The Reluctant Exhibitionist

By Martin Shepard and D. M. Thomas

The Reluctant Exhibitionist is the autobiography of an unconventional psychiatrist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504028592

Martin Shepard

Martin Shepard was a psychiatrist and writer and is the copublisher at The Permanent Press. He lives in Sag Harbor, New York.  

Book preview

1985

Groping for the Truth

by D. M. Thomas

Sigmund Freud in his consulting room:

It’s heating up and I’m grooving on the adrenalin pumping, enjoying my anxiety. Enjoying my role as counter-puncher.

I explode: ‘What kind of mother-fucking bullshit are you laying down on me? You and your superman, super-dude, macho bullshit. Fucking among you cats here goes on like there’s no tomorrow. Every time the homosexuals pass down the hall, it’s all you guys can do to sit in your seats and stay in this room. Your eyes open up like they’re never gonna close again.’

Well, no, not Freud, but one of his spiritual grandsons, Martin Shepard. Yet the gulf between the founder of psychoanalysis and his defrocked descendent should not be exaggerated. We are in danger of forgetting that Freud, in his time, shocked the bourgeoisie much more than Shepard is likely to today. Those powerful case-studies of hysterical Viennese ladies also clearly show that he was just as capable of ‘grooving on the adrenalin’, as he drew the woman, gasping and choking, to the remorseless enlightenment. And Shepard isn’t dealing with Viennese ladies in this passage, but with a group of delinquent blacks at the New York City Adolescent Reformatory.

After a period of conventional analytical work, Martin Shepard turned with relief and enthusiasm to encounter-group therapy. Therapy is perhaps not the right word, for he regards the healing method he has embraced as a part of our continuing education in the art of being free and human; the analyst/patient relationship is abandoned for a meeting of equals. The group leader is becoming healed along with the members. He is indeed a member himself; and the pun is intentional, for Dr (or Mr) Shepard believes—with William Blake and, up to a point, with Freud himself, that the unknotting of sexual repressions is a prerequisite of free, healthy living. And why shouldn’t the encounter-group leader enjoy his profession? His memoir records many couplings and triplings; records them with a dynamic gusto reminiscent of Henry Miller. Like Miller, he makes sex seem positively enjoyable: which is quite an unusual talent in our era of screwed-up screwing.

Freud, of course, foresaw the Shepards of this world when he warned Ferenczi not to try to make up to his women patients for their unloved childhood by kissing them. Freud kept strictly to coitus interruptus in his analyses: ‘… The period that followed, however, was a hard one for the physician. The recovery of the repressed idea had a shattering effect on the poor girl. She cried aloud when I put the situation drily before her with the words: So for a long time you had been in love with your brother-in-law. She complained at this moment of the most frightful pains …’ (Fräulein Elisabeth von R.). Shepard never puts it drily to his encounter-group lovers. On the other hand, he claims never to have made love, fully, to an ‘on-going’ patient: more out of a residue of respect for medical and Freudian rules than from conviction. Actually he believes that an analyst-patient relationship can be—like any sexual relationship—beneficial, neutral or harmful, according to circumstances. He expresses remorse that he did not make love to one particular young woman, since he is confident he would have helped her by so doing. By shrinking from it, for sound professional reasons, he believes he ‘fucked her up’.

Not surprisingly, but surely wickedly, the New York Board of Regents revoked Dr Shepard’s right to practise medicine, following the publication of his Memoir in the United States. They had him in a Catch-22 situation: either the sexual junketings were autobiographical, in which case he had acted unprofessionally: or, if they were fictional, he had brought his profession into ridicule. In spite of having courted danger so blatantly, the author is justified in feeling aggrieved.

