A while ago, I went to visit a new primary physician. Since he was seeing me for the first time, he ordered a slew of tests, and one of them said that my PSA was 44. A PSA of 44 generally indicates an advanced stage of prostate cancer. The primary doctor referred me to a urologist, a tall, skinny, balding, mild-mannered man, who did a biopsy and found that the whole left side of my prostate had shrunk into what he said looked and felt like a dried prune. While he was doing the biopsy, I asked him if he wanted to hear a urologist joke, a tactic for defending against my anxiety. He said, “Hit me with it.”
I proceeded to tell him the joke I had heard recently. “A man goes to see his urologist and the urologist puts on his rubber gloves and begins examining the man’s prostate. The doctor stops in the middle of his examination and says, ‘Jack, you’ve got to stop masturbating.’ Jack says, ‘Why doc?’ The doctor replies, ‘Because I’m trying to examine your prostate.’” As I told him the joke, I was aware of it being a kind of gallows humor. He laughed, but it seemed like his laugh was a bit hesitant.
After he had finished the biopsy he said, “It’s cancer all right. We’ll have to wait for the results of the biopsy to see how bad it is.” I went home feeling dejected. Even though I was going to turn 79 in a month, I still felt as though I was young for my age and had a long time to live. To be confronted with the possibility of an unexpected and sudden demise was, to say the least, disheartening.
The Politics of Cancer
A few days later I
returned to his office and he showed me the sheet of paper with the results of
my biopsy. He was very tall and lanky
and businesslike, and his eyes seemed to stay away from direct contact with my
eyes and instead focused on the chart. It
had a picture of my prostate, on which the left side was dark and ruddy. He explained that the Gleason score for the
left side was a five, the highest possible score. He spoke to me in what I thought was a tone
of gloom and doom, explaining each detail of the chart, and opined that the
cancer may have spread to my lymph nodes and bones and therefore might be incurable
(and therefore could only be contained but not cured by medication). To determine the extent of my cancer, he
referred me to the local hospital for a CT scan of my prostate and bones. He then looked up and asked me the question
that was also on my mind.
“When was your last PSA taken?” he wondered. “How did it suddenly get to 44? Didn’t your previous doctors check it?”
“That’s a good question,” I answered. “As far as I know, this is the first time that prostate cancer has come up.”
The Urologist, Dr. Eufemio, asked me to order the records from my previous primary doctor and I immediately emailed the clinic and sent for them. What I found was that a year and a half before, my then PCP had ordered blood tests that indicated I had a PSA of 15. When I saw this chart, I was surprised. I could not remember this previous doctor informing me of this PSA number, which was already high but still at a stage where it probably could have been cured. This doctor never mentioned the results of this test, never warned me that I might have prostate cancer, and never referred me to a urologist or for a biopsy. Six months later this doctor abruptly left the clinic where I had been seeing him for a year and a half, and moved on to another clinic in New York, without informing me he was leaving. I found out he had left when I called for an appointment with him and was told by the staff he was no longer there.
I found this PCP through an online search after my previous long-time primary doctor, who I had been with for 12 years, retired. The new doctor had gotten good online reviews and was young, handsome, and apparently professional. He seemed to do all the right things, treating my diabetes, tending to my acid reflux, taking tests and referring me to specialists, but I always had a vague, uncomfortable feeling when I saw him. He never smiled during my visits and spoke only in a minimal way.
As I pondered my time with him, I remembered a day when he suggested that I see a foot doctor. I replied, “I have so many doctor’s appointments. Do I really need to see a foot doctor?”
“You have diabetes,” he said.
“I know, but I’m not having any foot problems. Maybe it’s not necessary.”
The doctor did not like that answer. He jerked his head back in dismay and said nothing. It appeared he found that statement arrogant or perhaps challenging of his authority. I should have asked him what the look was about, but I have always been shy about asserting myself. From that time on, I tried to be more compliant. This was an old habit I had formed of trying to appease people who were mean to me.
While I waited for my CT scan, I feared the worst—that I now had an incurable form of prostate cancer—and all because of this ex-doctor’s negligence. I sank into a depression and felt outraged. I had visions of making an appointment to see him at his new clinic and confront him about what he had done. I Googled him and found that he had left one clinic and started at a second clinic a few weeks later. Three clinics in less than a year: that seemed to indicate instability on his part. After talking to my wife and close friends about my situation, I decided to consult with a law firm before doing anything rash. The law firm studied the medical records of my office visits and the lab reports and concluded that I had indeed been neglected. They took on the case.
In my gloom I didn’t really care about the law suit. Suing the doctor could not make up for the years of my life that I may have lost. The suit was mainly to make him answer for what he had done, so that he might not do it to others, and secondarily to give my wife some recompense after I died.
I kept wondering why he neglected his medical duty. Was he so busy or distracted that he could not pay proper attention to my lab results? Was he absent-minded? Did he have personal problems? I also speculated that it had to do with politics. Through casual conversation with him, I deduced that he had liberal views, while mine tended to centrist. I was mindful that I lived in an age in which political conflict was ever-present. I was a noted psychoanalyst whose writings were controversial because they were critical of political correctness.
I was also shunned in the
academic world, where for 17 years I was an adjunct professor at a Manhattan
community college. Because my views were
not in alignment with the mainstream views, I was discriminated against by the largely female and black administration. I experienced this over and over
during my career, as well as some brutal reviews of my books that used words like "misogynist" and "sexist" in degrading me.
I also wrote blogs and other things that were critical of some aspects of the gay rights movement, and I wondered if this ex-PCP was a gay man who had read and disapproved of such writings. Maybe, on an unconscious level, he viewed me as a dangerous man who deserved to die. There were many explanations for his behavior, but I did not think it too far from the realm of possibility that one explanation was that the doctor who neglected to tell me about my possible cancer might be disturbed, whether politically or otherwise.
