Father of Lies (3 page)

Background

When I first met him, Eldon Fochs was a thirty-eight-year-old accountant as well as lay provost for the largely conservative religious sect the Corporation of the Blood of the Lamb (“Bloodites”). He was clean shaven, pale in complexion, respectably dressed in a fashion typical of the Church's leadership, wearing a dark, sturdy suit, a white shirt, and a conservative tie. In all our interviews, he never departed from this fashion of dress. He was a large, soft-spoken man, slightly overconscious of his body but nevertheless possessed of a relaxed demeanor. He had sought treatment at the request of his spouse, who was concerned by recent changes in his sleep behavior, which included “talking in his sleep in somebody else's voice,” sleepwalking, and brief violent behavior toward his wife upon being awakened (behavior he had no memory of). Though Fochs believed his wife was overreacting, he chose to come to me nonetheless for two reasons: first to pacify her and second because during the past year he had had “disturbing dreams and thoughts” which he “wanted to be free of.”

In our first interview, Fochs stated a preference for being called “Brother Fochs” or “Provost Fochs” or simply “Fochs” rather than being called by his first name, Eldon. He was initially reluctant to discuss his family history. The disturbing dreams and thoughts, he felt, had “nothing to do with the past” since they had only originated a year ago. When I persisted, however, I discovered that he was the eldest of two children, the youngest having died at birth. He “was brought up in the faith,” growing up in a middle class Bloodite family in a predominantly Bloodite neighborhood. His earliest memories included his youngest brother's funeral, presided over by his father, a provost for the Church. He also remembered his mother helping him to learn to read out of the official Bloodite children's magazine,
Come Unto Me,
at age five, and the frequent absence of his father in his youth due to his church-related responsibilities.

Fochs remembered his mother as proper, loving, and industrious. She did not work outside of the home. She was very meek and often would look to her husband for advice even in simple household matters. The family had only one car, which Fochs's father took every day to work. His mother spent most of her time at home, except Wednesday afternoons when a neighbor would drive her to the grocery store. Nevertheless, the mother gave her son no sign of being discontent. Even when she lost her youngest child, leaving Fochs an only child, she told Fochs that it had been God's will and carried quietly on with her life.

He remembered his father as dignified, friendly, kind. His father was, Fochs indicated, most often absent in the evenings. The family understood the reasons for this and respected him for it, drawing strength from his “involvement with God.” According to Fochs, the time his father did spend with the family was “quality time.” His father “governed the household with kindness—sometimes sternly, but never with anger,” administering punishment swiftly and without heat. Fochs sometimes thought of his father as being distant and withdrawn, but his mother explained this was because of the weight of his position in the Church. Both his father and mother are still alive and still happily married.

Family life as a whole was generally happy, and Fochs had had every advantage. He did not mind being an only child. He claimed he had always been introspective and preferred to have the majority of his time to himself.

The family began each day at 5:30 a.m. with family prayer and Bible study, directed by the father. Each day was ended with prayer and religious study as well, directed by the father unless he was absent, in which case Fochs, as the only other male (even though a child), took charge.

As a child, Fochs had had a frequently recurring dream. In the dream was a man whose head was all cut and bloody, who was asking him to do something—upon awakening, he could never remember what. In the dream he was never frightened, but upon awakening
he was frightened. He claimed he had had this dream many times as a child.

When he was eleven, Fochs contracted pneumonia and grew very ill. His mother asked his father to give Fochs a blessing of healing, a practice typical in the Bloodite faith, but the father refused, saying the boy would heal on his own and that one shouldn't squander God's healing. Fochs did indeed recover, though he is now frequently subject to respiratory illness, perhaps as a result of the pneumonia. He claims not to blame his father for this, and says that his being alive today is proof that his father did not need to give the blessing.

As a teenager, Fochs had what he calls his “gray period.” On a personal and private level, he stopped praying, stopped reading the Scriptures, and began to participate in activities that he describes now as “immoral,” but whose exact nature he has been reluctant to specify. On a public level, however, he continued to attend church and to partake of Communion without confessing his sins. He did so because he didn't want others to suspect his shortcomings. Eventually the tension between what he was on Sunday and what he did during the week became too great. With some difficulty he changed his behavior and recommitted himself to the Church.

