PARTISAN REVIEW
535
been married, and if it hadn't been for your persistence and your
patience in making the truth of these insights self-evident to me, we
wouldn't have been married for more than the first three years. A lot
of growth. Lots of changes. On both our parts. And mine have had
to come in just this area, over my inability to handle guilt. But to
get back to what I was saying, just because my usual response to a
guilt-situation
is
silence and detachment, this does not mean con–
versely that, whenever I've gone silent on you and
seem
to be de–
tached and withdrawn, I am reacting to conscious knowledge of some
offense I've committed. No. It's quite possible, see, that I can tum
silent and seem withdrawn for no reason that has anything to do
with any offense
or
guilt. Okay, so then you'll come back at me and
argue, with some justification, I admit, that I don't need a specific
offense in order to feel challenged by guilt, that it's part and parcel
of my entire consciousness of my relation to the rest of the world.
This may
be
true, it
is
true, I suspect. But what we're talking about
here are
symp'toms. Effects.
Not causes. You can argue from causes
to effects, if you want to, but when it comes to my guilt syndrome,
you've got no right to start arguing back from the effects, you know.
After all, my silence and my seeming detachment can be caused by
many things. What if I had a stroke or something and couldn't
speak at all? What would you say then, that I was avoiding coming
to grips with my guilt-consciousness? Or what if I were grieving?
What if, just as an example, I happened to be holding some terrible
news about
your
health? That you had terminal cancer, say? Or
maybe I'm worried about my work, maybe I'm not going to be
able to make the mortgage payment. You haven't asked me, you
know. All you've done is assume that I'm acting out of some con–
voluted guilt syndrome again. I've been unusually silent these past
few weeks, you tell me, and I seem to be uninvolved with you, with
your daily life. Okay. Fine. So I'm a little less communicative than
usual. There might be lots of reasons for that. You might try asking
me what
I
think, you know. And so I
seem
to be uninvolved with
your daily life. That's
your
impression. Which, as far as I can see,
could as easily be a simple insecurity on your part as something con–
cretely true of my behavior. In other words, my seeming uninvolve–
ment could as much be a false impression as a true one, depending
on whether or not it's a direct result of your fearful assumption that
