Medicine: Tears, Sweat & Sinuses

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Few patients undergoing psychoanalysis keep any notes of the long, soul-searching sessions. If they write anything at all about the experience, they usually fictionalize it under a pseudonym. Not so New York Timeswoman. Lucy Freeman. Like the good reporter she is, Lucy Freeman hurried from the couch to a quiet corner, where she recorded all that seemed important of what she had told the analyst and what he had told her. The literary result: a 332-page book, Fight Against Fears (Crown; $3).

Outwardly, Lucy Freeman seemed to have almost everything a girl could ask. Daughter of a prosperous New York City lawyer, she had grown up in a fine Westchester house near Long Island Sound, where she helped run her father's cabin cruiser. She went to good schools, got good marks, did well in sports, had plenty of dates."She wanted to be a journalist, and soon made the staff of the Times. At 29, she was still unmarried but that, she rationalized, was because her standards were especially high.

Fancied Neglect. Inwardly, Lucy Freeman was in a mess. She had never known more people and never felt lonelier. She was miserable and gripped by a sense of futility. Her stomach was queasy and her sinuses were blocked. After countless painful sinus treatments, a doctor suggested psychoanalysis.

She had not been going long (for an hour, three times a week) to the analyst, whom she calls John, when the patient dredging of her memory brought up a case of fancied neglect by her mother. Lucy began to cry and could not stop. She burst out: "Why did she hate me so? What did I do to her that she should hate me?" The analyst said softly: "She didn't hate you." Lucy insisted: "Yes, she did . . . And I hated her!" She finally calmed down, blew her nose, apologized for her tears. Suddenly she exclaimed: "Gosh! I can breathe."

This physical relief, the author says, was a direct result of the first breach in the wall of fear surrounding her. As she explains it, Dr. John helped her to see that she had (wrongly) felt herself unloved. That feeling had made her afraid. Besides fear, she had felt guilt — perhaps she was unworthy of being loved. Against both fear and guilt, Lucy built up a defense: anger. But she felt guilty about the anger, turned it upon herself, and punished herself with psychosomatic illness (which also served to justify self-pity).

Cause & Effect. Once she understood and accepted this current of subconscious causes and effects, her feelings of fear and guilt were relieved and her self-inflicted sinus inflammation began to clear. When practically everything had been dragged up and exposed to candid consideration, Journalist Freeman felt that she had gotten over her fear of the night, her mad rush to keep busy, her stomachaches, headaches and constipation.

It took 2½ years for her to be able to write: "Now for the first time I know what the words mean, 'to be in possession of oneself.' " It took five years to finish the analysis. Reporter Freeman's frank recital spells out much about psychoanalysis that is not widely understood; her book may help many a borderline neurotic to decide whether or not he wants to take to the couch.