Because of the political chaos of our times, it seemed to me that judgmental thinking had all but drowned out sane thinking. Many were saying we were on the verge of a civil war. As a centrist, I viewed both sides of the political divide as unfortunate. President Donald Trump and the Republicans were continually showing disdain for Democrats while Democrats were referring to Republicans as “deplorables.” Both sides were flinging accusations at one another and were engaged in an ongoing conflict over who was right and who is wrong. When someone is accused of a crime, the accusation is thoroughly investigated by a court of law. In this political climate, both sides were rushing to judgment and these judgments were never put to a test. We citizens were like children, watching the ongoing argument of our parents and unable to do anything about it. Because of our divided society, our culture seemed to be in a very dangerous place. Where would it end? I wondered if I would live to find out.
Was I the target of a political assassination? Did this doctor develop an instant hatred for me because of my straight-man looks? Had he read some book I had written critical of gay rights? It angered me to think of that possibility, but I did so anyway.
Personal Psychology
Everybody has to die sooner or later, so the possibility that I was going to have to die sooner than later was of no great consequence in the cosmic scheme of things. On a personal level, however, it meant the frustration of my lifelong dream of contributing to the knowledge of humanity and to humanity’s creative arts. Since the 1990s, I have not been able to publish any more of my books with commercial publishers. I was publishing regularly until the 1990s and then I began getting rejections. Whether that was because my writing had become defective or because it was controversial, is open to debate.
Since the 1990s, I have been
self-publishing my books via Amazon. I
have published two nonfiction works, five novels, eight screenplays, and a book
of poems and drawings on Amazon, and I’m grateful to Amazon for providing this
opportunity. I have three other novels
that I have yet to publish as well a book of poetic philosophy and drawings
called, The Way to Be. I also
have an album of video song poems and two feature-length movies which I
produced through Amazon. As the years of
my life have advanced, I have sat at my computer with a sense of urgency,
trying to produce as many works as I can. When I found out that my demise might come
sooner than I thought, this sense of urgency was ramped up. Had my cancer been caught in time, I might
have lived out my regular lifespan. Now,
according my urologist’s gloomiest forecast, I might only live five more years.
These were my thoughts as I bided my time until my appointment for the CT scan. Finally, the time came for me to go to the hospital. I did the scans on a Friday morning, while my wife sat waiting for me in the lobby. She had suffered from sadness and occasional fits of crying since we had first gotten the news about the severity of my condition, which made me realize that the news was probably worse for her than for me. I had begun to make charts for her about where our money was and how to handle things after I die, and to otherwise organize things in the eventuality of my demise. We had started taking walks together in the evenings and holding hands as we walked. She was perhaps angrier at my ex-doctor than I was.
One day, as we were taking our evening walk, I told her about my fantasy of confronting him. She turned to me and scowled. “I want to go along with you. I want to beat him up!”
When I became aware of
her anger, my own anger increased, as if given permission by her anger. I began to think not only of the devil
doctor—as I now referred to him in my mind—but i also conjured up a whole
line-up of incidents in my life in which I felt hurt by people. The dark reminiscence went all the way back
to my childhood, and included my mother, my father and my brothers. It included school mates, friends, and the string
of girlfriends and other significant relationships that had left me with hurt
feelings. (I didn’t recall the incidents
in which I had hurt other people, however.).
I thought about how my older brother had tormented me because I could
sing harmony at a young age and became a local celebrity in the small town
where I was born. I remembered a
girlfriend that had suddenly rejected me in what I thought was a catty
way. I thought about a recent therapy
patient, a young man suffering from depression, who had seemed like a very
loyal and appreciate patient for a year, and then suddenly played a game with
me and left he treatment In a mocking way.
My mind was full of fantasies of letters or phone calls I would make to
these people, confronting them in some way.
I imagined calling up my
brother on the phone and of making a sudden visit to his house. I had several versions of what I would say to
him, depending on how he reacted. In
one version, I would show up in his town and invite him to meet me for coffee. When we were seated face-to-face with our
cups of coffee in our hands, I would smile at him and challenge him. “Remember how you used to bully me? Why don’t you try bullying me right now? I’m here, sitting beside you. Do it.”
The fantasy was a bit absurd, considering that my brother was 83 and I
just a few years younger, and the thought of two geriatric critters going at it
was a bit hard to imagine. But I
persisted, and visualized, over and over, that we would go through this
face-off. I would goad him until he tried
something and then, when he stood up, I would sock him between the eyes and
gain vengeance for his years of torturing me during my childhood.
This brooding about the devil doctor and the slew of people who I felt hurt by continued up to the day of reckoning. I fluctuated between these thought and others about how I would deal with my death from cancer. I envisioned myself slowly fading from the rot of cancer in a holding cell some place where the nurses were friendly and my wife held my hand and I told her how much I loved her and had always loved her and tried to end things with the proper closure.
On the weekend before my
appointment with my urologist to hear the CT scan results, my wife, Julia, a
very down-to-earth person, planned a weekend trip to distract us from our
worries. We drove to the Amish region of
Pennsylvania, stayed in a log cabin and partook of various activities. We went to a wolf sanctuary and watched the
wolves. We visited a corn maze and got
lost in the maze. We drove to an Amish
farm and listened as the guide explained the ways of Amish life. But we didn’t see or hear or feel any of it.
“I think if you die, I will feel lost,” Julia said, as we walked to our car from the farm. She is Chinese and does not speak English fluently.
“You’ll have Mei Mei,” I said, referring to her sister, with whom she was close.
“I don’t want to bother her.”
“Anyway, I’m not going to die tomorrow. I’ll be around for a few years. Maybe they’ll be able to keep me alive for another five or even ten years.”
“I’m not ready,” she said.
She walked ahead of me to
the car. I couldn’t think of anything
else to say.
On Monday we paid a
follow-up visit to my urologist. Both of
us were subdued and nervous as we waited in the examining room for the
doctor. The nurse took my blood pressure
and it was surprisingly normal. “The
doctor will be right in,” she said, smiling in what I thought was a
super-friendly way. Was she smiling that
way because she knew something, I wondered. The doctor finally came in carrying the
results of the CT scan. I watched his
face and could not determine whether he had good news or bad, and after asking
how we were, he proceeded to read from the chart. The first thing he said was that the CT scan
confirmed that my prostate cancer was a very aggressive variety. OK, I
thought. Here it comes. But then he read
further. “The scan of your prostate
indicates that the cancer has not metastasized to the lymph nodes. And the bone scan of your entire body did not
indicate any intrusion into the bone.
