The Psychologists’ Daughter

by Silvia E. Hines

Part 1 appears in this issue.

part 2

The therapist who is assigned to Hillary in the hospital, Dr. Mercer, doesn’t take notes while they speak and asks Hillary to call her Suzanne. Hillary is locked in a big brick institution, but she can handle it for the cause. She feels a kinship with her furry caged comrades, who are also talked to and controlled by psychologist-keepers. She must remember to tell her father that the behavior of an animal who is locked up is surely nothing like that of a free one, or did he tell her that once?

“So you say you now feel like you are one of the rats your parents work with?” Suzanne asks, looking brightly at her and holding her gaze.

“I won’t speak until you give me a pellet,” Hillary feebly jokes, eliciting a longer, louder laugh from Suzanne than her quip deserves. It seems to Hillary that Suzanne is scanning the small room, perhaps looking for a bag of M&Ms, kept ready for use as a human motivator. Or perhaps she is anxious that Hillary will really stop speaking; words are so important to a psychotherapist. But Hillary decides to take the initiative and put her warden on the defensive.

“You yourself have chosen people psychology instead of animal torture. That’s because you know it’s wrong, don’t you?”

“Actually, I’m a psychiatrist,” Suzanne evades. “I went to medical school.”

“Do they use rats in medical school?”

“Lots of animal research is done to test lifesaving drugs and surgical procedures.”

“I’m sure there must be another way. I once read that animal mothers will do anything to save their babies.”

“Suppose you had a child who was dying of a disease—”

“Suppose I was a mother rat. We can’t ask animals to suffer and die to save our babies.”

Suzanne realizes that Hillary, still a child, is too young to be moved in this way. Nevertheless, she continues on the same tack. “If it were the other way around,” she says, “and rats were bigger and stronger and we were small and helpless, don’t you think they would use us in the same way?”

Hillary laughs at the image. For a moment, she’s aware she’s supposed to be out in the world, laughing at unexpected images and funny things that occur to 12-year-old kids, not locked up in a serious building, battling with the defenders of the wrong.

“Maybe,” she says, “but it would be wrong of them, too. And, for all we know, maybe they would go about their business without bothering us.”

At the next session, Suzanne broaches the subject of antidepressant medication, suggesting Hillary might try a standard one or a new one they are testing right here at the hospital. “No,” Hillary says loudly, “I don’t need those, and I don’t want you to test anything on me, either. No double-blinds or control-group rigmarole. I am an individual, not a subject.”

She feels she can speak for all the rats, monkeys, and birds caught in the university labs, like her little Lucy, who died refusing. She is willing to die, too, she thinks, although that doesn’t seem to be necessary right now. She’ll reject anything they ask her to take or fill out unless it is her discharge papers.

She marches out of the room, standing tall despite knowing she may be kept longer in this place if she doesn’t cooperate. She pokes her head back in the room and asks Suzanne, who is writing quickly in a black notebook, whether the new drug was tested first on manic-depressive rats or schizophrenic mice.

The next day Hillary presents the idea to her therapist that she needs to be separated from her heartless parents and placed in the home of a more humane couple. “I shouldn’t be sent home with those parents,” she days. “How can I live the next six years, until my emancipation, with that kind of family? Find me foster parents who work gently for a living. Maybe a father who owns a pizza shop — vegetarian of course — and, let’s see, how about a mother who teaches aerobics?”

“Have your parents ever hit you or locked you in your room?” Suzanne asks.

“Of course not,” she says, immediately, indignantly. “They are excellent parents in that way.”

“Why then do you identify so with caged animals?” Suzanne wonders aloud. Hillary does not dignify this question with an answer.

When her mother comes to visit the next time, Hillary can see she has been told of her daughter’s request, and she can feel the piercing pain running through the woman’s body, her own mother’s pain, caused by her words. She can’t stand this mother’s pain any more than she can stand that of rat mothers.

