As a busy psychotherapist in NYC, I see a lot of clients with complex issues. Vinny is another example. Vinny's feeling edgy. After hemming and hawing for the past year, he finally gave Cindy an engagement ring and they plan to be married in six months. Vinny is beginning to doubt if they can make it together. Cindy has the wrong look even though she's pretty and sexy. The thing is she's not dark-eyed and Sicilian but blue-eyed and Irish. Their kids will never be 100% Italian. Vinny's also uptight about their sex life. Before they got engaged, he was really turned on by Cindy, even though she'd sometimes grow passive and sort of go out to lunch on him as they made love. Every once in a while Vinny got frustrated but he always felt he could bring her around. Now Cindy comes on to him all hot and lubricated and he can barely get it up. Sex has been a drag ever since he gave her the ring. Although Vinny is mostly confused by his feelings, a part of him senses what the problem might be. He once said, "I can only get it on with bimbos, girls who feel inferior. The Italian ones who are real knockouts, and of course bitchy like my mother, I can't even get to first base with. Cindy is different from the others. She's smart, loyal and true blue. I know she loves me but I feel weak and scared with her. It would be like graduating from high school to really be with her.

Apart from his sex life with Cindy, Vinny has strong doubts about his future in-laws. Cindy's parents send him mixed signals. Sometimes they're cold to him and treat him like he didn't exist. Then suddenly they're warm and friendly. Vinny's mother says if he doesn't like them and feels uncomfortable about going through with the wedding, he should cancel it. She tells him Cindy is a sweet, lovely girl but he should think twice about the importance of family. When his father married her, he was miserable until they got rid of Vinny's grandmother. In fact, Vinny's father put up with years of abuse from his wife and mother-in-law until the old lady finally croaked. Vinny remembers their yelling and screaming when he was little. Whenever he tried to stick up for his father, he got yelled at or slapped by his mother or grandmother. Sometimes they both hit him. Today, Vinny's father tells him his uneasiness about his future in-laws is maybe in his imagination. Vinny often wonders if the personalities of his future in-laws have anything to do with it. Cindy's father is cold, insensitive and overbearing. He wouldn't give you the time of day. Vinny can't stand the bastard. He hates to admit it, but in some ways Cindy's father reminds him of his mother. Cindy's mother is the complete opposite. She's a gentle, well-meaning whuz, like Vinny's father.

Why does Vinny feel so pressured when he has every reason to be happy? Why is he making his future in-laws more important than they deserve to be? Most of his life it's been drummed into Vinny's head, mostly by his mother, that you have to look at family. He can sometimes imagine himself with Cindy and their own family, but it seems so far away. In the meantime, Cindy's father and mother will be a part of their family and they're such a disappointment. Vinny needs them to be a lot better than they are. Is it because deep down Vinny needs his future in-laws to be the ideal parents he never had as a child? As long as he keeps unconsciously relating to them in the same way he did to his own parents, Vinny will never be able to enjoy the rich potential he and Cindy have to make their own family.

Why has making love to Cindy been so boring for Vinny ever since he gave her the engagement ring? Could it be Vinny is afraid to let himself feel the full depth of his lust for her? Would it be too scary if he did? And is he working himself into a state of pseudo-tragic, sentimentalized glop by believing he doesn't really deserve her. It's hard to see Vinny as a little boy happily flexing his muscles or later on feeling good about his virility, or taking pleasure in fighting for anything special. How could he have learned to enjoy being strong from a frustrated mother, an angry grandmother and, above all, a weak father? It's easy to picture Vinny as a hurt, frustrated little boy, terrified and ashamed of his anger. Look at how he's relived his earlier unhappiness as an adult. Before he met Cindy, he'd either get involved with bimbos who weren't good enough for him or Italian-
American princesses who would bust his chops. So when he finally does meet someone good enough, he starts believing she's too good and he tries to undermine it. In their two years together he's procrastinated over the ring, made Cindy feel unwanted except for her body and given her parents more power than they deserve to have over anybody. And what does Vinny do after he finally gives Cindy a ring and she comes back to life sexually? He can't enjoy her passion!

In a weird kind of way, it's as if Vinny the little boy was still paying homage to his mother and grandmother who always made him feel he could never please a woman. Vinny has also been identifying with his father the underdog by finding women who weren't good for him in the past and being unable to enjoy one who is in the present.

Not long ago Vinny dreamed he was driving to the wedding. On the way he got side-tracked shopping for the right clothes to wear. When he got to the church, Cindy was gone. She'd taken off with a jock Vinny knew from college, a guy who'd always been better at sports than he was. Vinny lingered in the church crying silently, feeling like an outcast.

In his book Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes about people like Vinny, Susan, Ellen, Bill and Michelle. He'd say they're caught up in thoughts, feelings and horrible unconscious images of themselves lodged in them as they grew up as their true selves were pushed into hiding. Most of us can only catch glimpses of our true selves in dreams or in conscious projections like the picture on the Psychotherapy Group in the Village home page of roses in Monet's garden at Giveny. This picture is what Jung called an anima projection which really came from someone moved by the beauty of the roses who had to take the picture.

In his current frame of mind, could Vinny ever imagine a place like Monet's garden, a place to which he could take Cindy on their honeymoon?

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