Perhaps it is because of envy—I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love’s executioner. Yet Thelma, in the opening minutes of our first interview, told me that she was hopelessly, tragically in love, and I never hesitated, not for one moment, to accept her for treatment. Everything I saw in my first glance—her wrinkled seventy-year-old face with that senile chin tremor, her thinning, bleached, unkempt yellow hair, her emaciated blue-veined hands—told me she had to be mistaken, that she could not be in love. How could love ever choose to ravage that frail, tottering old body, or house itself in that shapeless polyester jogging suit? Moreover, where was the aura of love bliss? Thelma’s suffering did not surprise me, love being always contaminated by pain; but her love was monstrously out of balance—it contained no pleasure at all, her life wholly a torment.
