Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa...and Me. Tony Cointreau
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of doubts and fanatical about being perfect. He has already suffered from several compulsive obsessions (perfection in his grooming, perfection in his schoolwork, etc.). Very fixated on his mother with a striking ambivalence.
He suffers from acute anxiety attacks (fear of going into class, fear of entering a public place) which were triggered by two emotional shocks at several weeks’ interval: an appendectomy and a first communion which seemed to awaken all his feelings of guilt.
The Rorschach test shows a basic anxiety with obsessive elements. The TAT by Murray shows an obvious castration complex.
A course of psychoanalysis appears to me to be indispensable and urgent. The parents understand the situation and are committed to having their son undergo the necessary treatment.
Back in New York, my parents’ physician, whom I knew well, had a talk with me at our home. It consisted of his patiently urging me to look into his face and say, “Hello.” Once he had accomplished that task he announced in a loud voice that I no longer needed any psychiatric help.
The subject was never brought up again.
One thing that helped me survive the following years was my love of the piano. My parents had allowed me to study piano ever since I was tall enough to sit on a bench and reach the keys. Until I was eleven, we did not have a piano, so every day when we were in New York I went to Tata’s house to practice. She was the one person who always listened to and encouraged me in my childhood dreams.
As far back as I could remember, my only desire in the world besides wanting to be perfect enough to deserve my mother’s love was to dedicate my life to one of the arts. The one hope I clung to at that young age was that I would someday have a career in show business. It might seem like a bit of a stretch, but I confided to Tata that it would either be that, or become a missionary. She understood.
When Tata had been a young woman in a convent school in Boston, she had fallen in love and eloped with an aristocratic young man from a diplomatic family in Portugal. She lived with her young husband and their baby in his family’s castle, far away from Boston and home. Tata said the family treated her with such disdain that she suffered agonies of homesickness and finally went home to visit her mother, leaving her young son in the care of her in-laws. When she returned, they had disappeared with him. Tata, who had phlebitis in her leg, traveled on crutches from one end of Europe to the other in search of them, but could not trace them because of the family’s diplomatic immunity. Ultimately she realized that these people were too rich and too powerful for her to win back her son. Therefore she lavished all her maternal love on my brother and me.
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