When Fochs was twenty-four, during his last year of college, he met the woman he would marry. One week later they became engaged, and six weeks after that he married her. He described his wife as having all the good qualities that a woman should have. Their first daughter was born ten months after their marriage, and since then they have had two sons (twins) and a daughter. Fochs says he is content with married life, and that although there are occasionally minor disagreements between himself and his wife, he is happy.

Pacifying His Wife

Fochs had come to visit me partly at his wife's request. He had recently begun to talk in his sleep, sometimes very loudly, often in a
voice that was not his own. In a short note that Fochs handed to me in our first meeting, his wife described the voice as “sharp, biting, and full of malice,” much different from Fochs's soft-spoken near-slur. She had heard his mouth speak like this three times. It spoke, she said, “using profane and pornographic language (language which my husband never uses while awake)” and seemed intent on recounting some sort of abusive, violent narrative, though Fochs's wife could not piece together more. The first time, she shook him and he stopped speaking. The second time, he began to wander through the house, apparently still asleep. She caught him as he was putting his coat on, preparing to go out the door. When she touched him and spoke to him, he (though still apparently asleep) allowed her to lead him back to bed. The third time, she had started to shake him but he continued speaking and then suddenly struck out at her. Fochs claimed he was asleep at the time, that he didn't know he was hitting anybody, that his body had struck her but that he had been “too deep inside myself to be responsible for the action.”

Fochs has never been awake during his sleepwalking episodes. He seemed to want to minimize the importance of these and his other sleep disturbances.

Fochs's sleepwalking alone might be seen as a simple sleep disorder, but because of its combination with Fochs's talking in his sleep in a different voice and in different words than he would normally use, it deserves to be taken seriously as an indication of larger dissociative disturbance.

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Disturbing Thoughts

Once he was comfortable with me, Fochs himself raised the issue of his “disturbing thoughts.” When I asked if he heard voices, he hesitated but said no, just “loud thoughts.”

Fochs admitted these had to do with children.

“A child?”

“Lots of children.”

“In what way?”

“In the thoughts, you might say it is as if I am writing on them.”

“On them?”

“They have no clothing. I don't know what has become of their clothing.”

“Writing on their skin?”

“Yes. My mouth is dry and I know it is wrong to do but I am doing it anyway.”

“What are you writing?”

“Sometimes I am writing God's name. Most often I am writing my own.”

He would at this time go no further. However, the suggestion was already present that these thoughts tended toward a pedophilic or pederastic nature, writing one's own name on the body of a child being as well a kind of indication or claim of ownership.

Fochs, on the grounds of the little he had told me, wanted me to “cure him.” Yet he at first rejected my suggestion that if we were to go further, he would have to discuss the issue of the thoughts further and be honest about them. I told him that it was wrong to think if he arrested his thoughts on children, he would be cured. What was needed, I suggested, was a determination of what lay behind his thoughts, what had caused them to occur. Otherwise, though they might vanish momentarily, they would repeatedly resurface in different forms. He was somewhat impatient with this suggestion.

When I asked Fochs, in a later session, if he had thoughts written on his own body, he claimed there had been things written
there, but he had erased them all. In the same session, he was finally willing to admit that the thoughts had been of a sexual nature, directed toward children.

“I would never act on such thoughts, mind you,” he said. “I would never even tell people about them.”

“You've told them to me.”

“Sure,” he said, smiling, “but you're not a person: you're a therapist.”

Draw-a-Person (DAP Figures) Results

Fochs's first figure consisted of a profile of a head, small and to the lower left of the page. The head had a thick neck, a collar, and the beginnings of a tie. The figure was apparently male, simple and quickly done, but in bold strokes, the hair drawn as eight straight horizontal lines, as if blowing in a direction opposite of where the head faced. The mouth was a simple line which split the L-shaped angle of the front of the face and the chin. The lines of the face did not quite connect. The eye was lidless and incomplete. The tie and the shirt collar, however, were very carefully drawn. There was no shading, except for the knot of the tie, which was carefully darkened.