Father of Lies Read online

  Fochs: Sure.

  Fesh: If I say to you, “Fochs, you’re no longer a person, you’re an object,” what object first comes to mind?

  Fochs: Well, I don’t know. A slice [sic] of paper, I guess.

  Fesh: What do you like about paper?

  Fochs: It’s flat. There’s no thickness to it. You can only see one side at a time. But you always know the other side is there, and you can always turn it over and see the other side. Unless it’s transparent paper. Then you can see both sides at once.

  Fesh: Would you be opaque or transparent paper?

  Fochs: Opaque.

  Fesh: Would it be nice to be flat and have no thickness?

  Fochs: You get rid of one dimension, down to two. Certainly, it simplifies things. But it’s not a question of nice: it’s just the way paper is. It can’t help it.

  Fesh: What needs to be simplified?

  Fochs: I don’t know, ask the paper.

  Fesh: What wouldn’t you like about being paper?

  Fochs: What don’t I like? I don’t know, really. I can’t think of anything. Paper is pretty much nothing but paper; everything it must be, nothing further.

  Fesh: You can write on paper.

  Fochs: Yes, and you can erase what is written.

  Fesh: Unless it’s written in pen.

  Fochs: I always write in pen. Then you have to use white-out.

  Fesh: What’s written on the other side?

  Fochs: What?

  Fesh: If you’re a piece of paper, what’s written on your other side?

  Fochs: How should I know? If it’s on the other side, I can’t see it, can I? Anyway, I’m not a piece of paper at all, am I.*

  Initially I believed the object-identification exercise’s primary value had been as an exercise in self-identification and as an icebreaker. It raised issues that would surface again, most often in disguised form, in the later sessions—i.e., Fochs’s sense of self-disconnection (two sides, one cannot see the other), his mistrust of interior experience (symbolized by his desire for a lack of interior space, a flatness without thickness), and his empirical conception of the self as largely created by external forces (writing on paper), a notion that the Church does not share.

  The object-identification exercise also gave him a language with which to broach the subject of his disturbing thoughts.

  Disturbing Thoughts

  Once he was comfortable with me, Fochs himself raised the issue of his “disturbing thoughts.” When I asked if he heard voices, he hesitated but said no, just “loud thoughts.”

  Fochs admitted these had to do with children.

  “A child?”

  “Lots of children.”

  “In what way?”

  “In the thoughts, you might say it is as if I am writing on them.”

  “On them?”

  “They have no clothing. I don’t know what has become of their clothing.”

  “Writing on their skin?”

  “Yes. My mouth is dry and I know it is wrong to do but I am doing it anyway.”

  “What are you writing?”

  “Sometimes I am writing God’s name. Most often I am writing my own.”

  He would at this time go no further. However, the suggestion was already present that these thoughts tended toward a pedophilic or pederastic nature, writing one’s own name on the body of a child being as well a kind of indication or claim of ownership.

  Fochs, on the grounds of the little he had told me, wanted me to “cure him.” Yet he at first rejected my suggestion that if we were to go further, he would have to discuss the issue of the thoughts further and be honest about them. I told him that it was wrong to think if he arrested his thoughts on children, he would be cured. What was needed, I suggested, was a determination of what lay behind his thoughts, what had caused them to occur. Otherwise, though they might vanish momentarily, they would repeatedly resurface in different forms. He was somewhat impatient with this suggestion.

  When I asked Fochs, in a later session, if he had thoughts written on his own body, he claimed there had been things written there, but he had erased them all. In the same session, he was finally willing to admit that the thoughts had been of a sexual nature, directed toward children.

  “I would never act on such thoughts, mind you,” he said. “I would never even tell people about them.”

  “You’ve told them to me.”

  “Sure,” he said, smiling, “but you’re not a person: you’re a therapist.”

  Draw-a-Person (DAP Figures) Results

  Fochs’s first figure consisted of a profile of a head, small and to the lower left of the page. The head had a thick neck, a collar, and the beginnings of a tie. The figure was apparently male, simple and quickly done, but in bold strokes, the hair drawn as eight straight horizontal lines, as if blowing in a direction opposite of where the head faced. The mouth was a simple line which split the L-shaped angle of the front of the face and the chin. The lines of the face did not quite connect. The eye was lidless and incomplete. The tie and the shirt collar, however, were very carefully drawn. There was no shading, except for the knot of the tie, which was carefully darkened.

  DAP interpreters have suggested that lack of body may be indicative of someone who has difficulty dealing with feelings or who favors the intellect over feeling. The care and detail used in drawing the collar and tie maximizes its importance in relation to the rest of the figure. The smallness of the figure and its placement low on the page can be read as an indication of insecurity. That the figure was drawn looking to the side rather than straight ahead might be indicative of Fochs self-identifying with this picture less than with the picture that follows.

  The second figure Fochs drew was a complete body, filling the entire page, looking directly forward, one eye higher than the other. The eyes and the nose were the only clear portions of the figure. The mouth was extremely distorted. There seemed to be no clothing or shoes. The figure itself was a mess of scrawled and overlapped lines, the body not clearly male or female, hands and feet undifferentiated, the boundaries of the figure fluid and made by suggestion from the disjoined scrawls rather than clearly delineated, the figure gapped and porous.

