I’m convinced some people are dark entities, human black holes that not only suck in everything around them, including light, but also bend space and time. I know that sounds fantastic but I’ve encountered a few singularities in my psychiatric practice and it’s always unsettling.
Just last month, I got a new client, a middle-aged housewife named Dora Salomon. My first impressions of her were inconclusive—she was depressed and anxious, but apart from that there was nothing unusual and no apparent pathology I could discern. She was typical of every housewife I’ d ever met and the only remarkable thing about her was the fact she seemed so unremarkable.
I asked her to do some homework for me—to record her moods and observations about her feelings and emotions and keep the tracker for a week and bring it with her to the next session.
The following week I sat staring at her chart. Again, everything seemed perfectly normal, but I still had the niggling feeling something was wrong—something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Dora, I don’t understand this one entry—you were cleaning the kitchen and feeling depressed. You know the incident to which I’m referring?”
She nodded.
“What did you mean by saying you put away the fork?”
“Why did I say it?” She thought for a moment.
“I suppose I said it because I was feeling anxious about Frank coming home.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Like stabbing my eye with a fork.”
I was flabbergasted—that was the last thing I expected to come out of her mouth and it was said so matter of factly it made the hair on my arms go up.
“Does Frank abuse you?”
“No.”
“He doesn’t threaten you or strike you or lose his temper?”
“Never.”
The one-word answers were unsettling. Something was not quite right—she was fogging and I knew it. She was also very good at it—in fact, that was the one thing she did best. Outwardly she was bland and genial, but inwardly hiding invisible scars only she knew existed. I wondered if she cut herself in places where it couldn’t be seen.
“Would you object to my sending you for a physical?”
She shook her head, “No—I have no objection to that.”
I felt a dark mist surround me—a kind of mental chill. Something didn’t add up and in my experience it always pointed to some concealed pathology with its own private logic. Her detachment was disconcerting, however, and I sensed that further questioning would prove fruitless.
“Perhaps your husband, Frank, could join us for the next session?”
“I’ll ask him to come,” she said. The words were flat and monotone—typical of a depressive, but I couldn’t escape the sensation that there was something else hidden and buried in her psyche. It bothered me the rest of the week.
There was something strange about Dora, something I sensed neither she nor I would be able to contain, much less control.