A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [188]
Dirks questioned Dr. Bailey primarily about post-traumatic stress syndrome. There was the litany: bed-wetting, aggressive behaviors, nightmares, detachment from others, recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event. By now so many of the questions seemed formulaic that I felt that I could have asked them myself. “Dr. Bailey,” she said, “you have told us that Robbie Mackessy suffers from PTSS. Have you formed an opinion based upon your training and experience and based upon your evaluation of the child, to within a reasonable degree of psychological certainty, as to the cause of PTSS?”
“Yes, I have.”
“And what is that opinion?”
Again I watched Bette and Grace, the Greek God, the Dairy Man, the intellectual woman, while Dr. Bailey declared that I had both physically and sexually abused Robbie Mackessy. My favorite jurors had settled into their duty. Some of them rocked a little in their comfortable chairs. They were all listening, but their faces were placid, unruffled. They were saving their judgment, their emotion, for the deliberation perhaps; I couldn’t have begun to say what any one of them was thinking of Dr. Eugene Bailey’s partially audible, careful testimony.
Rafferty began his cross-examination by saying, “Let me ask you, Dr. Bailey, about the so-called trauma of the primal scene. By the primal scene I am referring to sexual intercourse. The orthodox psychoanalytic notion I believe is this: A child who witnesses the primal scene is deeply traumatized. Is that correct?”
Dr. Bailey was wearing a turtle neck and sucking on lozenges. It was good to know that his voice may not normally have been so thin and reedy. “That is Freud’s general interpretation, yes,” he answered.
“When a child witnesses the primal scene does he not frequently interpret sexual intercourse as a cruel, destructive act?”
“That is one of the possible misinterpretations on the child’s part. The psychic content will vary according to the child’s age and previous history.”
“Uh huh. But what is almost always present in the young child, the four-, five-, six-year-old, who witnesses intercourse, is the linking together of sex and danger. Is that not true?”
“The content varies according to the details that have been witnessed.”
“But if a young child does witness the act, it is possible for that child to be traumatized?”
“Yes.”
“Traumatized to the degree that he may develop subsequent neurosis?”
“Freudian scholars would certainly agree with that statement.”
“Other psychoanalysts, not only Freud, but Róheim and Ferenczi, for example, talk about the identification with the mother, who represents the support of the child, and the child’s inability to deal with the mother’s relation to other objects, such as the father. Ferenczi says, if I recall correctly, that the child is overwhelmed by emotions that he cannot yet organize when he witnesses the primal scene. Is that a reasonable statement?”
“Reasonable, yes.”
“We all understand that there is enough literature on this subject to more than fill this courthouse. Would you be so kind as to briefly tell us what effect the primal scene has on a young child in your view?”
Dr. Bailey cleared his throat. “When a child sees that his parents cannot transcend the body in their most intimate relations, the child naturally has anxiety. The child is in the process himself of trying to work out the problem of the body, trying to overcome the horror of the body.”
It wasn’t difficult to understand why Dr. Bailey could speak to the horror of the body, when his own form—his sunken chest, his slim waist that required a belt for which he likely had to make extra holes—might alone have caused him plenty of trauma and subsequent neurosis. I liked Dr. Bailey, felt his sensitivity, his probable fondness for moss and lichens, wild flowers, Debussy.