Love Thy Analyst

"I fell in love with him," the pale, soft-spoken woman told a hushed Manhattan courtroom. If it sounded like the familiar tale of the innocent girl and the wily seducer, conditions were different enough to make it the juiciest trial in town: the defendant in the $1.25 million malpractice suit is a psychiatrist, Renatus Hartogs, 66, who writes an advice column in Cosmopolitan magazine. The plaintiff, Julie Roy, 36, alleges that she paid for standard psychiatric help but instead got 14 months of "sex therapy" from her analytic guru.

Roy, now a $65-a-week book clerk in a San Francisco department store, was a secretary at Esquire magazine in Manhattan when she went to Hartogs in February of 1969, seeking help for depression. Her story: after a few weeks of twice-weekly talk sessions, Hartogs suggested that they have sex to erase her guilt over an earlier sexual liaison with a woman. Things progressed from holding hands across his desk to kisses on the mouth to lying together on his couch. By May she was partially undressed, and uncomfortable about "his constant reference to sex," but she was told she had to overcome her squeamishness about touching him. Roy says she was so afraid of getting hurt by the therapy that she considered jumping to her death in the Grand Canyon. Finally, after six months of foreplay, she succumbed to Hartogs, she said, and was told this "indicated progress."

In October Hartogs waived his low $10-per-session fee, hired her as a typist and paid her $3 a letter for typing "hundreds of letters." The therapy, she says, continued for almost another year, occasionally at his apartment. Once she received three sex treatments in one day. She says she broke off with Hartogs in September of 1970, then after three or four days begged him to take her back. He refused to give her an appointment or recommend another therapist. The following year she was involuntarily confined to psychiatric wards of Metropolitan Hospital, once for eleven days, another time for five weeks.

Hartogs testified last week that Roy was an "incurable" schizophrenic. "I never had sex with this person. Never!" he insisted. "She does not know the difference between fantasy and reality. She will never know it." He maintained that Roy is seeking revenge for his decision to cut off treatment. Hartogs has held a number of psychiatric posts in New York City. In 1953, as psychiatrist at Youth House, he diagnosed a disturbed 13-year-old as "potentially dangerous." The boy was Lee Harvey Oswald, and Hartogs later parlayed the brief experience into a quick book on Oswald and Jack Ruby (The Two Assassins, written with Freelancer Lucy Freeman). A patient later got him the job as a Cosmopolitan columnist.

The trial is more unusual than the charge. Some therapists argue privately that sex is legitimately useful in treatment, though it is explicitly forbidden by ethical standards of both the medical and psychoanalytic professions. A 1973 survey by Sheldon Kardener, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine, indicated that somewhere be tween 5% and 13% of American physicians have had "erotic contact," with patients, sometimes including intercourse, and that 19% believe such contact can be beneficial. According to his study, psychiatrists are less likely to sleep with patients than are obstetrician-gynecologists or general practitioners.

The problem was familiar when Freud addressed it in 1915, decreeing that "the analyst is absolutely debarred from giving way." Aware of the dangers of seductive patients in an emotionally charged therapy, Freud wrote that a love affair "would be a great triumph for the patient, but a complete overthrow for the cure." At the end of his long essay, he tossed in one final argument that still has its point: sex in therapy could help the enemies of psychoanalysis destroy the profession.

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