There was just one spot on the bone that we’re not sure about, so we’ll
do an MRI to make sure.
He looked glanced at me for a moment and continued to study the chart.
I was unsure of what I was hearing. I had expected something different. “That’s good news,” I said, almost as a question.
“That’s very good news,” he said. “It means that the cancer is localized in your prostate and can therefore be cured.”
My wife looked at me and seemed on the verge of tears, but she restrained herself. It took most of that afternoon for the news to sink in. Hey, I thought. I may not have to die after all. I can be cured. I can live out my normal lifespan. The cloud of my depression lifted.
I began the hormone therapy he following week. The hormone therapy, which in effect meant taking female hormones to counteract the testosterone that was fueling my cancer cells, started off with pills and would later transition to injections. After that they would administer the radiation therapy. My mood settled into a reflective pause. I felt as though I had been given a reprieve.
Contemplating Death
I was referred to the radiologist, a skinny man of medium height who wore a bow-tie and argyle socks. He sat down in the room in front of my wife and I and in the most courteous and human way went over the practicalities of radiation treatment. He explained that it would last five weeks and would be administered five times a week. He said I would have about a 70% chance of cure. He added that I would be getting an MRI to check on the spot on my pelvis, but even if the spot were here I would still have a 60% chance of cure.
“Do you have any
questions?” he asked when he had finished his explanation, looking with care at
my wife and me.
“No, you’ve explained it very well,” I said. I thought, if only my first primary doctor had explained the PSA that was 15 as well as this doctor. I wouldn’t be in this mess.
“May I ask, what do you do. What is your profession?” he asked.
I told him I was a psychoanalyst and that I had practiced at an office downtown in Manhattan for 45 years.
“Can you tell me, what’s the difference between psychoanalysis and other types of psychotherapy?”
I explained how psychoanalysis was a method started by Freud, which looked at the unconscious factors that affected one’s personality and functioning. I said it differed from other methods that concentrated on removing symptoms. “Psychoanalysts believe that if you simply remove a symptom without delving into the unconscious factors that cause the symptom, another symptom will soon take the place of the one you removed. For example, you may help someone stop smoking, but then they may later start popping pills.”
“That’s very interesting. My wife is a neuropsychologist so I am a little familiar with the psychological aspects of cure.”
He went on to tell me about the MRI I would be scheduled to take the following week. “The CT scan indicated a small spot on your pelvis and we need to ascertain if it is malignant. It may just be some scar or indentation. But we need to make sure.” He asked me again, “Do you have any questions?” I was almost overwhelmed with the courtesy and respect he was showing me.
I said I did not have any questions. “You have explained this all very well. Thank you so much.”
I felt very comforted by this doctor and very lucky to have him. Julia and I left the room holding hands, both feeling good about him. Outside, in the waiting room, we scheduled the MRI and the radiation treatments that were to begin in a month. While waiting for the MRI the following week, I pondered the meaning of it all.
A psychoanalyst named Wilhelm Reich, who was declared insane at the end of his life because, among other things, his writings were considered fraudulent, was the first to write about cancer as human rot. One of the oddities was that he devised a method of treating cancer that consisted of a person sitting inside a metal box in the sun called an “orgone accumulator” that was supposed eliminate this rot and cure cancer. He saw cancer as the rotting of human flesh just as an egg rots if it is left in the sun too long. He posited that people begin to rot when they have an unconscious anger that is turned inwards.
My take on cancer is that it is a biological process that is associated with the decay that happens in old age. However, when cancer happens earlier, it has to do with some ongoing, relentless stress that affects some part of the body and eventually impinges it on a cellular level. This generally happens to people who internalize their feelings and bottle them up until they fester inside their body. The stress might begin as a constant ache in some part of their body and then progress, after a few years, to cancer. For example, acid reflux is thought to occur when a person is stressed out over time, causing the acids in the stomach to build up to the point that the acids and acidic vapors rise up into the esophagus, especially at night, causing aches in the chest and in the throat leading to coughing. Over time, the constant acid reflux can lead to cancer of the esophagus, or
Barrett’s Syndrome. This is my own theory and not one shared by
most doctors.
Taking this theory into consideration, I ask myself, “Why are you starting to rot?” I have always internalized my feelings, going back to the age of four. At four my two older brothers and I won a local talent show. It had been discovered that I had unusual musical talent and could sing harmony (a fact which frustrated my second oldest brother, who could not sing harmony no matter how hard he tried). When we sang, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” for the talent show, I stood on a stool in the middle of my two brothers, proudly singing the second harmony, and I became the hit of the show. Thereafter I was invited to sing for the Lion’s Club and the Rotary Club and during halftime of our high school’s football game. I became my mother’s favorite for a time and she would sit me in her lap to teach me new songs to sing at the next event.
My older brothers didn’t
take kindly to the fact that I, and not they, had been invited to sing for
these different events and that I, and not they, had become a local
celebrity. Nor did they particularly
like seeing me sitting in my mother’s lap day after day, smiling proudly as my
mother doted on her little prodigy. One
day I heard my oldest brother say to my mother, “I think maybe Jerry’s getting
too big for his britches.” My mother was
easily influenced and her attitude toward me started to change.
When my younger brother was born, my mother’s attention went to the new baby. I felt abandoned and began to complain about losing my place in her lap. I kept running up to her and asking her to hold me. She had no patience with my complaining; she was angry at my father due to his alcoholism and abusive behavior toward her and that anger was directed toward me. “I don’t need two babies!” she yelled. I began to act like a baby, sucking my thumb and wetting the bed. This made her even more angry at me and she began to spank me frequently. I had gone from my mother’s prince to her scapegoat. My second oldest brother gloated and taunted me. “Danny is going to have more musical talent than you’ll ever have,” he taunted me. “He’ll sing harmony when he’s three.” This brother tormented me all of my childhood and laughed at me when I attempted to fight back. He was four years older and I could never win with him. This is where I began the habit of internalizing my anger.