I would probably read another of his books, if I came across it: tolerating the dated clichés of the psychedelic counter-culture, and the deliberate shapelessness of his style, for the sake of his liveliness and honesty; and I might even join one of his encounter-groups if the chance arose, because his heart seems to be in the right place and his mind ticks away satisfactorily too. It is ironic that, for all his theories of free marriage, and his strenuous practice of his theory, he was completely thrown when he came home one day to find his wife’s lover happily in residence. He is curiously blind—as Freud certainly was not—to the limits imposed by reality on human freedom; at least as far as his own life is concerned. Yet he can acknowledge those limits, very wisely, when discussing the bad marriage of his own father:

When I was younger, I felt he had one weakness—the weakness of guilt that tied him to my mother when other, more imaginative women interested him more. I now see that tie as the wisdom of knowing that all relationships develop their own absurdities and lack of fulfillments, and that tearing his marriage asunder would have caused much pain to many and really bring no greater happiness.

But Dr Shepard would probably nod emphatically in response to this observation, and say ‘Well, that’s the way it is. I’m not Sigmund Freud. Don’t expect me to be any wiser or better than you.’

I

How can you know me? By my words, my thoughts, my feelings? By my successes or my failures? By my accomplishments?

And what marks success and what failure? If through disaster one grows wiser, is not the disaster a success? And accomplishment? What is that? Accomplishment for one man is folly for another.

There is, of course, the historical approach: I was born in the Bronx to Mac and Marcia Shepard.… There I went to public school.… In the first grade my teacher was Miss Crimmens … and then to Music and Art High School … and on to college … etc., etc., etc.

Or the professional approach: call it The Making of a Psychiatrist. Here I would begin with my adventures in medical school and spin myself out along my career path. I would tell it like it is, in hospitals and psychiatric and psychoanalytic training centers, and—oh, yes—report anecdotes of interesting clinical experiences with patients.

And how much of me would you really know then? And how much of me do I really know? Incompletely analyzed, some of my more presumptuous psychoanalytic peers might say. Yet, unless you could see me with your own eyes, feel me with your own hands, hear the sound of my voice with your own ears (for my tone and inflection count as much as my content), you would be forced to rely upon me for your knowledge of me. And I reveal as much by what I leave out as by what I include.

One thing I know about this fellow Shepard is that he is impatient. Call it boredom. Call it restlessness. Call it whatever you wish. All I know is that neither of the traditional autobiographical approaches interests me. They’ve been done so many times before. And it all seems so boring, anyway.

Freud said that if you truly understand one dream, you will understand everything. Your entire history goes into the making of each dream.

I believe Freud was correct. For is not the universe contained within each grain of sand? By focusing down very, very carefully, each man reveals all that he is in every aspect of his being. From his dreams to the way he dresses, from the books he reads through the way he decorates his home, from the way he moves about through the way he signs his name. Even through his toilet habits.

Scoff not at that last remark. The way you wipe your ass and the rituals preceding same are as revealing as anything else. When at home, do you lock the door? What does that say about your feelings of privacy? In a strange toilet, will you spread out papers upon the seat before sitting down? What does that say about your sense of dirtiness? (I’m sure you don’t put on paper gloves before handling objects that other hands have touched.) And what of the wiping itself? Is it rub-a-dub-dub, or a little dab’ll do ya?

But I run away with myself. I don’t intend to reveal myself to you through my toilet habits. Why not? Largely because I abandoned my own toilet rituals when I realized how absurd they were in spite of their historical relevance. And while I might recall the significance of this psychoanalytic breakthrough, I would bore myself silly by the effort involved in rehashing all that crap (to make a pun). My curiosity about my bathroom habits ceased on that brave morning some years back when I stopped spreading paper on the seats in the public john.

What I’d prefer to do is to tell you about my sex life. You see, I’ve progressed from the anal stage of development to the genital.

Notice that it is my boredom I refuse to suffer—not yours. If this account tires you so far, that’s your responsibility, not mine. After all, you bought the book. And if you’re not too compulsive or too miserly, you can either put it down or throw it out.

Perhaps you don’t like my attitude. Yet that too is me.

II

Last summer I wrote a short journal entitled Summer on the Tantric Road: An Erotic Autobiography. While somewhat fictionalized to protect the innocent, essentially it was about myself. Notice the obvious ploy that introduced that book:

While walking along the beach in Bridgehampton in the autumn of 1970, I discovered the following notebook lying in the sand.

