Marilyn's Last Sessions (37 page)

For a while, Greenson used episodes from her analysis to illustrate his lectures at UCLA, and made a point of emphasising the appropriateness of all his clinical decisions. Two years after his
patient’s death, he gave a lecture at UCLA entitled ‘Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation’, in which he said, ‘Psychiatrists and physicians must be willing to become
emotionally involved with their patients if they hope to establish a reliable therapeutic relationship.’ Defending himself in the
Medical Tribune
on 24 October 1973, he said he had
done ‘what he thought best, particularly after other methods of treatment apparently hadn’t touched her one iota’. He defended his policy of making her a member of his household,
negotiating with the studios on her behalf and, in general, taking such an active role in the decisions she made about her life. He said he had had a precise aim. He had thought his method was the
only possible one for that specific woman, but he had failed: she had died. He never used the word ‘suicide’.

Greenson more or less stopped seeing patients in the mid-1970s, and gave up teaching. But he continued writing articles, which were collected and published in 1993 under the title,
Loving,
Hating and Living Well
. He never got over his infatuation with Hollywood, and would often suggest ideas for movies to Leo Rosten, which Rosten always found absurd and unfilmable. He counted the
friends he’d lost and the colleagues who’d died. Once, on his way back from a funeral, he told his wife, ‘We have to learn to live better. I mean, take more intense pleasure in
those close to us, remain curious and active, and work, keep on working.’

He described his attitude to death in a short article. ‘I am an analyst by profession, but also a Jew, and that is why I cannot renounce some promise of an afterlife.’ The following
year, although he was finding it harder to lecture, he spoke about ‘the Sexual Revolution’ in a talk at San Diego University called ‘Beyond Sexual Satisfaction?’.

On 18 August 1978, he wrote a final, unpublished, article entitled ‘Special Problems in Psychotherapy With the Rich and Famous’. Without mentioning Marilyn by name, he wrote of a
famous, beautiful, thirty-four-year-old actress who came to see him because of her lack of self-esteem.

He gave his last talk to the Southern California Institute of Psychoanalysis on 6 October 1978 on the subject of: ‘People lacking family’.

When the death of his famous patient threw him into disarray, the Freudian establishment were quick to rally round. Anna Freud immediately sent her condolences.

Greenson answered by return of post.

A few months later, Greenson took up his pen again: ‘I have to reassure my friends and enemies. I am still functioning!’

Anna replied, ‘Marianne Kris spoke to me about Marilyn Monroe and her experiences with her a great deal over the summer. I don’t think anyone could have kept her in this
life.’

Three years later, Greenson wrote another letter, which he didn’t send:

He continued to correspond with Anna Freud until his death, and she played the role of supervising analyst in the aftermath of Marilyn. He seemed to combat his feelings of guilt by appealing to
destiny, that of his patient and that of any course of analysis. An unfinished letter was found in his papers:

In 1965, Greenson and Anna Freud’s relationship assumed a more formal dimension when he became an official fundraiser in LA for the Hampstead Clinic, which was short of consulting-room
space. The principal American donor, Lita Annenberg Hazen, was so generous that when Freud’s house at 14 Maresfield Gardens came on the market, the Hampstead Clinic was able to buy it. The
house was finished in February 1968 after work by the architect Ernst Freud, Anna Freud’s favourite older brother, whom Greenson was treating with sedative injections for his dreadful
migraines. When his last analyst Max Schur died in 1969, Greenson again turned to Anna Freud. She replied, ‘I agree that mourning is a terrible task, surely the most difficult of all. And it
is only made bearable by the moments, which you also describe so well, when one feels fleetingly that the lost person has entered into one and that there is a gain somewhere which denies
death.’ In the same letter, she referred to his request to call her by her first name:

Ralph Greenson and Anna Freud subsequently exchanged letters about a documentary on the Hampstead Clinic that Greenson thought was necessary for fundraising. Anna and her companion, Dorothy
Burlingham-Tiffany, ended up agreeing to appear in the film. They thought it very good, and held out great hopes for it. Greenson, however, was to die before he could show it in California as he
had planned. In the last letter she wrote to him, in November 1978, Anna asked, ‘What will happen to psychoanalysis in the future? And where will its backbone be when our generation is
gone?’

