He is a renown professional in his field. I tell him that he will someday win the Nobel prize. His problem that haunts him is a particular type of woman/relationship. He has had a series of affairs. Always the same. It starts with a crushing attraction, like being pulled into a gravitational field and thrown out of orbit, followed by ecstasy and bliss. His own thoughts are replaced by incessant thoughts and fantasies of her. He is distracted and can only think of her. He becomes imprisoned by these thoughts of her as if his own thoughts have been replaced/vanished and these other thoughts have taken over his mind. The affair eventually dies out and when he has taken his mind back it all makes no sense to him. Until the next affair.
She calls for an appointment. I have not seen her in years. Her last course of therapy dealt with her marital relationship. Now she is divorced and wants to discuss a new relationship. She says that all relationships fail. And that this new man has too many “red flags”, but there is something about the way he makes her feel–something that she has never felt before. She continues the relationship and becomes enthralled/entranced by him. She experiences great joy and cannot stop thinking and fantasizing about him. She can’t sleep or eat waiting for the next contact. Her mind has been captured. When the relationship ends, she becomes depressed. She says that it was not the loss of the man that depressed her, but the loss of the fantasy.
Can the mind be captured? Can your mind be captured? Can the mind be treated like an object, a piece of furniture to be manipulated, owned, sold, controlled, possessed, discarded and placed in storage? I imagine this may be the experience these two patients were dealing with.
It has also struck me that I have been probably dealing professionally with this phenomenon, if it exists, for a long time. Of course this has not been the bulk of my practice, but more like a sub-specialty. In the 1980’s I treated cases of domestic violence. In those days therapists had an anecdotal story that an abused woman finally leaves her battering male partner and goes to a domestic violence shelter. A good samaritan appears and whisks the woman off to a room filled with 100 men-99 good guys and one batterer. The woman is only attracted to the batterer. The same applies to abused men. They apparently have a built-in radar for women who will capture their mind.
I dealt with ex-cult members. These were patients that had been members of cults and had usually been “extracted” from the cult by family. The cult member would never have left voluntarily. I had one rule in working with these patients–no further contact with the cult. I knew at some level that if they had any contact with the cult, their mind would be recaptured.
More recently, I have dealt with children who have been described as “brainwashed” in the midst of their parents’ child custody battle. One teenager told me that his father was so mean, abusive and cruel to him that if he had to sit in my waiting room with his father he would kill himself. Of course he sat in my waiting room with his father and didn’t kill himself. The case was interesting because mom had abandoned the teenager years ago. She just vanished. Then one day, several years later, mom appears and takes the child to another state where the teenager promptly tells the authorities a litany of atrocities that dad has done to him. The authorities immediately give custody of the teenager to mom. When I interviewed the teenager, I asked him to tell me about dad. Without hesitation, he related a series of horrible things dad had done to him over the years–breaking objects over the teenager’s head, insulting the teenager, spanking the teenager. Finally the teenager told me that dad would hold the teenagers two hands over a flame and burn his flesh. In several recent burnings, dad had caused the teenager to receive “third-degree” burns over both his hands. I asked the teenager to show me his hands–they were unscarred and clean.
I am attempting to write about a false experience. This is not to be confused with “falling in love” or “love”, whatever that may be. That is a benign experience in comparison to what I am describing. What I am describing is perhaps a perverse form of falling in love. It is not benign, but malignant because the intention is not to love, but to capture someone else’s mind. While the description of the experience may sound similar, it is not. What I am describing is a facsimile of the “true” experience. Perhaps it can be described as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the predator disguised as love.
Which makes me wonder if we all are not pre-disposed/impelled to having our minds captured. To being whisked away in feelings of ecstasy and joy.
If such a phenomenon exists, what would be the root of such an experience? I can’t know, but my imagination wanders to babies and mothers. Perhaps in the womb babies experience a once-in-a-lifetime at-onement. The ultimate pleasure of being totally inside someone else. There are not two, only one. Of course this “spell” is broken by coming into this world–born. But perhaps babies have had such an ecstatic experience and spend their lives looking for it again. Freud apparently thought so because he considered birth the primal anxiety and the root of all anxiety. And Otto Rank, who wrote “The Trauma of Birth”, created his theory of personality on this event.
Patients who apparently have had these types of experiences, after they have regained their minds. After they have recaptured their thoughts. After they have been able to dis-connect from the intense tractor beam of the other that they have been subject to. After they have come “back to their senses”., usually tell me things like “Why didn’t I see it?” or “Why didn’t I see the red flags?” or “How could I have been so stupid?” or “Why didn’t I listen to my gut?”
As I listen to these statements, I sometimes find myself wondering what will happen the next time? The next time their mind gets captured? Will they succumb or resist? Will they be able to discern the real from the facsimile? Will they have learned anything from the experience?
A patient recently said to me when discussing their relationships, “I don’t often get what I want, but I always find what I expect”.
Dr. Brody