You Were Right
When we get to a certain age, we all have something to confess. My name is Rudolph, and I’m 89. I worked as a psychologist in my private practice for 54 years, and I had hundreds of clients. For most of them, the treatment was successful. That’s what I’m most proud of, now that I’m facing the end of the road. But there was one case that, unfortunately, didn’t go well. And I have to say it: Andy, you were right.
Andy was one of my first cases. He stepped into my office for the first time in 1962, when I was still learning the craft. You know what I’m talking about: all those things that make for a great professional and which they don’t teach you in college. Andy was a young boy, not yet twenty. And he had a problem, which back then was a big deal.
Andy had peculiar tastes. He liked women, of course (we were light years away from sexual diversity), but what he wanted to do with them was not the usual thing. When he was a teenager, he had seen some pictures his father had brought from Japan after the war. Neither of us knew it then, but what he had seen was a Shibari scene.
He was a healthy young man, and he was easily aroused by women scantily dressed or dancing suggestively. But what these pictures did to him was something he had never experienced before.
Since he watched them, he had looked for the opportunity to put them into practice. But in 1962, in America, no decent young woman was willing to play bottom in a bondage scene. He’d had a terrible experience with his last girlfriend, the daughter of one of her father’s friends, whom everyone was expecting he would marry. And that’s why he was in my office.
Remember, that was many years ago. So, I tried to convince him that what he wanted was wrong, and that he should expel those desires from his psyche, if he wanted to ever recover peace. I “cured” Andy. He married a normal woman and led a normal life with her. Then, one fine day, he shot himself in the head.
Now, so many years later, I see that he was right. He was entitled to experience sexuality according to his own wishes.
You were right, and I couldn’t see it. Forgive me.
