Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [38]
Regardless of his marriage, the reality was that Felix had fallen in love with a woman who at fifteen was already very sick. Then the two began a very complicated social dance. It was not like the failed relationships with his older sister and his mother, women who were always in control. This time, it was Felix who was in control, and Susan was the patient he could help.
However, in this attempt to save Susan, he unwittingly became the focus of her many internal conflicts, a process called transference. In psychological terms, transference occurs when a patient shifts feelings of anger, rage, disappointment, or love onto their therapist. In Susan’s case, Felix became her father. Complicating matters was the fact that the transference was not limited to Susan. Felix, too, struggled to reconcile his vision of Susan to reality, as Susan may have became Felix’s fifteen-year-old sister whom he had fantasized about as a teen.
It was a deadly mix of transference and countertransference, one that would have explosive consequences.
Felix and Sharon Polk legally separated on October 10, 1978—one month after the couple celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary. Ironically, Felix had marked the occasion with a $600 gift of silver purchased at Gump’s, the famous San Francisco retail store. Then, he asked for a divorce.
That fall, his teenage girlfriend sat for the Standardized Achievement Tests (SATs). Susan scored a 740 out of 800 in English and a 530 in Math, without taking any substantive math courses in high school. She was ranked in the 98th percentile in English and the 80th in Math. Soon after, she was awarded her GED.
The following year, Susan moved out of her mother’s house and in with Felix. By this time, Felix was no longer her therapist; now he was simply her boyfriend. When she demonstrated an interest in college, he chose Mills College, an all-girls school in the foothills of Oakland, and there is evidence that he was footing the bill for her education.
Compliant, and anxious to please Felix, Susan attended Mills for two years. But then she decided to take a semester off, and soon it became clear that her days at Mills were over.
Not long afterward, she began to feel suffocated by her relationship with Felix. It was okay when she still had all of her high school issues, and Felix was there to save her, but now that they were living together, she was feeling more like a nineteen-year-old hostage than a girlfriend. She couldn’t make one decision without his approval. He was exacting and became edgy when things didn’t go his way. Finally it reached a point where Susan was afraid to say anything that might upset him.
To avoid confrontation, she often listened and agreed, rather than stir controversy. She began to think back to other points in the past where she had been afraid to disagree with him. During their sessions as therapist and patient, he would set out a number of provocative theories. For instance, he told Susan that all girls had fantasies about having sex with their fathers and that their fathers wanted to sleep with them as well. He also implied that most girls had fantasies of rape. When he asked a teenage Susan if she shared those fantasies, she grew embarrassed and told him “no.” Felix insisted that these thoughts were natural, and Susan had no reason to question him. Now as she looked back, she began to see the larger impact of those statements, statements that affected her ability to have relationships of any kind.
By 1979, however, she was no longer a naive teenager. For the first time, she felt capable of making decisions on her own. At times, she didn’t want to be with Felix anymore but didn’t know