At the age of seven, I
went through my first bout of depression.
I had gone to Sunday School and heard a teacher talk about Adam and Eve
and how they ate the apple and how God spoke to them. She concluded, “Because Adam and Eve sinned,
we are all mortal. We all have to die.” I went home and lay in my bed and closed my
eyes and twisted and turned in my bed. I
felt abandoned by my mother, abused by my father, and betrayed by my
brothers. I had become the forgotten
boy. This made me susceptible to this
death depression that now overtook me.
For weeks and then months I felt like the loneliest boy in the world. I would walk to the creek near my house and
sit there looking at the moving water and wonder why God had played this trick
on me. Why had He made me think that I
was going to live forever and always be happy?
Why had he misled me, only to pull the rug out from beneath me at the
last minute, as if he was telling me, “Sorry, but you have to die.” I gazed at the people around me and nobody
seemed to be aware of this horrible fact that they would have to die. They were all laughing and carrying on as if they
were going to live forever and ever. I
wanted to scream at them, “Don’t you realize we’re all going to die?”
This early death depression led, in later years, to my psychoanalytic theory about the Death Trauma, which I explained in a recent book. The Death Trauma occurs in the life of most children when they first realize they are mortal. A beloved pet gets run over by a car, or a mother suddenly passes; children are confronted with death and their thoughts turn to their own mortality. This comes to a shock to them and, depending on how it is handled by parents, can become a major trauma. It can then be a lifelong factor influencing their personality formation. It might cause a person, for example to defend against the unconscious fear of death by constantly taking risks, such as engaging in sky diving. Each time he safely lands on earth he proves that he is not going to die. In other cases, when people suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts, they are reacting to the threat of death by saying to themselves, “If I have to die, let me just die and get it over with!” In my own case, I believe my urge to write is my way of trying to be immortal, to leave something behind that still might be a living reminder of me.
How different would human life be if there were no death? If we all lived forever, how would people deal with death? Would there still be a death trauma? As I begin to think about these questions my meditation became broader. Even if people lived forever, they could still be killed, I supposed, and therefore death would still be a factor. In fact, it would be even more of a factor, since murder then would be even more horrendous and lives would matter even more. If everybody lived forever, would people calm down and stop fighting wars? If everybody lived forever, would people be nicer to each other.
After a week of pondering
the contingencies of death, I went back to the hospital to do the MRI. The two women who did the MRI were quite
nice, just as the doctor had been. Everybody
seemed to be nicer to me when they knew I had cancer. The woman who was in charge, an attractive
blond toward whom, in other circumstances, I might have been attracted to,
asked me what music I wanted to hear and I said, “La Boheme.” A day later the kindly doctor called me to
tell me the results. “The MRI indicated
that your cancer has metastasized into your pelvis,” he said in a friendly,
sympathetic voice. When I questioned him
about it, he again repeated that my chances of recovery had now gone down from
70% to 60%. I asked what he meant and he
explained that once cancer spreads to the bone, it can no longer be cured. It can only be treated in order to stop its
growth and prolong life. Upon hearing
this my mood sank again and I again had thoughts of killing the devil doctor.
The Treatment
The following week my
urologist gave me the first hormone injection.
He said that testosterone had become my enemy and was fueling the cancer
cells in my body; the hormone shots were basically female hormones that would
push aside the nasty male hormones and forestall their aggressiveness. I asked what the side effects would be and he
said I might have hot flashes (the same as middle-aged women who stop having
their menstruation), lose my ability to have erections and the motivation to
have sex, and suffer from fatigue. I
wondered out loud if I would grow tits.
He said no.
The radiation treatment was scheduled to start in a little over a month, and I spent the time pouring over the internet to find out all I could about my condition. I read through several web pages describing the treatment of prostate cancer, the treatment of prostate cancer that had metastasized to the bone, the types of treatment used in both instances, and the effectiveness of the various treatments. I learned about the side effects of hormone therapy and radiation therapy. I read on and on, looking for some new treatment that could turn things around. However, everything I read confirmed what my doctors had told me; once cancer had reached the bone, it could no longer be stopped. The best that medical science could do was stall the growth of the cancer cells and prolong life as much as possible. There was one sentence at the end that offered a kind of loophole, noting that how a patient responded to treatment and how likely he was to recover depended on variable such as his age, his physical state and his mental state. Well, that was a little hopeful.
That last sentence brought to mind a book I had read, Anatomy of an Illness, by Norman Cousins, who was the editor of a weekly New York magazine. The book described how his doctors had told him he would die in six months due to a combination of severe conditions. Having nothing to lose, he left his stressful job and rented a hotel room, where he continually watched funny movies day and night. By the end of three months of laughter, he returned to the doctors that had given him the death sentence and presented himself to them, smiling. They examined him and pronounced him as cured. “How did you do it?” they wanted to know. “I laughed,” he said. The laugh cure is no secret to psychologists. Laughter is a release of anger and therefore of stress. It has been studied ever since the Aristotle wrote about the emotions in Ancient Greece. “Maybe I should go away and rent a hotel room?” I thought.
I felt angry and frustrated that nothing could be done. Yes, the cancer had spread to the bone, but the CT scan had hardly detected it and all the MRI had found was one little spot in my pelvis. Surely something could be done about this little spot. Surely something could be done to nip it in the bud. I envisioned an operation in which a surgeon would use a laser beam to cut away the offending cancer cells. I imagined using chemotherapy to kill those cells. Was I, at 78, too old for chemotherapy? I imagined new, experimental treatments. I couldn’t believe that nothing could be done about a little speck in my pelvis. On the advice of a friend, I had contacted the leading authority on prostate cancer, Dr. Wassim Abida, at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York, and I had scheduled an online visit with him in a couple of weeks. I hoped all my questions would be answered at that time.
