Behind the Lens, Inside the Mind. The Life of Frederick Eberstadt.
Part 4: A new start
It took about three months after he started seeing Dr. Jeffrey Young for Eberstadt to become a functioning person again.
He remained in therapy for about two years. By then, four long years had passed since he became engulfed by depression, a very painful period during which he did very little work or anything at all. But at this point, he finally felt he was back on track and he and Young agreed therapy had reached its goal.
Still, the experience with depression and his recovery touched Eberstadt deeply, to the point that an intent had been brewing inside him for a while, which led him to ask one last question to his doctor: If he obtained a therapist license, would Young be willing to let him work at his clinic?
It was clear to Young that Eberstadt was an extremely sensitive person. “His friends talked to him about their own depression,” he said. And it seemed this was not an aspect of his personality that developed with therapy. It had been part of him since at least his fashion photography days. “My mother told me that especially male models came to him with their love problems,” recalls Fernanda, his daughter. “He became their love adviser just as much as their photographer.”
Young thought he would be a great therapist. The answer was yes.
The therapist
It took him a few more years to fully build the resolve to go through with what seemed like a wild fantasy, but Eberstadt eventually went back to school and completed his undergraduate degree — four decades after dropping out of Princeton. He then enrolled at Columbia University’s School of Social Work to become a psychotherapist, receiving his diploma the same year he received his first social security check. “I think it was very gutsy to go back to college when he was in his 60s,” Fernanda says.
Inheriting the paradigm-disrupting school of thought that started with Aaron Beck and continued with Young, therapy with Eberstadt was not what might be considered orthodox. He once had a phobic client who was terrified, among many things, to drive a car. “We talked about it. We made mental images of it. And then, after a certain point, we went to Hertz,” he recalls. The first few times it was just a drive around the block, Eberstadt in the passenger seat. After a few such practice sessions, it was time for her to drive alone.
It was summer, so he settled on the sidewalk, outside a coffee shop, to wait until she came back. He waited. And waited. “Five minutes go by. Then ten minutes go by. Twenty…” he recalls. He began to worry. “It had been almost an hour. Had she gotten into a traffic accident? Should I call the police?” And then she showed up.
After realizing she could drive, she ventured into Henry Hudson Parkway, drove all the way north of Manhattan and then returned via the FDR Drive, on the other side of the island. “That was the end of that therapy,” Eberstadt laughs.
There was one man who had such an ingrained sense of shame about his own body, he was incapable of using a public restroom, so he commuted between his office and his home during the day, whenever he needed to relieve himself. Eberstadt eventually had him visit nude beaches in New Jersey. “Nudity is a great treatment,” he states. “It’s difficult to begin with, but then it is very freeing.” He drove some of his clients to nude beaches himself.
One of the unsuccessful cases he recalls with sadness was a European man who “was, and is, I believe, a homosexual,” he says. “He came to me to be, so to speak, ‘cured’.” Eberstadt could not convince him there was nothing to be cured. After a few years, the patient found a therapist who assured him such curing was indeed possible, and he departed.
The acceptance of homosexuality as something that does not need to be cured has gained vast ground — if never fully embraced by all of society . It is also consistent with Eberstadt’s broader thinking: He doesn’t consider people with depression to be ill. “If you are sick, then it is in the lap of the gods whether you ever get well again or not,” he stresses. That is also why he prefers calling them clients rather than patients. “A client is a man or woman with a problem. People I work with are, generally speaking, depressed or have anxiety problems. But I don’t consider them to be sick. They are not psychotic or schizophrenic. They are people who have a problem. And two intelligent, well-meaning people probably should be able to solve most problems.”
Besides therapy, antidepressant medication is part of the repertoire of tools used to help clients. “Medication was the first thing that helped me,” he readily declares. Ever since he concluded therapy with Young, Eberstadt stopped taking — and needing — medicines. He is glad not to depend on them anymore, but he is aware of their merit and refers clients to licensed psychiatrists for prescriptions when he considers they might benefit from them. “[Medication] can be very, very helpful in cases that are pretty sticky. They loosen things up so people can get to other places,” he says.