  This second figure is perhaps most significantly interpreted in relation to the first drawing. In the first drawing, Fochs used bold strokes and lines to draw the head of the figure, yet all these terminated in the carefully drawn collar and tie. This might be read as symbolizing the way in which Fochs is controlled by his Church. The second figure, on the other hand, had broken out of that control, had a fuzziness that might be seen as representing freedom—it was not even clear that it was wearing clothing—and perhaps was Fochs’s wish-fulfillment representation of himself.

  When I asked him about the sex of the figures, he indicated both were male, despite the fact that in asking him to draw a second figure I had requested he draw a person of a gender different from the first drawing’s figure. His fixation on males is perhaps due to his acceptance of the rigid and traditional gender roles taught by the Bloodite faith, which leads often to a devaluation of women.

  “Which figure do you like better?”

  He pointed to the second figure.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a better drawing. It’s more artistic.”

  “What else do you like about it?”

  “That it’s drawn better.”

  “What does it make you think of?”

  “It reminds me of someone in my dream.”

  Religious Inadequacy

  Fochs had feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness, resulting at least in part from his church-related duties as a provost. Indeed, both his sleep disturbance and his disturbing thoughts and dreams did not begin until shortly after he was asked to be the provost.

  As he became more comfortable with me, he expressed his doubts about his role in the Church. He declared to me that he was “not worthy,” that he “had been called to serve as provost against God’s better judgment,” that
“God had allowed the Church to make a mistake.” We discussed whether he had any legitimate grounds to feel unworthy, but from the information he gave me, it seemed that he was more committed and faithful than most members of the Church. Indeed, perhaps too committed: he would feel guilty if he went a day without reading in his Scriptures or if he missed a prayer. He had maintained an idealized view of church leaders, believing them to be more than mortal. He, in his own mind, didn’t meet the ideal. There were the “thoughts on children” as well, as he had taken to calling them. He was convinced that “sins of thought” were nearly as bad as sins of action, and that it was a short distance from one to another.

  In the course of his therapy, I tried to work against Fochs’s hyper-sensitivity and his delusion-based guilt and lead him to a more productive understanding of his relation to himself and to the Church. Fochs’s guilt about religious issues seemed tied to his father’s strong commitment to the Church, and the sense that Fochs’s father and mother both perhaps unconsciously gave him that religion should come before all else. Indeed, Fochs’s strongest memories of his father were related to his father’s involvement in the Church.

  As a youth, Fochs was made to believe that only the most worthy men would be asked to be provosts. He had his father held up to him constantly as an example of someone who lived an ideal life, and he not only looked up to his father but saw him as perfect. He never moved beyond an idealized image of his father. He had frequently worried that he would not measure up, but had gradually suppressed these fears. However, his anxiety was reawakened when he found himself in the church position he associated with his father (when he found himself in essence playing his father’s role), in his father’s place as a provost but still human, with flaws and faults, and with thoughts that he believed his father never could have had. Since all worthy Bloodite males receive some form of the priesthood, and since a great emphasis is placed on exercising one’s priesthood worthily, uncertainty about one’s priesthood or one’s role in the Church may precipitate doubts about personal identity.

  Fochs was extremely reluctant to trace his difficulties back to the archaic idealized image of his father that he had objectified and internalized as a child. He continued to insist on the accuracy of that internalized object, proved unwilling to acknowledge his father as a real external being, as a nonidealized person with faults and flaws. He continued to insist that his father had been perfect.

  Fochs vs. Provost

  Fochs liked to think of his difficulties as originating at the moment he was called to be provost over a sizable congregation. He claimed to have had no feelings of unworthiness until this time, though everything he revealed about his personal history and all he admitted to me about his relationship with his parents, his father in particular, suggested that a sense of inadequacy had been firmly entrenched early in life. His being asked to be a provost merely brought to the surface what he had been troubled by most of his life. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, Fochs repeatedly insisted he had had “high self-esteem” until he became a provost. He said he shouldn’t have been assigned to be provost. He believed the area rector who presided over the local area had given him the assignment not because of his merits but because he wanted something done and knew Fochs would do it.

  In the interview in which the assignment of provost was extended, the area rector asked Fochs no questions about his moral worthiness and Fochs volunteered nothing about himself. The area rector told Fochs that he needed someone who would be completely obedient, and when Fochs expressed his willingness to be so, he extended the assignment to him. Paradoxically, because the area rector did not question him about his moral worthiness, Fochs saw this as evidence that he must be unworthy. Since the area rector also talked a great deal about a woman in Fochs’s congregation whom he said must be excommunicated, Fochs believed he had been made provost largely because the area rector knew he would follow orders and excommunicate the woman. The current provost had refused to excommunicate her. He “didn’t know his duty,” the area rector told him. The area rector knew, he said, that Fochs would “follow orders.”