I thought again and again about the devil doctor. I could see his face, with his serious eyes and his elegantly trimmed mustache and beard. I wondered what he was doing at this moment. Was he out playing golf? Had he forgotten all about me? Or was he feeling guilty about his omission? Then I began endlessly circling around the thought, sometimes even whispered out loud, “What if he had told me about my PSA of 15?” If only he had told me, I would most likely not have been in this predicament. If he had told me, I would have been cured by now and enjoying my life. Instead, I have now reached a point beyond return and have been given a death sentence by my doctors. If only…if only…if only…
As I pondered my fate, I
was reminded of the five stages of grief according to Elizabeth Kubler Ross, a
social psychologist who worked in a hospital for patients who were near death
or dying. On observing these patients
and noting how they and their loved ones reacted when they were told they had a
terminal illness, she came up with her theory of stages of grief. According to her, when a person finds out
they have to die, their first response is to deny it. “Me die?
I’m too young to die! You must
have mixed up my X-rays with someone else’s.”
The second stage is anger. “Why
the hell me?” The third is
bargaining. “Please, God, I’ll do thirty
Hail Mary’s a day if you’ll let me live.”
The fourth is depression. “I have
to die. To hell with everything. Nothing matters.” Finally, if a person is well adjusted, they
get to the fifth stage: acceptance. You
finally accept that you have to die and you achieve closure with your loved
ones. I thought about Ross’s theory and
wondered if I would now go through these stages. I am not in denial, I thought, but I am
probably in the anger stage. When I
studied these stages in school, I never envisioned myself having to deal with them
myself.
My appointment with Dr. Abida at Sloan Kettering came around. He was an earnest young man and he more or less repeated what others had said, that once cancer has spread to the bone it cannot be cured, only stalled. However, he informed me of the latest research involving two new medicines that had proven to lengthen the lives of prostate cancer patients. I wrote down the names.
“But doctor, all I have is one little spot in my pelvis. Can’t you go in with a laser or something and scrape the cancer off the bone?” I pleaded from my Skype to his.
“Unfortunately, no. There’s no such operation. And even if there were, you can never be sure the cancer isn’t spreading. There can always be little specks on different parts of the bone that are hard to detect at first. Anyway, the radiation is just as good. A radiologist can focus the radiation right on the spot and neutralize it.”
“But if I had a bullet in my pelvis, you’d remove that.”
“Yes, but that’s different. Once you remove a bullet, there’s no possibility of the lead poisoning spreading.”
“So, there’s nothing more to be done? I just have to wait it out. Until I die.”
“But as I said, the hormone therapy and radiation will keep you going for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Five years or so.”
“Has anybody with cancer in the bone ever kicked it?”
“It’s happened. About one or two percent of patients have a remission of symptoms and live out their normal lives.”
“Maybe that’ll be me.”
“Maybe.”
Dr. Abida sent along
information about new research to my urologist.
I went back to see the urologist for another shot of hormone therapy the
following week, and a few weeks after that I started the radiation
treatment. I am scheduled to go to the
hospital for five weeks, five times a week, to get doses of radiation aimed at
my prostate and pelvis. I am still
seeing therapy patients online and I am busy writing and publishing my books on
Amazon. My wife, Julia, and I do not
talk much these days. She lets me work
and write all day while she watches Chinese YouTube programs on her
Iphone. Our parrot, Lucky has gotten
into the habit of screaming and we have had to lock him in the bathroom to shut
him up. Our cats snuggle up with us at
night and I sometimes have to resort to Melatonin in order to get some sleep.
I have one advantage over other people. I know about when I am going to die, whereas for many, death comes suddenly and they have no time to prepare for it. I have been given a few years to finish things up. I’ve got some pretty good novels to complete and some new ideas about how to end them. I am also putting together an anthology of poems called, Poems from the Heart: Collected Words of Truth and Beauty, which is a book of poems, from ancient times to the present, from around the world. And I’m working on a book called, The Way to Be, a philosophical work, written in verse. The writing keeps me occupied and in a good frame of mind. We all have to die sometime. You can accept that, or you can fight against it. I have chosen to accept it.
The Radical Feminist Deconstruction of Men
By Gerald Schoenewolf, Ph.D.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Abstract: Feminism started out in the early 1900s as as fairly moderate movement fighting for basic things like voting rights. However, by the latter part of the 20th Century is had become a radical movement who members were mostly lesbian. The author presents his view of the feminist deconstruction of men as a competition between lesbians and straight men for the love and loyalty of women.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Over the years, feminism has portrayed itself as a political moment that is working toward the goal of equality between men and women. But this is just its public relations angle. When you study feminist history for the last hundred years, you discover a trend not towards equality but towards inequality: putting down men and idealizing women.
There has always been an aspect of feminism, even in 19th Century Europe, of man-hatred. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist, wrote about how women are subjected to “domestic slavery,” by men. That phrase has echoed down to the present day, along with many others. Over time, there has been a concerted attempt to depict males and masculinity in a most unsavory way.
Degrading Men
At the beginning of the second wave of feminism which began in the 1960s, feminists came up with new names for men. They were said to be sexists, male chauvinists and misogynists. Men were accused of being prejudiced against women, but women, according to these radical feminists, were not prejudiced against men. Men hat erected a patriarchy with which they held on to male power over women. Feminists also began accusing men of terrorizing women by raping them, battering them and sexually abusing women and children, and they came up with statistics that seemed to prove there was an epidemic of male sex abuse. But when those statistics were checked out by objective sources they were shown to be gross exaggerations.
Next, feminists went a step further and insisted that males were born that way—that is, they were all innately toxic toward women. It was called “toxic masculinity.” These accusations against men were combined with fierce emotional attacks on any man who attempted to defend men or to argue against such charges. Women would attack any man who tried to speak out, in any public forum, with strident, self-righteous anger, telling such a man that he was just a sexist who couldn’t tolerate strong women. No man or woman was allowed to present another side without being severely punished.
From the 1960s until the present feminists have pressed Western governments to pass more than a hundred new laws favoring women and disfavoring men. These included, for example, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2010, which stated that if a man killed a woman and it was determined that he hated women, his punishment would be greater than the punishment administered if a woman killed a man, for her hatred of men would be viewed as justified by male sexism against women.
