Beauty and the Beast (ALON GRATCH)

Once upon a time, there lived a prince who was spoiled and selfish. On a winter night, he turned away an old woman who had asked for shelter. The woman, who was really a powerful enchantress, changed the prince into a hideous Beast and cast a spell on all who dwelt in his castle. She left behind an enchanted mirror and a rose that would bloom until his twenty-first year. If the prince had never been loved by the time the last rose petal fell, he was doomed to remain a beast forever.

In my office sit many such male beasts. Well beyond their twenty-first year they nevertheless are still waiting to be loved unconditionally by a perfect blond. Of course, in reality these men are not at all hideous. They might be a bit short or thin or balding. Or they might be extremely good-looking, for that matter. But because they feel beastly they are convinced they can only be cured by the unconditional love of a beauty.

Unfortunately, unlike the fairy tale, no Belle ever shows up. The reason is that since they can only fall in love with appearance, the person under the blond mask does not feel loved by them and therefore can never love them. So they are doomed to live in a constant state of punishment — by a taste of their own medicine. They live and die for beauty.

Of course, these men are perfectly capable of metamorphosing themselves back into a prince. They do that in the course of dating when attempting to date a nice, decent woman whom they end up judging and dismissing as the beast incarnate. As we saw in the second chapter, this metamorphosis involves the projection of feelings of shame onto the other person. There is, in fact, an intimate connection between narcissism and shame: grandiosity is essentially a flight from the experience of shame. The other thing we saw in that chapter as well as in this one is that for men, looking good is not necessarily the same as being good-looking. More likely, it’s having a woman who’s good-looking, and a good-looking job. Let’s remember that as we take a good look at several forms of transformational beasts.

One patient, a married man in his late thirties and the father of two small children, came to therapy because he was unhappy in his work as well as in his marriage. He was a periodontist, working as a partner in a group practice he had bought into several years earlier. He was making good money but was tortured by the constant feeling that he wasn’t as successful as he could have been. His partner, he said, was not ambitious and was reluctant to upgrade equipment and to keep up with progressive treatment techniques. Also, the office was in an old, unattractive building in a low-middle-class area, and most of his patients couldn’t afford the more sophisticated and lucrative treatments he was trying to push.

At home, a similar picture emerged. He and his wife had a close relationship with a rather open dialogue. She was a dental hygienist and an aspiring opera singer. She didn’t make a lot of money but she loved working with people and enjoyed her work. His children, like all kids, added both joy and stress to his life. But what really bothered him was a nagging sense that his wife was just not the right person for him. She didn’t have exactly the same sense of humor and she didn’t share his interest in traveling. He was also not as attracted to her as to some of the women he would see in the street or in the office. “A prince,” I said to myself upon hearing this, preparing to look for signs of beasthood. But I didn’t have to look very hard — it was all over the place in the previous chapter of his work and love life. Before buying into his practice, the patient had worked as a salaried periodontist in Rockfeller Center in a technologically sophisticated, progressive group with a wealthy patient population and beautiful offices. But the patient was quite miserable there. Not only did his boss make it clear to him that he would never become a partner, but he was also an arrogant, hostile prick who dominated and manipulated the patient with his sarcastic humor and infantalizing put-downs. Nevertheless, the patient stayed in this job for more than ten years.

He finally couldn’t take it anymore, so he quit without having another job and began to look for an opportunity to buy into a practice — which eventually led him to where he was today. Quitting that job also corresponded with an important event in his personal life — the breakup of his first marriage. From his description now it seemed that his first wife was everything his second wasn’t — she had a great sense of humor, she was a successful lawyer, and he was passionately attracted to her without reservation or ambivalence. Except for three things — details, details — her sense of humor was hostile toward him (he didn’t care), she had cheated on him (he suspected but managed to deny it), and she ultimately left him for another man (he was devastated by that). So in his attempt to regulate his self-esteem, this patient went from being treated like an unlovable beast to becoming a spoiled prince. With the first job and wife he tried to feel good about himself by choosing a successful and beautiful environment — but that only highlighted his feelings of inadequacy. With the second job and wife he tried to do it by choosing a lesser environment so that he could feel better about himself by comparison — which also backfired. So in fact, in both chapters of his life the patient did the same thing — he projected a part of himself onto the environment in a doomed effort to find an external solution to an internal problem. If you conclude from this that the patient’s ideal environment would have been somewhere in between the two extremes, you may or may not be right, but you still don’t get the point. The point is that for this patient — as it is to varying degrees for everyone — the attractiveness of the environment was all in the eyes of the self-involved beholder.

