CARTOONS

“The Rorschach test also taught us that traumatized people look at the world in a fundamentally different way from other people.”

—Bessell van der Kolk. The Body Keeps the Score.

 

 

I have had several dreams with the word “cartoon” in them, one of which occurred two months before my memory returned. I eventually learned what “Cartoon” was doing in my dreams when I saw the 2012 movie The Iceman, on Netflix in 2019. The screenplay is about Richard Kuklinski, a real life hit man for the Mafia, thought to have killed more than one-hundred people. Michael Shannon plays the title role, and Winona Ryder, his wife. At the beginning of the movie, Kuklinski works in a store where he sells pornographic pictures and vignettes. Over the course of the movie, I learned that the industry called porn films and photographs “cartoons.”

 

DREAM: The Cat Cartoon (July 2, 1989. Two months before my memory returned.)

I am partnered with a man, and we are with a firm that helps the police investigate crimes. I am opening a box in which each item in the box is wrapped in newspaper. I unwrap each object to see what it can mean to the investigation and tell the policeman what it is. I unwrap two “cat cartoons.” The cartoons are shaped like bookmarks or comic strips.

 

When I learned the meaning of cartoon, I understood this dream. An investigator is showing me sex toys and a strip of film to see if I know what they are.

 

DREAM: He Develops Film. (November 9, 1989. Two months after my memory returned.)

…now I am in a house with a man. He is developing film. On the floor are pieces of paper that look like artwork. He is collecting cartoons. He shows me one. Two friends arrive. They are working on collections of cartoons and copying them.

 

This dream suggests that the man I am with is selling, or trading, pornographic photos he has taken of me and is developing in his house.

 

Group Therapy

In 1963 I began therapy. I was twenty-three years old. I had never been in counseling and was uncertain as to how to find a therapist, so I called the Riverside Baptist Church and asked to see a pastor. He recommended the Marble Collegiate Church where the American Foundation for Psychiatry and Religion was located. Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote the popular book, The Power of Positive Thinking, was the pastor. I called and made an appointment.

I was tested by Dr. Libby Lyons who took me through a Rorschach test and had me organize a series of pictures to make a story, draw a picture of myself, and arrange a series of wood blocks.When discussing the results, Dr. Libby said, “The tests suggest you have had a childhood trauma. We don’t know what it is.” 

I had one-on-one sessions with her at the clinic for six months. Dr. Lyons and I talked about my family history, work related issues, and my dreams of an operatic career. Eventually, she told me she would like me to join a group that met one night a week at her home.

Dr. Lyons lived in a splendid old Victorian House on Manhattan’s West Side, somewhere around 23^rd Street. She had turned her four-story home into a halfway house for women who had recently been released from a mental facility and needed a supportive place to live. It had a basement kitchen and a large living room on the first floor with beautiful wood floors. A chandelier sparkled from the 15-foot-high ceiling, lighting up the discussion group below.

Dr. Lyons was easy to love—a six-foot-tall, vivacious woman who was larger than life. Her shoulder-length hair flew around her shoulders as she talked, and she was full of laughter and positive comments. She occupied the master suite and each of the women residents had their own room. There was also a baby, temporarily abandoned by one of the women, and everyone took care of her. Sometimes the two-month-old came to group therapy and sat on Dr. Lyons’ lap as we talked.

In the early sixties, group therapy was still an idea in development. Groups were usually comprised of people of similar age, pathology, family, sex, religion, etc. Dr. Lyons, however, followed the model of one of the early founders of the movement, Dr. Irving D. Yalom—a “here and now” format where sessions were mixed with individuals from many different walks of life and pathologies.

In Dr. Lyons’ group, I was initiated into the lives of people whose lifestyle and difficulties were unfamiliar to me. The group included three gay men, two secretaries with work-related problems, a woman with an abusive husband, a single young woman struggling to take care of her child, a man who had recently become impotent, a scientist with relationship problems, a severely overweight woman, a playwright struggling to find work, and a girl with suicidal ideation.

Our evenings together were vibrant with emotion as members talked about their problems and received honest—sometimes loud—feedback. For the first time, I learned how others lived. The group chastised me for “playing innocent” and I soon realized I needed to grow up. I went in as a naive young woman and came out with a better understanding of myself and the world. I became, despite my religious background, tolerant and accepting of all kinds of people and empathetic to their problems and different ways of living.

 Dr. Lyons retired after I’d been in the group for about two years, and the group disbanded. We all went our separate ways.

 

 

I met my model friend, Paul, in therapy. His, “As Long as you’re up get me a Grant’s” ad sign lit up the huge open Grand Central Station entrance for many months. When not working as a model, he was a supervisor for a clipping service. Clients who wanted to know what was being said about them in the news media, used his service. His staff read and clipped articles from newspapers and magazines from all over the United States.

 

 

2008. Tickfaw State Park, Louisiana, taken by me. My brother Stephen, his wife Maryanne, and I toured Louisiana together in our two recreational vehicles following a family reunion in Port Aransas, Texas.

 

Onward and upward.