Reading it, I was amazed at how closely it paralleled some of my own experiences and thoughts that summer.

M. S.

October, 1970

The first chapter (a one-sentence paragraph, in fact) explained the title and justified, I thought, all of the fucking and sucking adventures that followed (Be careful, said a friend. Doctors aren’t supposed to fuck. They are only allowed to have intercourse).

Anyway, I present that chapter to you:

The Tantric* path is not for the ordinary thrill-seeker, for the follower of Tantra can achieve enlightenment only by fully accepting and courageously following his sexual desires.

I liked the book. It was the most personally rewarding writing I had ever done. Honest, unadorned reporting. Nonexplanatory. No justifications (beyond the sentence/chapter I just reported). Without excuses, without apologies.

I’d advise you to forget it, said my first agent. It’s boring, second-rate pornography without redeeming social value or literary interest. And it’s also extremely self-destructive. Not only will you ruin a promising career as a serious writer, but you will likely be censured by the medical authorities.

How strange that he or any other outsider should be offended by my sex life. Those with whom I’ve been sexually ensconced might possibly have reason to complain. But someone remote from the event? How could he possibly judge me?

No. I rejected his advice. The examination of any part of a man’s existence can be used to comprehend him. And what better way for a psychiatrist to reveal himself? Did not Freud himself credit the sexual instinct as being the prime mover in our lives? The force that defines our characters? Have not I and other psychoanalytically influenced therapists encouraged our patients to tell us all sorts of intimate details about their intimacies? On the surface most therapists imply, It’s all okay … it’s natural enough … there’s nothing to be ashamed of.

For me, this journal was a double test. Would I have the courage to reveal myself unashamedly? And will my colleagues really practice what they preach? That is to say, will they censure me for my sexual liberties?

Publication of Tantric Road ran into more opposition than I expected. My current agent, my present publisher, and some valued friends wanted more. More depth, more analysis, more of an understanding as to how these events related to my training and work as a psychoanalyst, as an encounter-group leader, as a more fully defined human being.

I was resistant. Let the facts speak for themselves.… People can judge it anyway they wish.… Their interpretations in the end will reveal more about themselves than they will about me. I still believe these things. For what is any of us but a walking, living, breathing Rorschach test? If you agree with my attitudes you call me honest and wise. If you can see no part of yourself in me you call me egoist, unprincipled, or scoundrel.

Another reason for my being reluctant to provide more was that I feared my cleverness—my ability to explain away, to seduce the reader, to make the unpalatable palatable.

Yet here I am, providing more. Why is that? Because in the final anyalysis I felt I could accommodate both positions. My associates’ points were well taken. Life is like music. When I listen to John Coltrane play his saxophone, I hear only one tone at a time. I hear each note at the one-and-only moment it is played, in the ever-present PRESENT—the only time we ever live in. Yet memory recalls the pattern of sound preceding the single sound I hear. And the sound I hear now will be linked into a coming, evolving complexity. Were there no preceding pattern, were there just one note, Coltrane would not excite me, would not interest me, would not move me, and would render himself meaningless.

So let me offer you both Tantric Road and something more, something that hopefully expands your understanding of that eventful summer.

* Tantric refers to Tantric Yoga, the ancient Indian Yogic discipline that helps a student achieve wisdom by studying and fulfilling all of his sexual appetites. The word Tantric comes from Sanskrit and is translated as stretch. Tantric Yoga was and is considered as valid a way of achieving enlightenment as were the other Yogic disciplines, such as Hatha Yoga (the popular Yoga of breathing and structured exercises), Karmic Yoga (the Yoga of doing good deeds), and Kundalini Yoga (the Yoga of awakening the serpent in the spine through chanting and meditating). None of these Yogic disciplines is religious, in any formal sense, but rather consists of prescribed instructions, which, if adhered to, will make the practitioner aware of the meaning and reality of his existence.

