Seven Days in Rio. Francis Levy

and Viennese analysts who had been refugees from the Nazis settled in Manhattan, which sports as many psychoanalytic institutes as England has soccer teams. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute is the Manchester United of the lot. Growing up in Manhattan in a family with aspirations to be culturally au courant , I amassed statistics about psychoanalytic stars like A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Ernst Kris, and Phyllis Greenacre the way some kids memorized the batting averages of Joe Dimaggio, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. My favorite was the French analyst Janine Chasseguet-smirgel, author of the tome Creativity and Perversion. She was the equivalent of an excellent minor league player, to the extent that her work was only known to the relatively small coterie who collected psychoanalytic memorabilia.

      China was carrying one of those quart bottles of Volvic water, which she gulped lasciviously as she entered the central atrium of the hotel. I almost followed her, thinking I might find her turning tricks like so many of the other inhabitants of Rio. I was sure that China was a very good therapist. She was attentive and empathetic, but I was also certain that she could equal if not better her reputation by changing her name to Tiffany and adopting the life of a whore. She had the looks, and every bone in my body told me she had the talent.

      Our parting had felt a little like the last scene of Casablanca. There was no plane waiting to take her away from me, there was no heroic resistance leader standing between us, no war, and I wasn’t a hardened American expatriate named Rick. Yet I felt I could hear the strains of “As Time Goes By” playing on the piano in some beat-up North African café. China—the very name created a frisson.

      When would I ever see my China again? It didn’t take long to answer the question, as she walked right back into the auditorium, swigging from an even larger bottle of water. I still hadn’t decided what my approach was going to be. If I took it for free, we would be in a real relationship, where raw emotion was the currency. And if I became China’s patient, I would have to put her in the position of employing the transference in an unethical manner. I felt I needed a therapist just to work out the mess I’d gotten myself into.

      Unfortunately, I was again deviating from my plan. I was well into my second day in Rio without having enjoyed the abundance that was supposed to be everywhere, if I was to believe the sex tourism guides and online reviews of Rio nightlife. When I had first considered taking my vacation in Rio, I had simply Googled “Rio + prostitution.” The sheer number of results, along with the four-star ratings and exuberant descriptions, had played a large role in my booking a flight.

      But all was not lost. Even though I hadn’t yet gotten what I came for, the psychoanalytic conference being held at the hotel was a welcome, frequently titillating diversion. I had a lump in my throat as I read the notices for the afternoon panels: “The Oldest Profession: the Neuro-Anatomy of Streetwalking” and “Working Girls: Parallels in Phone Sex and Telephone Analysis.”

      Now is probably as good a time as any to talk about how a nice Jewish boy like me came to spend most of his adult life with prostitutes. It was really very simple. From an early age, I knew there was something wrong with me. I didn’t have any friends, and no girls seemed to like me. But the sluttiest girl in my high school class, Janet Borges, agreed to go to the senior prom with me. With thick lips, smudged from countless make-out sessions, and huge tits, she was crudely sexy. She always wore a short cheerleader skirt with no underpants, even though she wasn’t a cheerleader. Most of the members of the school’s varsity football team had fucked her, and no one considered her respectable prom material. I purchased the usual corsage, which was the price I had to pay for my first fuck in life.

      We started to see each other the summer of my senior year, before I started college, and one night I jokingly offered her money for sex, which she unjokingly took, saying, “I never thought you would ask.” Besides the fact that our sex, which had been tentative up until then, took off into a whole new stratosphere, it was the beginning of her career as whore and mine as a john.

      By my freshman year in college, Janet was fully set up in the business, and so successful that I realized my heart would be broken unless I started to play the field and see other whores. My first analysis in my twenties had enabled me to break with my mother. My father was a business type, and my mother and I had a confidant relationship in which she talked to me about things that my father wasn’t interested in, like emotions and art. The analysis had gotten me to the point of addressing my early inclination to pay for sex. Had I continued, I might have been able to form a relationship with a woman that wasn’t a monetary transaction. I had made the transition from the mother/confidant to the mother/whore figure, which was a great leap, but I was aware there were other feelings toward women that had yet to be added to the palette.

      I was an ambitious young man, and shortly after I graduated from college I had already drummed up enough business to support a Midtown accountancy office manned by a staff of loyal employees. Who had the time or the money to see an analyst four days a week? But in the end, this is precisely what I would do, as I returned to analysis repeatedly over the years. However, the Rio conference was enabling me to view analysis from a different perspective. I had always been limited to the patient’s point of view, which is mostly prone. But here I was seeing analysts eye-to-eye, watching them as they exchanged valuable insights with each other. I was seeing the kind of people they really were.

      If I had met China in a professional situation, in which she demonstrated analytic neutrality, she would simply have been a very good-looking Asian piece of ass. At worst, I might have tried to look up her skirt during my initial intake. I would have stared at her platform heels and wondered to myself what kind of an analyst wears shoes like that? I probably would have thought something like I bet she’s a really good fuck. I might even have communicated these thoughts to her in the course of a session, and we would have dealt with it as part of the transference.

      My last analyst, Sam Johnson, was a short man who had such thick stubble that he always looked unshaven, though he was very proper. He wore industrial grade, rubber-soled shoes, blue blazers and gray pants, and rarely said anything. I frequently communicated to him my perception that he was a virgin whom no woman would ever go near. I discovered on the Internet that he was married and had children, but I still had fantasies about his private life. My previous analytic work had gotten me used to indulging in fantasy and free-association, even when I wasn’t in treatment. For instance, I was sure that even if Victor the concierge seemed like a normal male, he was a secret cross-dresser who hid his penis between his legs when he was putting on women’s panties.

      But getting back to China, I had gone so far as to imagine the moment in our first consultation when she would suggest I move to the couch. Was I to take this as an invitation to classic Freudian analysis, or to sex? Maybe her chaise longue was little more than a proverbial casting couch.

      My reverie about China was interrupted when I saw Dr. Sunshine return to the auditorium. He was surrounded by a coterie of followers, bearded men in wool suits who looked like they had stepped out of turn-of-the-century Vienna and could easily have been members of Freud’s inner circle. I even overheard some conversations in what sounded like German, though many New York analysts talk so quickly and enigmatically that it is often difficult to tell what language they’re speaking. I wanted to introduce myself to Sunshine, but as he walked by I had a Tourettic moment, emitting a muffled, involuntary cry of “Daddy!”

      It turned out that Sunshine was a charismatic and controversial figure whose attempts to broaden the audience for Freud’s insights had included showing ’70s porn films, with famous stars like John Holmes, Harry Reems, and Linda Lovelace, as illustrations of his theories of narcissism and idealization. Sunshine had been brought up in an orthodox Jewish family in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. His parents had actually been members of the Satmar sect, led by Moses Teitelbaum and his feuding sons, Aaron and Zalman. Sunshine was not a practicing Jew, but he was no stranger to feuds. The once close relationship with his student David Moldauer had fractured over the fundamental aim and purpose of using pornographic films to illustrate his theories, mirroring the famous split between Freud and his Aryan disciple, Jung. (Sunshine’s famous maxim, “We aim to please, will you aim too, please?” displayed above the toilet in his office bathroom, was another bone of contention between the two men).

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