Greenson died on 24 November 1979. Anna, who had lost Dorothy just five days earlier, wrote to Hildi, ‘You ask who’s coming with me on holiday. The answer is simple: I’m going
alone, since I do not believe in replacement partners. I am trying to learn how to be alone outside my work.’ Hildi answered that she felt on the threshold of solitude too. ‘I feel that
terrible
homesickness
for all the marvellous years, including the many times when all four of us were together.’

At a memorial service, Anna gave the eulogy on behalf of the Freudian establishment. ‘We are raising new generations of psychoanalysts all over the world. Nevertheless, we have not yet
discovered the secret of how to raise the real followers or people like Romi Greenson, namely, men and women who make use of psychoanalysis to its very limits: for the understanding of themselves;
of their fellow beings; for communication with the world at large; in short, for a way of living.’ On behalf of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, Albert Solnit lauded ‘Captain
Greenson, MD’: ‘He was a clinical scientist and a romantic in the classical sense. He loved life in all of its forms and expressions: musical, poetic, artistic and athletic. He showed
constant concern for those who struggle to achieve, those who fail, those who life puts at risk, those who suffer and go without.’

A year later, Marianne Kris died in London at Anna’s house in Freud’s widow Martha’s room. Anna herself was eighty years old ‘with a silly heart’. ‘It’s
as if I’m trying to be next, having heart problems straight after Marianne’s death,’ she wrote to Hildi Greenson. She was to die in 1982.

In Arthur Miller’s play
After the Fall
, first directed in 1964 by Elia Kazan in New York, the husband Quentin says to the wife Maggie, who is clearly modelled on
Marilyn, ‘A suicide kills two people. That’s what it’s for.’ During his session the day after seeing a performance of the play, Ralph Greenson said to Max Schur,
‘Miller has his highly autobiographical character say, “You don’t want my love, you want my destruction.” It wasn’t hard to think that about Marilyn.’

‘Would you say it was love you felt for her?’ Schur asked.

‘I loved her and I didn’t love her. I didn’t love her as an adult. I loved her as a child, or someone sick, for her fallibilities, her fears. But her fear also frightened me:
it was bigger than her, it was somewhere she could hide, and I thought I could accommodate it, contain it, make it go away.’

‘OK,’ Schur said. ‘Shall we stop there?’

Greenson had gone into analysis in New York partly to help him resolve his mourning for Marilyn, and partly to get away from Hollywood, to rediscover a space of words and
language – to forget the movies, at least for a while. When he thought about their years together, he said to himself that Los Angeles had ended up catching Marilyn and killing the New York
side of her, killing the Marilyn who’d fled Hollywood one day to become someone else, the Marilyn who’d given a press conference upon arriving in New York City on ‘the new
Monroe’. By the end of the 1970s, as far as movies were concerned, Manhattan had conquered Hollywood anyway. New York was the only place where Greenson could finally lay claim to the phrase
he had repeated to Sergeant Clemmons as the Schaefer ambulance men took her body away: ‘We lost her.’ He often said that to Schur, without specifying who he meant by
‘we’.

During the ensuing sessions, he wondered what had brought him to this psychoanalyst. Schur had been Freud’s doctor during his final years in Vienna and afterwards in
London. Was he seeking some sort of rapprochement with Freud after his unorthodox treatment of Marilyn? No doubt he and Schur also identified with one another in a way. Schur had been a doctor more
than an analyst. But Greenson had also been drawn to him for a more unconscious reason. He only realised this after Schur had died, and once
Freud: Living and Dying
, the book Schur had
hardly had time to complete, was published in 1972. Greenson saw his choice of fourth analyst as a repetition.

When the press started to insinuate that he had killed his patient with an injection to the heart, Greenson read the passage where Schur described giving Freud the morphine injection that had
released him from the burdens of his suffering and this life: