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Allen Wheelis's new memoir, The Listener, might be more accurately entitled The Doctor of Desire had the author not already used that title for his 1987 novel about a psychoanalyst tormented by insatiable lust. Indeed, many of Wheelis's 14 books are about psychoanalysts of desire for whom a beautiful woman is a fatal attraction. “Great beauty inflicts a wound,” he writes at the beginning of The Listener. “Private and somehow shameful. It can neither be acknowledged nor complained about. A deep, burning pain. It will not go away. The pain is the longing; the wound is the knowing that the longing can never be fulfilled, that, like hell, it will go on forever, always there, always inside” (p. 16). We might assume that these are the words of a young and perhaps callow man. Not so. Wheelis is now 84, and his response to great beauty seems undiminished—and unmitigated—by age.
A few facts may be helpful for those unfamiliar with Wheelis's life and work. He was born in a small town in Louisiana in 1915 and attended the University of Texas. After receiving his medical training at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, he served in the Navy during World War II, studied psychiatry at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, and then completed his professional training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He was a staff psychiatrist at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and then moved to San Francisco in 1954, where he continues to practice psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
Wheelis's writing career began in 1958 when he published his first book, The Quest for Identity. A curious mixture of psychoanalytic and social commentary, The Quest for Identity is enlivened by six extended clinical vignettes about a young man named Larry Hunt who has a troubled relationship to his strict, pietistic physician-father.