This small, dark-haired mother created hilarious word games to play with her when she was young, taught her to read early and never failed to applaud her faltering efforts. Her mother has always treated their cat, Blimpie, like a prince, except possibly for the time the two of them tried to condition poor Blimpie to stand by his feeding dish when shown the word FISH written in large letters on a paper plate. After a brief period of awkwardness, Hillary takes her mother’s hand and tells her she is sorry, that she wants to go home with her and be a family again.

It’s clear to Hillary that her mother’s relief is beyond words. She can almost imagine what the previous few days were like for her mother: crying herself to sleep, unable to work in her lab, eyeing the photo of the plump baby in the den and trying to relate it to the thin girl in the hospital, wondering what the connecting link was.

Hillary’s father would likely have been philosophical, perhaps saying sadly the connecting link was life, the unknowable parts that can’t be controlled except in the lab. She could imagine, then, her mother, in no mood for philosophizing, slamming the bedroom door and sleeping in the den.

So Hillary stops being such a smart aleck in the hospital and tells everyone she realizes she’s made a huge mistake and that it will never be repeated. Her parents take her home to begin the “after” portion of her childhood. The three of them leave the hospital together, the two suddenly old-looking parents walking briskly, inches from their daughter’s stiffly held body, yearning to take her hand and have back their inquisitive young ally but settling for bringing the eccentric adolescent home again. A reporter from the local newspaper phones the family, but Hillary’s father won’t let him speak to his daughter.

* * *

Hillary’s homecoming marks the beginning of her effort to push the animals out of her mind. Of course her parents stop talking with Hillary about their work or bringing her to the lab and work conferences. At the insistence of the hospital staff as well as the university, they arrange for Hillary to meet weekly with a local psychotherapist. They take her for two independent evaluations, just to be safe. One of these appointments is in New York, more than 200 miles from home, to see a woman highly recommended in the field of child psychiatry.

While they are in New York, Hillary’s parents want to visit the Bronx Zoo, explaining they’ve heard most of the cages have been replaced with natural wildlife settings, but Hillary declines the offer, reminding them she isn’t terribly interested in animals anymore. Hadn’t they noticed that she hardly ever plays with Blimpie at home?

Hillary trains herself to stop thinking about animals, to stop seeing the rats’ faces. When she is discharged from therapy after the two agreed-upon years, she doesn’t talk about the incident with anyone. Her parents say she needs to develop whole new areas of interest, so she half-heartedly helps her mother plant a vegetable garden in the spring. While it germinates, she plunges into a reasonable facsimile of teenager distance.

Her old friends Jason and Jenny, predictably, have become a couple. When they run into Hillary in the high school corridors, they unlock their gripped hands, and Jenny uses her freed hand to smooth her now shorter, bouncier hair. Sensitive about others’ perceptions of her as odd, Hillary doesn’t try to pull her friends back to her. In fact, she pushes them further away, as if to even the process, like a quick blow on late-summer dandelion seeds that would have dispersed eventually but now are hastened on their way to new beginnings.

When conformity doesn’t seem to work for Hillary, she reverts to her tendency toward the unconventional, focusing her intensity on wearing vintage clothes and reading obscure classical novels with eccentric characters, like Hesse’s Demian. She changes her focus from animal rights to other worthy causes: peace, human rights, poverty. There are clearly so many people who need help — starving or oppressed victims — for her to have time for animals. Her outrage cools as though doused with water, extinguished like the flames of the fire she had set or like the responses of rats when the experimenter withdraws reinforcement.

* * *

Going away to college is a relief, even though Hillary has to contend with the proximity of the animal lab. At least here she is with people who don’t know of her eccentric past, and here, too, she is near New York City, where she and her new friends spend as much time as possible.

One day she is walking with her two roommates on the outskirts of Central Park, on their way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when she spots a gargoyle on a building across the street that reminds her of something. Oddly, it makes her think of the smiling round face of an older woman, although it doesn’t in any way resemble such a face.