Radical Lesbian Competition with Men
In the meantime, the feminist movement was changing. In the beginning of the 20th Century most feminists were straight, white women. However, as the years passed, more and more lesbians joined the movement and eventually took over the National Organization of Women. By the turn of the century (2000), NOW was comprised of lesbian, transgender and black women. At this point the target of their anger became exclusively straight white males, and the influence of these women was so great that almost all of Western culture was now following their dictates.
For years, radical lesbian feminists have smeared men with labels such as "toxic masculinity," and with bogus statistics making it seem like we have an epidemic of domestic abuse and rape in our society. According to a recent UNICEF study, "20 to 50 percent of the female population of the world will be victims of domestic violence" (UNICEF having been taken over by feminists). One needn't be a rocket scientist to understand how preposterous it is to suggest that 50 percent of women will suffer from domestic violence.
Looking at this psychologically, it appears that radical lesbians want to degrade men as people who abuse, objectify, enslave, rape and do a hundred and one bad things to women. They view themselves in a competition with straight men for winning the hearts and loyalty of women.
As a psychoanalyst, I am interested in the psychodynamics of feminist politics. Freud wrote volumes about how the unconscious mind influences behavior, but in feminism one cannot find anything about the unconscious except in feminist analyses of white males, who are said to engage in microaggressions against women without being aware of it. Freud wrote that women develop unconscious envy of men, after discovering, as little girls, that males have a body part that they lack. In a paper in 1925, he said, “Now upon this penis envy follows that hostile embitterment displayed by women against men, never entirely absent in the relations between the sexes, the clearest indication of which are to be found in the writings and ambitions of ‘emancipated’ women.”
Lesbians seem to be the most prone to penis envy, which would be associated with unresolved hated of their fathers. In studying the biographies of radical feminists, I have observed that a great many of them have grown up under the tutelage of mothers who hated men. Gloria Steinem, a feminist icon of the 1960s, had a father who abandoned the family after he divorced Steinem's mother when she was ten years old. Her mother, Ruth, spent long periods in and out of facilities for the mentally ill, and she was convinced that employers and doctors gave her inferior treatment because she was a woman (not because she was a difficult person). Steinem later found many reasons why women lacked social and political equality.
Steinem's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, focused on how women had been disenfranchized and kept down by men. That and her constant attack on men and her contention that men had historically enslaved women into domestic abuse may be seen as evidence of penis envy; it may also be that Steinem suffered from paranoia, for she, like her mother, seemed to look for ways that men were out to get her and women.
One can see
signs of this envy in women's attempt to downgrade men and blame all the evils of
humanity on masculinity. Phyllis Chesler
codified this view in her book, Women and
Madness (1972). At the bottom of
this attempt is the aforementioned lesbian competition with men; radical feminists want to be “the man,” and
they want to alienate all heterosexual men from the competition and take all
nubile young women for themselves.
The Feminist Tyranny
Over the years, feminism has become one of the most tyrannical movements in existence. It calls itself “liberal” and “progressive,” but in fact it seems to have become fascist. We now live in a dystopian world that some have compared to the society described in the novel 1984, a world where not big brother but big sister is watching. Basic freedoms, such as freedom of speech, that are essential to a healthy society have now been lost. Just as in all tyrannical societies, scientists under the feminist state are no longer allowed to look for the truth if that truth veers away from the accepted ideology.
Corporations such as Google required strict allegiance to feminist ideology and employees were asked to do training programs on how to be sensitive to women. Those who spoke out against this requirement, as James Damore did in 2017, were fired. Damore wrote an interoffice memo, calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", and stating that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through “reverse discrimination.” His words were considered an abomination by Google. Even though feminism is almost totally prejudiced against men, no one is ever allowed to consider whether feminists or women are sexist. Indeed, over the last 100 years men have been substantially sensitized as to women’s feelings and needs, and in actuality it is women who need to be trained to be more sensitive toward men.
Feminists continue to portray women as innocents who need to be protected from men, and unfortunately most people buy into that. This is the theme that has permeated most cultures since the beginning of history and it is deeply ingrained in the human psyche, and it might have been true at one time. However, today nothing could be further from the truth. Today, society needs to be protected from the relentless aggression of feminism.
I, along with many others, have attempted to warn about this problem for years, but to no avail. My most recent book, The Rise of Feminism: A Psychoanalyst Probes the Meaning of a Movement, has sold about 57 copies to date. By now, most everybody has been scared off of reading anything that diverges from the accepted view of feminists as saviors of female virtue and sanctity. They have been scared off of reading Freud--one of the greatest thinkers of the modern era; why should they read anything anyone else writes?
The terrorism of radical feminism has produced an automatic reflex by almost everybody to avoid taking in any information that goes counter to feminist ideology. Indeed, as they read this article, many readers will likely feel fear or revulsion and will want to ignore it or perhaps even silence the author as someone whose thinking is dangerous.
In reality, feminists are not saviors. Feminism is perhaps the most harmful political movement that has ever plagued American society, and feminists are the most disturbed human beings ever to inhabit it. Most people who are disturbed go into therapy to work through the misconceptions that prevent them from actualizing themselves. Radical feminists—and particularly radical lesbians—have instead projected their inner disturbance and taken it out on society.
The Song of Songs
By King Solomon (translated by G. Schoenewolf)
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ABSTRACT: Written in the 10th Century b.c., The Song of Songs was probably the work of Solomon himself and one of his brides. Solomon is known as the wisest man in the world, and this poetic theater piece demonstrates Solomon's relaxed and romantic philosophy of life.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Bride Confesses Her Love
She:
Let
him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is better than wine;
your
anointing oils are fragrant;
your name is oil poured out;
therefore
virgins love you.
Take me with you; let us run.
The
king has brought me into his chambers.
Others:
We
will exult and rejoice in you;
we
will extol your love more than wine;
rightly
do all love you.
She:
I
am dark, but lovely,
O
daughters of Jerusalem,
like the tents of Kedar,
like
the curtains of Solomon.