But for Eberstadt, what is essential is the intimacy that must develop between therapist and client. Not being able to connect with a client, not honestly liking him or her, hinders the progress. That, he says, is why he did not take clients he didn’t like. “That is partly, I suppose, self-indulgence, but I also don’t think it is fair,” he explains. If he could not genuinely become fond of a potential client, “I couldn’t help but be prejudiced in some kind of way, maybe passing on the subliminal message that they are dislikable, or not attractive, or whatever it is.”
Therapy had helped rescue years back. Now a therapist himself, it would come to his aid again as Isabel, his wife, deteriorated after a long battle with a painful illness, finally passing away in 2007. One of the ways Eberstadt coped during this heartbreaking period was by continuing seeing patients. Decades earlier, being at the receiving side of therapy was instrumental in bringing him back from the abyss; now, being at the providing side of it kept him afloat.
For years, the family tried achingly to help Isabel deal with her own depression, just as they did with her husband. It was a cruel irony that therapy never constituted for Isabel the beacon it became for him. “Why didn’t it work for her? It’s an interesting and complicated question,” reflects Fernanda, their daughter. “She was very insightful towards other people, incredibly empathic, an amazing listener. But somehow didn’t want to address herself. She couldn’t open up to a therapist. She just didn’t want to go there.”
No survivor of depression wishes to ever fall into its grips again. Eberstadt certainly does not. Yet for him, having been through it was part of his life, part of what made him who he is today, however painful.
Asked if he thinks he has saved lives during his years in the profession, he answers modestly. “All I can say is that I am lucky enough to have never lost a client,” he declares, as his hand vigorously searches for a wooden surface to knock on.
Modesty apart, in contrast with a surgeon who removes a cancerous tumor from a patient just in time, there is no way for a therapist to be unequivocally certain that he saved somebody’s life. Still, it is safe to assume Freddy did just that at least once throughout his years as a therapist, because there is little doubt in my mind he saved mine.
Fighting for my life
“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” is how Emily Dickinson hauntingly and accurately described it.
For those who have been through depression, it is akin to setting foot in an embassy kept on earth by the Kingdom of Hell. To enter, visitors are waived the traditional rite of passage — death — and allowed to experience the absolute hopelessness of a soul condemned to eternal damnation. Each moment stretches into a perpetuity of irremediable despair. The shattered, tortured mind wishes for nothing else but for life to have the mercy of detaching itself from the condemned body. But, alas, in what feels like the ultimate act of cruelty, life declines. It clings on, like a disease, allowing the unbearable torment to continue.
I abruptly fell into depression for the first time during the fall of 2002. After months of being lost to its madness, wishing for nothing but death, only the support from my family enabled me to break free from it and return to reality. Over the years, however, it has sporadically managed to track me down and drag me back into its transcendental torture chamber.
During one of those periods of purely dark despair, in the spring of 2008 in New York, I first crossed paths with Freddy. Countless times I arrived at his door, my whole being reduced to nothing more than a container of hopelessness and agony. On at least one occasion, my spouse had to almost carry me there.
After close to two decades of battling against it, depression still lurks around, sporadically managing to drag me down to its pit— The last time was while I was finishing this writing. It’s hard to think I will ever be completely free from it.
But things have changed.
The agonizing hopelessness still feels painfully real, but I have finally managed to understand its dirty little secret: It is a self-created illusion, one that we allow to have a life of its own. It whispers torturing thoughts to our ears, trying to trick us into believing they are reality itself. This is something that, for many years, was impossible for me to even conceive. But now, its strategy has been irreparably compromised. The ocean of despair it creates still feels absolutely real, but now I know it will end. And I owe that to Freddy.
On more occasions than I can remember, Freddy told me he was not the one doing the work. In fact, he emphasized, he could not. The role of a therapist, the only thing he or she can do, is to lay the framework for the client to be able to dig himself out. Freddy is a modest man, but I believe it is not modesty that motivates those words from him. He is right. It was always up to me to drag myself out of hell. First, however, I had to be convinced that was even possible. And even as I reluctantly began believing it was, I then desperately needed help building the will to fight back.
The bond Freddy offered me over a decade ago reminds me of the one shared between a professional athlete and his trainer. Similarly to the depressed person, it is the athlete who feels the pain, who must overcome it, waging a battle against the resistance presented by his mind and body. Just like the therapist, it is the coach who guides and motivates the athlete, training him to conquer himself, to fight for the gold.
Freddy trained me to fight for my life.