They are already inside the museum, examining the carved features of Egyptian goddesses, when she realizes the round face belonged to the psychiatrist her parents had brought her to see in Manhattan. That office was in an older building, also adorned with gargoyles. The woman had a heavy accent, she remembers now, and a manner that seemed less inquisitorial than that of the other therapists she had seen back then. There is a pleasant feeling connected to the face, but Hillary can’t remember anything about the actual session. When she gets back to the campus, she phones her mother to get the woman’s name, finds her in the Manhattan phonebook, and quickly calls to make an appointment.

With trepidation, Hillary pushes the black elevator button in the maroon-carpeted lobby and travels upward to the eighth floor, to Dr. Friedlander’s suite. Everything looks familiar in the anteroom and therapy room — it’s only been seven years — the antique furniture, two wing chairs, overstuffed sofa covered with brocade instead of the pine-framed futon she sat on weekly at her therapist’s office at home. She recognizes the lavender scent, although she’s unsure whether it’s coming from the doctor or her office. Dr. Friedlander, who appears to be in her seventies, seems truly happy to see her, as Hillary remembers from the earlier time.

“Hillary, I wondered what had happened to you. After I saw you that one time, I received no news from your parents. Maybe they were uneasy about what I said in my report?”

“What did you say?” Hillary asks, surprised. She sits comfortably on the stout couch, her shoes off and legs crossed under her.

“Oh, of course, you still don’t know. Now you are old enough to know such things. I said, basically, that I found you to be a normal girl who—”

“Normal! How could you say that? I did a horrible thing, I could have killed someone.”

“Yes, you are right, you did do a terrible thing; your behavior was uncontrolled, you had an incident of destructive, impulsive behavior that had to be addressed. But I talked with you for more than two hours, and I concluded that you did not have any actual psychopathology; that is what I mean by normal. You had no psychotic thoughts, no personality disorder that I could detect, no major depressive illness, although perhaps some milder depression that is common in sensitive adolescents such as you were. You did not have a conduct disorder, because you had only this one incident of, shall we say, bad conduct. While I would not have said you were ‘well-adjusted,’ I believed you were on your way to that kind of stability.”

“Well, what did you tell them to do with me?”

“My recommendation was that your parents — this may sound a little strange — that they introduce you to some people in an animal rights group. I felt that you needed an outlet for your feelings about animals and some constructive tasks to do.”

“You told my parents I needed to be with a bunch of animal rights activists! What if they were the violent type?”

“I don’t think that most of them are like that.” The woman’s eyes seem to shift easily from cheerfulness to empathy and back again.

“Well I did the opposite. I stopped thinking about animals totally.”

“That is too bad, I think,” the therapist says, frowning. “And do you remember what advice I gave to you?”

“I forgot. I guess that’s why I came to see you today.”

“I took a chance in saying this because I firmly believed you would never again do anything like what you did. I acted on a hunch. I told you that you could think of yourself as ahead of your time. That perhaps one day the world would catch up with you and stop using those animals in the way that you object to. But that for now you must respect the customs and ethics of the society you have been born into.”

“Now I remember! You told me I needed to stay out of jail so I could do positive things to help animals. How could I have forgotten?”

“You are remembering now.”

“Are you an animal rights advocate?”

“No,” she says, “I am a children’s rights advocate.” She pauses and smiles. “I hope this will not sound too inane, but I thought of it this way: You heard the animals’ cries, and I heard yours.”

Hillary wipes tears and reaches into her bag for her checkbook.

“I am not going to charge you for this visit, Hillary. Let us call this a brief follow-up, or review session.”

A few minutes later, Hillary slings her canvas bag over her shoulder and strides from the dimly lit elevator, through the lavish lobby, and into the bursting sunlight of Central Park West. She smiles at the doorman’s nod, and stops on her way to the subway to peer at a pigeon pecking at something sticking out from a crack in the sidewalk and then flying away.