Do not gaze at me because I am dark,
because
the sun has looked upon me.
My mother's sons showed me their anger;
they
made me keeper of the vineyards,
but
my own vineyard I could not keep!
Tell me, you whom my soul loves,
where
you pasture your flock,
where
you make it lie down at noon;
for why should I be one who hides herself
beside
your companion’s flock?
Solomon and His Bride Delight in Each Other
He:
If
you do not know,
O
most beautiful among women,
follow in the tracks of the flock,
and
pasture your young goats
beside
my shepherds' dock.
I
compare you, my love,
to
a mare among the Pharaoh's chariots.
Your cheeks are lovely with ornaments,
your
neck with strands of jewels.
Others:
We
will make for you ornaments of gold,
studded
with silver.
She:
While the king was on his couch,
my
nard gave forth its poignant scent.
My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh
that
lies between my breasts.
My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms
that
lie in the vineyards of Engedi.
He:
Behold,
you are beautiful, my love;
behold,
you are beautiful;
your
eyes are the eyes of a dove.
She:
Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved,
truly delightful.
Our couch is green and fine.
the
beams of our house are cedar;
our
rafters are pine.
She:
I am a rose of Sharon,
a lily of the valley.
He:
Like a lily among thorns
is my darling among young women.
She:
Like an apple tree in the forest
is my beloved among young men.
I delight to sit in his shade,
and his fruit is sweet to my taste.
Let him lead me to the banquet hall,
and let his scarf be over me with love.
Let him strengthen me with raisins,
refresh me with apples,
for I am faint with love.
His left arm is under my head,
and his right arm caresses me.
Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you
by the gazelles and by the deer of the field:
Do not stir up love
until it is time.
Listen! My beloved!
Look! Here he comes,
leaping over the mountains,
bounding across the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the window,
peering through the lattice.
My beloved spoke and said to me,
“Arise, my darling,
my lovely one, come with me.
See! The winter is past;
the rains are over at last.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the voice of the turtle dove
is heard in our land.
The fig tree reveals its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.”
He:
My dove in the clefts of the rock,
hiding on the mountainside,
show me your face,
let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely.
Catch for us the foxes,
the little foxes
that ruin the vineyards,
our gentle vineyards that are in bloom.
She:
My beloved is mine and I am his;
he browses among the lilies.
Until the day breaks
and the shadows flee.
Turn, my beloved,
and like a gazelle be,
or like a young stag
on the hills of Bether.
Songs of Solomon (3)
The Bride's Dream:
On my bed by night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I
sought him, but found him not.
I will rise now and go about the city,
in
the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves.
I
sought him, but found him not.
The watchmen found me
as
they went about in the city.
“Have you seen him whom my soul loves?”
Scarcely had I passed them
when
I found him whom my soul loves.
I held him, and would not let him go
until
I had brought him into my mother's house,
and
into the chamber of her who conceived me.
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
by
the gazelles or the deer of the field,
that you not stir up or awaken love
until
the King pleases.
Solomon Arrives for the Wedding:
What is
that coming up from the wilderness
like
columns of smoke,
perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,
with
all the fragrant powders of a merchant?
Behold, it is the litter of Solomon!
Around it are sixty mighty men,
some
of the mighty men of Israel,
all of them wearing swords
and
expert in war,
each with his sword at his thigh,
against
terror by night.
King Solomon made himself a carriage[b]
from
the wood of Lebanon.
He made its posts of silver,
its
back of gold, its seat of purple;
its interior was inlaid with love
by
the daughters of Jerusalem.
Go
out, O daughters of Zion,
and
look upon King Solomon,
with the crown with which his mother crowned him
on
the day of his wedding,
on
the day of the gladness of his heart.
Songs of Solomon (4)
Solomon Admires His Bride's Beauty
He:
Behold,
you are beautiful, my love,
behold,
you are beautiful!
Your eyes are doves
behind
your veil.
Your hair is like a flock of goats
leaping
down the slopes of Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes
that
have come up from the washing,
all of which bear twins,
and
not one among them has lost its young.
Your lips are like a scarlet thread,
and
your mouth is lovely.
Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate
behind
your veil.
Your neck is like the tower of David,
built
in rows of stone;[a]
on it hang a thousand shields,
all
of them shields of warriors.
Your two breasts are like two fawns,
twins
of a gazelle,
that
graze among the lilies.
Until the day breathes
and
the shadows flee,
I will go away to the mountain of myrrh
and
the hill of frankincense.
You are altogether beautiful, my love;
there
is no flaw in you.
Come with me from Lebanon, my bride;
come
with me from Lebanon.
Depart
from the peak of Amana,
from
the peak of Senir and Hermon,
from the dens of lions,
from
the mountains of leopards.
You have captivated my heart, my sister, my
bride;
you
have captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes,
with
one jewel of your necklace.
How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride!
How
much better is your love than wine,
and
the fragrance of your oils than any spice!
Your lips drip nectar, my bride;
honey
and milk are under your tongue;
the
fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.
A garden locked is my sister, my bride,
a
spring locked, a fountain sealed.
Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates
with
all choicest fruits,
henna
with nard,
nard and saffron,
calamus and cinnamon,
with
all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes,
with
all choice spices—
A garden fountain it
is, a well of living water,
and
flowing streams from Lebanon.
Awake,
O north wind,
and
come, O south wind!
Blow upon my garden,
let
its spices flow.
Together in the Garden of Love
She:
Let my
beloved come to his garden,
and
eat its choicest fruits.
Songs of Solomon (5)
He:
I came to my garden, my sister, my bride,
I gathered
my myrrh with my spice,
I
ate my honeycomb with my honey,
I
drank my wine with my milk.
Others:
Eat, friends, drink,
and
be drunk with love!
The Bride Searches for Her Beloved
She:
I
slept, but my heart was awake.
A sound! My beloved is knocking.
“Open to me, my sister, my love,
my
dove, my perfect one,
for my head is wet with dew,
my
locks with the drops of the night.”
I had put off my garment;
how
could I put it on?