This patient needed to downgrade and upgrade himself, not his environment. He needed to integrate the prince and the beast inside of him into a realistic sense of a good enough self-worth before he could see who his wife and job actually were — free of his narcissistic projections. Then and only then could he figure out if they were environmentally correct for him. In this case, after a long therapeutic process, the patient did figure it out. When he began to accept his limitations and enjoy his celebrations, the chips fell down as follows: the job was out and externally upgraded and the wife was in, internally upgraded.

As we saw in the second chapter many women are familiar with the way in which men critically project their own sense of inadequacy onto them. As in the case of the patient above, these men’s attempts to feel better about themselves by “downgrading” their spouses or girlfriends only backfire, because they end up feeling downgraded by reflection. What I’ve found clinically interesting over the years is that these downgraded men compensate for their low self-esteem at nighttime, with heroic dreams. One such critical husband was lowered from a helicopter to save his wife from a fire in her office building, while another conducted an amazing emergency surgery to save his child from choking.

Of course such dreams have individualized meanings as well. For example, one man who was harshly critical of his wife’s emotional vulnerability had a dream in which he was able to fly. But he flew, mind you, in order to escape from a disgusting pig who was chasing him and digging his pink, phallic (the patient’s, not my description) nose into his back. The patient related the dream to a traumatic childhood experience in which another boy repeatedly induced him to perform oral sex on him. So the dream showed how the patient’s character attempted to cope with the terrible shame he felt about this humiliating childhood experience. To escape feminization, the patient had to be capable of flying, that is, he had to develop a fantastical, grandiose sense of masculinity. And this defensive masculinity was the same place from which he rejected his own feminine vulnerability and projected it onto his wife.

In the second chapter I discussed “the checklist,” men’s tendency to project shame onto women in dating situations. Clearly, that discussion could be repeated here, in examining the transformation of undesirable, internal parts of the self into external environments. I’ll spare you the repetition, but I’d like to mention a related transformational syndrome which I personally find particularly heartbreaking to work with. In this syndrome, the man is genuinely looking to fall in love and commit to a lifelong partnership. But time and again, after he falls in love with a woman who seems to be absolutely right, he begins to have doubts. Something about the woman bothers him — it can be something small like big thighs or something…small like lack of interest in music. But whatever it is, though it didn’t really bother him at first, now that he is focused on it, it gets bigger and bigger in his mind until, in the words of one patient, “it eats away at whatever is good in the relationship.”

I find this painful to watch because typically the patient goes through this experience at least twice, each time genuinely believing — and often even convincing his skeptical therapist — that he has found true happiness. His disappointment in his own capacity to love, when his Belle is once again transformed into a beast, is anything if not poignant. Of course, there is always an illusional element to falling in love, the illusion being that feeling loved by the other person — who’s temporarily imbued with unparalleled specialness by our own idealizing love for her — will keep us feeling good about ourselves forever.

But when the person’s entire sense of self is invested in the illusion, no matter how genuine or intelligent he is, when it dissipates there’s no there there, and love is gone as swiftly as it came. Now the most painful experience of this syndrome comes — as is often the case in psychotherapy and in life — just before the healing phase, when the patient realizes that there was nothing wrong with any of the women he (thought he) loved — he probably could have been happy with all of them. This is painful not only because of the loss of love and opportunities, but also because of the realistic sense of internal damage that the person is left with — he’s the one with the problem, not them. The silver lining, though, is that it’s precisely this painful realization that can launch this man on a therapeutic trajectory at the end of which he may come to see that beasts and beauties are for the birds — or for fairy tales.

If Men Could Talk

Alon Gratch