Red Sox, and the supposed Kennedy family curse.
I remember from childhood a different friend of mine whose father had cursed him. "Henry, you will end up either in prison or dead before you are 25," his father told him. (He ended up being quite successful and today he is 47.)
Curses and blessings run through the families like the maze of wiring that lead into the basement circuit breakers. Some are said out loud. Others are just believed silently.
I believe, in the case of humans at least, they are a profound construct to keep people connected. It seems to my mind that curses follow from a relationship between 2 people often fantastically intense, but not necessarily positive. Often they come out of rivalries between two entities where somehow each is completed or made whole by the other. Father-son, mother-daughter, business-partners, people who were once passionate lovers.
Sometimes it emerges from a relationship somehow where each has taken in the other as a crucial part of their identity frequently to the point of obsession. Think of the historic feuds: Hatfields and the McCoys, the Yankee - Red Sox rivalry, even Republicans and Democrats.
When viewed this way, it seems that the true purpose of a curse is to cement a relationship between the curser and the cursed. To make sure that the two of them are bound together. From what I understand about my friend's impasse with his analyst, it would seem that unconsciously, the analyst, ordinarily a terrific professional and a good person, was threatened by my friend's separating from him.
And so he cursed him.
