Remarkable Psychotherapeutic Experiences:
A Client's Report
Introduction

This is one client's report of three psychotherapeutic experiences that I had between 1973 and 1982, experiences that changed my life. It begins in lost and ends in found.

In 1970 I was thirty years old. My life had fallen apart. My wife and I had divorced. She got custody of our daughter. I lost my job. I became largely idle. I had irritable bowel and recurrent urinary infections. Stuff was not coming out right.

From 1970 to 1972 I was treading water. I moved from Massachusetts to Long Island. I got a new teaching job. I was involved with a couple of women. I lived communally—as was more customary during that time than it is now.

One evening in 1972 two of the communards had a dispute. We had a house meeting to deal with it. The meeting was a fiasco. We knew little about dealing with real conflict.

During the dispute something arrested my attention. A Puerto Rican woman asked the combatants if they could feel their underlying love for each other and interact from that place.

The intervention did no immediate good. But I was transfixed by both what she said and how she said it—with presence and passion. I asked her later where that intervention had come from. She told me she was in therapy with Leida Berg, M.D., a Park Avenue psychiatrist. I took Dr. Berg's name and phone number.

That summer one of the women from the house and I moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village. In April, 1973 I called Leida for an appointment. The next part of my life started then.