I had bathed my feet;
how
could I soil them?
My beloved put his hand to the latch,
and
my heart was thrilled within me.
I arose to open to my beloved,
and
my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with liquid myrrh,
on
the handles of the bolt.
I opened to my beloved,
but
my beloved had turned and gone.
My soul failed me when he spoke.
I sought him, but found him not;
I
called him, but he gave no answer.
The watchmen found me
as
they went about in the city;
they beat me, they bruised me,
they
took away my veil,
those
watchmen of the walls.
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
if
you find my beloved,
that you tell him
I
am sick with love.
Others:
What is your beloved more than another beloved,
O
most beautiful among women?
What is your beloved more than another beloved,
that
you thus adjure us?
The Bride Praises Her Beloved
She:
My beloved is radiant and ruddy,
distinguished
among ten thousand.
His head is the finest gold;
his
locks are wavy,
black
as a raven.
His eyes are like doves
beside
streams of water,
bathed in milk,
sitting
beside a full pool.
His cheeks are like beds of spices,
mounds
of sweet-smelling herbs.
His lips are lilies,
dripping
liquid myrrh.
His arms are rods of gold,
set
with jewels.
His body is polished ivory,
bedecked
with sapphires.
His legs are alabaster columns,
set
on bases of gold.
His appearance is like Lebanon,
choice
as the cedars.
His mouth is most sweet,
and
he is altogether desirable.
This is my beloved and this is my friend,
O
daughters of Jerusalem.
Songs of Solomon (6)
Others:
6 Where has
your beloved gone,
O
most beautiful among women?
Where has your beloved turned,
that
we may seek him with you?
Together in the Garden of Love
She:
My beloved has gone down to his garden
to
the beds of spices,
to graze[a] in the
gardens
and
to gather lilies.
I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine;
he
grazes among the lilies.
Solomon and His Bride Delight in Each Other
He:
You are
beautiful as Tirzah, my love,
lovely
as Jerusalem,
awesome
as an army with banners.
Turn away your eyes from me,
for
they overwhelm me—
Your hair is like a flock of goats
leaping
down the slopes of Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of ewes
that
have come up from the washing;
all of them bear twins;
not
one among them has lost its young.
Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate
behind
your veil.
There are sixty queens and eighty concubines,
and
virgins without number.
My dove, my perfect one, is the only one,
the
only one of her mother,
pure
to her who bore her.
The young women saw her and called her blessed;
the
queens and concubines also, and they praised her.
“Who is this who looks down like the dawn,
beautiful
as the moon, bright as the sun,
awesome
as an army with banners?”
She:
I went down to the nut orchard
to
look at the blossoms of the valley,
to see whether the vines had budded,
whether
the pomegranates were in bloom.
Before I was aware, my desire set me
among
the chariots of my kinsman, a prince.[b]
Others:
Return, return, O Shulammite,
return,
return, that we may look upon you.
He:
Why
should you look upon the Shulammite,
as
upon a dance before two armies?
Songs of Solomon (7)
How beautiful are your feet in sandals,
O
noble daughter!
Your rounded thighs are like jewels,
the
work of a master hand.
Your navel is a rounded bowl
that
never lacks mixed wine.
Your belly is a heap of wheat,
encircled
with lilies.
Your two breasts are like two fawns,
twins
of a gazelle.
Your neck is like an ivory tower.
Your eyes are pools in Heshbon,
by
the gate of Bath-rabbim.
Your nose is like a tower of Lebanon,
which
looks toward Damascus.
Your head crowns you like Carmel,
and
your flowing locks are like purple;
a
king is held captive in the tresses.
How beautiful and pleasant you are,
O
loved one, with all your delights![a]
Your stature is like a palm tree,
and
your breasts are like its clusters.
I say I will climb the palm tree
and
lay hold of its fruit.
Oh may your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
and
the scent of your breath like apples,
and your mouth[b] like the
best wine.
She:
It goes down smoothly for my beloved,
gliding
over lips and teeth.[c]
I am my beloved's,
and
his desire is for me.
The Bride Gives Her Love
Come,
my beloved,
let
us go out into the fields
and
lodge in the villages;[d]
let us go out early to the vineyards
and
see whether the vines have budded,
whether the grape blossoms have opened
and
the pomegranates are in bloom.
There I will give you my love.
The mandrakes give forth fragrance,
and
beside our doors are all choice fruits,
new as well as old,
which
I have laid up for you, O my beloved.
Songs of Solomon (8)
Longing for Her Beloved
Oh that you were like a brother to me
who
nursed at my mother's breasts!
If I found you outside, I would kiss you,
and
none would despise me.
I would lead you and bring you
into
the house of my mother—
she
who used to teach me.
I would give you spiced wine to drink,
the
juice of my pomegranate.
His left hand is under my head,
and
his right hand embraces me!
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
that
you not stir up or awaken love
until
it pleases.
Who is that coming up from the wilderness,
leaning
on her beloved?
Under the apple tree I awakened you.
There your mother was in labor with you;
there
she who bore you was in labor.
Set me
as a seal upon your heart,
as
a seal upon your arm,
for love is strong as death,
jealousy[a] is fierce
as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
the
very flame of the Lord.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither
can floods drown it.
neither can floods drown it.
If a man offered for love
all
the wealth of his house,
he[c] would be
utterly despised.
Final Advice
Others:
We have a little sister,
and
she has no breasts.
What shall we do for our sister
on
the day when she is spoken for?
If she is a wall,
we
will build on her a battlement of silver,
but if she is a door,
we
will enclose her with boards of cedar.
She:
I was a wall,
and
my breasts were like towers;
then I was in his eyes
as
one who finds peace.
Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon;
he
let out the vineyard to keepers;
each
one was to bring for its fruit a thousand pieces of silver.
My vineyard, my very own, is before me;
you,
O Solomon, may have the thousand,
and
the keepers of the fruit two hundred.
He:
O you who dwell in the gardens,
with
companions listening for your voice;
let
me hear it.
She:
Make haste, my beloved,
and
be like a gazelle
or a young stag
on
the mountains of spices.