III-Summer on the Tantric Road

Sunday, June 28

All she wanted to do was fuck. Not that she would come when we were together. On the contrary. She kept coming in between the times we balled, while just walking around grooving on mother nature. And she was embarrassed, this tall, dark-haired, full-breasted, hazel-eyed, statuesque Norwegian, starting off this summer in the Hamptons discharging into her bikini bottoms while just sitting in the sun.

In all, it was an incredible experience for me as well. For the past year I’d been attempting to convince Eivor to try acid in the hope that it would get her head into a different place—a place more compatible with mine, and thus one that would help our marriage. And all that year she had been fearful of her possible reactions—dying, going mad, or God knows what other catastrophe.

She had seen (or rather heard) me freak out on my first acid trip last summer. Convinced that my female guru-guide was a witch or death itself come to claim me for my profligacy or for tasting from the tree of knowledge, I had run down thirteen flights of stairs to the city street—my five-foot guide in panicky tow—to sit and hope for the best. And I phoned Eivor to tell her that I was dying, cursed by this witch Jane. Superhuman powers, my ass, she answered. Don’t bother telling me your troubles. And then she hung up.

But of course I did survive. That in itself seemed a miracle. Also I had felt, before my panic, almost at one with the ALL. And incredibly aware of the validity of the supernatural, for all of my scientific training and reliance on reason. My second and last trip last fall, in the presence of Eivor and the kids, was even more rewarding. Death was no longer so terrifying. I dwelt for a while in the Great White Light of endlessness, infinity, cosmic consciousness, nirvana, eternity. And I burst from a trap door in that chamber back into the world of super-reality, seeing life as a process so incredibly simple that I was glad to forget in a few days that I knew it all. But still, I remembered that all the rules of how to be, of right and wrong, of morality, of possessiveness, and of image were absurd and totally arbitrary. People were no different from caterpillars. You munched your food and passed the wastes, mated, and died. And the only lesson worth passing on to children was to munch without too much avarice, to leave some leaves for the neighbors, and to enjoy their matings in the summer sun.

These were drug-aided insights I hoped that Eivor could share—the experience of the Great White Light so as to lessen her general gloominess and fear of dying, and give her the fullest appreciation of the absurdities of social convention so that she would not go through unwarranted craziness whenever I happened to turn on to another woman.

But it was out of my control. She took the tab, all right. But every time I tried to get her into the ultimate religious experience by reading to her from Timothy Leary’s adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, all she did was laugh and say, How silly. And then it was, Come make love to me.

So here was I, lying in bed with Eivor after fucking for the fourth or fifth time, with my mind blown on two accounts. One was merely the juxtaposition of my past trip with her present one. I, a six-foot-tall, strong, and supposedly lustful male had been scared shitless by a five-foot, two-inch girlfriend guide, with so many thoughts flying through my head, when I wasn’t in a panic, that sexual, or any other, contact with a human being was the last thought in my mind. Whereas my presumably brittle, puritanical, scaredy-cat wife was relatively comfortable and copulating with man and nature.

And secondly, I had been complaining both silently and openly for the past two years that Eivor wasn’t loving enough, available enough, or just plain cunty enough for me. But after the fifth fuck I wondered what I had made such a fuss about. An old Buddhist saying fluttered around in my mind: The only thing worse than not getting what you want is having your heart’s desire.

Thursday, July 2

Who am I?

A thirty-five-year-old man. Married for seven years. Three sons. Citizen of the planet earth. A toad.

Son of a loving father and a Jewish mother. Lover of sensuality and student of death. A Taoist come lately.

An adolescent artist. A dabbbler in politics. An anarchist, socialist, humanist wearing the mask of a liberal Democrat.

A psychiatrist. A group therapist. A defrocked psychoanalyst.

A Toscanini of the tambourine.

An aficionado of Alan Watts and John Lennon, psychedelic drugs, and The Incredible String Band.

Most recently a writer.

An aspirant to live out my desires, to presume nothing, to expect anything. A wanderer upon the Tantric road.

Today I must confess experiencing a certain cowardice along my chosen path. No. Chosen is not the right word. For I could no more choose the road I wander than I could choose the time and circumstances of my birth. But I can report with some accuracy on the journey itself. And cowardice (or,