  The individual in question was a mother of six, a faithful and involved member of the Church. The area rector wanted her excommunicated because she had publicly written what Fochs called “the unthinkable opinion” that the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Godhead, might be female.

  “You didn’t want to excommunicate her?” I asked.

  “But I did,” he said. “This woman was a heretic.”

  “How did you know she was a heretic?”

  “The area rector told me she was.”

  “What made you believe him?”

  “He was a man of God. He was the area rector, and he was speaking in his official capacity as a church leader,” Fochs said. “And an apostolic elder told him. Of course I believed him.”

  Fochs believed that church authorities would never lead him astray. He believed that whatever a church leader says, speaking in his official capacity, was new scripture and must be immediately obeyed. Even if a church leader were to ask him to do something “contrary to decency,” he would be blessed for following him and doing it, even if he knew it was wrong.

  Yet, at the same time, Fochs had convinced himself that he had been assigned to a position that he was hardly worthy to hold. He had accepted the position of provost because he thought it was better to be obedient than to question the area rector’s decision and also because he was sure that God needed him to excommunicate the “heretic.” He convinced himself that as soon as the woman was excommunicated and his task was done, someone else would be put in his place.

  But after the woman was excommunicated, they did not release him. He found himself in a difficult position: his awareness of himself and his own flaws would not fit the image of church leaders that he had idealized. Either he had to believe that he was unworthy and had been called in error (which would mean severely questioning the infallibility of his leaders) or he had to believe he was worthy, despite the reservations he had about himself because of the archaic idealized image of his religious father.

  Faced with this dilemma, Fochs chose to believe both. On the one hand, as a provost, he saw himself as worthy, but he was unable to justify in this context the thoughts he seemed to be having as Fochs. As Fochs, he was guilty. As provost, he remained innocent. The result was a partitioning of the self, which was manifested through disturbing thoughts, through sleepwalking, through speaking in an odd voice while asleep, and through his “disturbing dreams.”

  Provisional Diagnosis

  DSM-IV criteria related to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DSM-III, Multiple Personality) were not met by Fochs, though when I asked Fochs if he ever felt like there was another person with a different name inside of him, he hesitated for some time. Instead of looking at me, he seemed to be looking past me. Then he responded:

  “Inside of me? With a name?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No, there’s nobody like that inside me.”

  “Have you ever had any kind of supernatural experience?”

  “Supernatural, no. I’ve had a lot of religious experiences.”

  “What sorts of religious experiences?”

  “Faith-promoting experiences. Sometimes I can feel Christ so strong it’s almost like he’s present.”

  “Have you ever felt possessed?”

  “Possessed? By a demon?”

  “Or by someone else, either good or bad.”

  “Sometimes I let Jesus take charge.”

  “What happens when Jesus takes charge?”

  “Maybe take charge isn’t the right phrase. Sometimes I have these thoughts. When I have them, I just feel that I know what Christ wants me to do, so I do it.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Just things.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Nothing special, really. Just everyday things.”

  “Are these thoughts voices?”


  “No. Just loud thoughts.”

  Because of the Bloodite belief in the possibility of personal communion with God, these beliefs were not alarming or unusual in and of themselves. Interesting, though, was Fochs resorting to approximate answers to avoid specifying the thoughts. His sense of hearing and knowing what Christ wants, his sleep disorders, and his feelings of worthlessness, all seem to be tied to his sense of himself in relation to the Church on one hand and to his father as a church leader on the other hand (the first symptom as a desire to be led in his duty as a church leader, the second symptom as a kind of reaction to his church duty—the expression of a long-denied aspect of his personality—the third symptom as again an acknowledgment of the gap between himself as a person and his formalized idea of what a provost is and what his father was).

  With this in mind, I made a provisional diagnosis of Dissociative Order NOS, with Axis II: Parasomnia.

  Pecking Order

  Fochs’s internal fissure found means of expression and consequently solidification when Fochs was “encouraged” to excommunicate the heretic. Indeed, in our conversations, it became clear that despite his religious reservations about her, he empathized with her in a way that made it almost seem for him that he occupied both sides of the church court, that he was both the “Judge in Zion” and the sinner to be cast out (Provost vs. Fochs).

  For Fochs, the woman was a means of expressing what he had repressed—a catalyst his mind used to perform its operations. It was clear from how he spoke about her that he hardly considered her to be a person in her own right. His actions in her church court (at least as he reported them to me) seem to suggest this: more than anything else he seems to have been prosecuting himself, trying in essence, by excommunicating her, to excise what were the negative parts of his soul. The woman, the reality of her suffering, were neither acknowledged nor understood.

  Despite his surface kindness and civil demeanor, Fochs seems to acknowledge people only rarely as people per se—more often they are counters in a patriarchal system, to be recognized by their titles, by their rank in the Church. Fochs is the same way with his family, referring most often in our sessions to his wife as “my wife” and his daughters as “my youngest” and “my eldest.” Only his boys, the twins, are consistently referred to by Fochs by name, perhaps because they, as males, will one day hold the priesthood.