Jane was afraid Topekans would all be members of the John Birch Society or something, but we were treated with curiosity rather than suspicion by the locals, and even though I was a Jewish long-haired hippie from New York, I was good at drawing people out. I’d strike up a conversation with the neighbor about to pull the starter rope on his mower or the roofer who came to do some patchwork or an old-timer at a lunch counter and we’d end up talking about the antiwar movement or women’s liberation; the key was to agree to disagree so respectfully that your interlocutor felt despite himself honored enough to reconsider whomever he had thought of as the enemy. (This was before the Reverend Fred Phelps of Westboro Church launched his ugly crusade, standing on street corners with his family and a few parishioners, holding picket signs that read GOD HATES FAGS, making Topeka world-famous for homophobia.) This kind of thing sickened my radical brother—“You’re great at making fascists feel heard”—but it was what my practice as a therapist was based on, finding a way to get people, especially reticent Midwestern boys and men, to talk.
I was successful at the Foundation because I lacked ambition: I was a conscientious therapist, but had zero interest in ascending the ranks, wanted no power over my colleagues or fame in the field, and this meant, in an institution with its share of intrigue, that I made no enemies. My dissertation was long since filed—the findings fascinating, my analysis dialed in—and I had no real desire to publish, which meant that, unlike Jane, I never had to publicly offend partisans of this or that theoretical persuasion. As a result, I was one of the few people who got along equally well with everybody in the unspoken Foundation hierarchy: psychiatrists (“real doctors”) and analysts at the top, followed by us psychologists, who were above social workers; then came the nurses and activity therapists: art, music, exercise.
I was well liked and, for reasons I never entirely understood, Thomas Attison loved me, summoning me on one pretext or another to his large office lined with first editions and various antiquarian books. (There was rumored to be a copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy bound in human skin.) Really he wanted to talk about movies. I think Dr. Tom, as everyone called him, found in me a nonthreatening representative of a threatening counterculture that both drew on and attacked the canons of psychiatry. I was among the students who stormed the dean’s office at Columbia in ’68, but I wasn’t, he told me, “one of these kids who had to act out an oedipal drama with every figure of authority.” We’d talk about Sturges or Hitchcock (Spellbound was his favorite; “Did you know Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman had an affair on set?”), and our conversations would drift into Dr. Tom’s reminiscences, his Kansan pronunciations flattened further by the mild facial paralysis that led him to speak largely out of the left side of his mouth.
I knew the institutional talking points—how in 1919 Dr. Tom had returned to Topeka after studying neuropsychology at Harvard to open a family clinic with his physician father, something like a little Mayo Clinic for the mind; how his younger brother, David, joined them in 1925, and would increasingly oversee daily operations as Tom gained fame through his publications; how waves of analyst émigrés arrived as a result of the catastrophe in Europe; how meeting Freud in ’39—“despite his being an arrogant son of a bitch”—was pivotal for his and his institution’s orientation; how the Foundation grew over the years from a small single sanitarium into a powerhouse of milieu therapy and training. But I was also treated to aspects of early personal history that Dr. Tom didn’t widely volunteer: “You know my brother is ‘Marie’ on his birth certificate; Mother was desperate for a girl; she put him in dresses for years.” Did Dr. Tom really once tell me, apropos of nothing, how much he resented that his mother forced him to undergo frequent enemas as a child?
Everyone was aware of the ongoing struggle between the Attison brothers; Dr. Tom, while retaining some influence over the board and brand, was, by the time we got there, largely a figurehead. And there were the familiar transgressions—staff sleeping with each other (Dr. Tom himself divorced his first wife for a colleague), minor embezzlement, and so on; Dr. Tom told me little in this regard that I hadn’t heard from others. More scandalous than the scandals were the norms, especially the practice of staff undergoing analysis with their senior colleagues, thereby assuring that boundaries were always blurred, that transference would be a fact or a suspicion, that a meeting could never only be about its ostensible subject (new state-mandated diagnostic insurance forms) but was also inevitably about repressed drives and aggression (what did Dr. Gibson’s failure to bring enough copies of the form express about her feelings toward the group?). And who wouldn’t think twice about challenging a superior to whom you’d described anxiety dreams (mine at the time was laughing uncontrollably at a suicidal patient), with whom you’d probed the origins of your sense of sexual inadequacy? The Foundation’s setting on the northwest edge of Topeka in conditions, depending on your temperament, backward or bucolic, only made the institution more total; there was no big city into which you could flee by carriage or dissolve your workday, your contradictions.
Being Dr. Tom’s confidant still had its advantages; while the Foundation was big—the campus consisted of more than twenty buildings, mainly red brick; there were over a thousand employees—it had echoes of a family business in which the affection of the patriarch carried weight. For me this meant that, after we joined the permanent staff, I was able to start, with Dr. Tom’s support, a tiny “film and video department”—that is, me and a part-time secretary—with the stated purpose of investigating and eventually producing instructional films about therapeutic topics and techniques.
Initially this was a sliver of my work; my hours were devoted to patients, primarily teenage boys. I saw some adolescents (and occasionally their parents) from the Topeka community on an outpatient basis and had several hospitalized patients in my caseload. Still, I was grateful for any opportunity to link film with the Foundation; it gave me an excuse to purchase some equipment on their dime, to think of movies as part of my profession, not just as a hobby. (The joke at home was that, even if I was just getting stoned and watching Bonanza reruns on our new Zenith, I was conducting “research.”)
But increasingly I saw real therapeutic value in my World Famous Film and Video Department. I started to curate screenings on the Foundation campus. Milieu therapy was based on the notion that patients and staff should mix, collaborate on treatment; we all ate in the cafeteria together, for example, though at different tables (small exhibitions of patients’ paintings—sunsets, still lifes, winter scenes—were displayed on the walls); younger staff and patients might play basketball together at the gym, both groups almost comically careful not to foul; the senior staff might get their hair cut at the barbershop really intended for inpatients, in order to demonstrate how seriously they took this notion of integration; Dr. Tom was always joking in front of patients about how “Dr. Beatnik” could use a trim. (The Foundation—renowned, comparatively affordable, far away from the coasts—attracted an unusual resident population. As postdocs, we’d been tasked with administering the Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test to new patients; in my first week, I evaluated a star of daytime television, a peripheral member of the Qatari royal family, and a Vietnam vet who turned out to live a couple of blocks from us on Woodlawn.) My “festivals”—the first one showed movies set in Kansas; the obligatory Wizard of Oz, Gunfight in Abilene, the more recent Paper Moon—were mainly attended by patients, but some staff would trickle in and out; I can see Dr. Tom’s white hair glowing softly in the front row for The Rainmaker.