On the face of it, that seems like a very odd note to be getting from your psychiatrist–even, or perhaps especially, a psychiatrist old enough actually to be your mother. According to Boston therapist Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, this was a desperate attempt to comfort a “severely mentally ill patient, " Harvard medical student Paul Lozano. According to the lawyer for Lozano’s family, it is evidence that Bean-Bayog lured a brilliant young man into a morbid emotional and physical relationship that left him deeply disturbed when she terminated it. Lozano himself, the youngest son of an immigrant family from Mexico, can’t speak to the point. He died a year ago of a cocaine overdose-a death his parents believe was a suicide.
Perhaps not since the seminal neuroses of Freud’s Vienna has the relationship between therapist and patient been so luridly documented. Some 3,000 pages of medical records, notes and letters, plus tapes, books and gifts exchanged by Lozano and Bean-Bayog have been gathered by the Lozano family for a civil suit charging malpractice and wrongful death. The documents describe a classic case of its kind, except for the detail that the male party was the one on the couch. They show a vulnerable patient, who, contemplating suicide, told Bean-Bayog that “the only thing that kept me alive is you. " They depict a therapist so obsessed that she wrote to Lozano almost every day during her vacation. And they reveal a medical bureaucracy that took no action on another doctor’s charge of “gross misconduct " against Bean-Bayog for more than a year, until the lawsuit brought the case into the headlines. As of last week, she was still practicing, although the state placed her under the supervision of another psychiatrist. The open question, though, is whether the records prove that Bean-Bayog did in fact have sexual relations with Paul Lozano-something she insists never happened.
At the very least, as Bean-Bayog wrote last week in response to questions from the state medical board, her treatment of Lozano was “somewhat unconventional. " He was 23 and in his third year at Harvard in 1986 when he sought therapy from Bean-Bayog. She was 20 years older, a respected psychiatrist with a clinical appointment at Harvard (meaning she taught no classes and drew no salary); she was and is married and has two children. Exactly why Lozano sought help is in dispute. In court papers his family described him as merely depressed and homesick. But Bean-Bayog’s statement depicts a deeply troubled youth prone to “homicidal, violent and delusional thoughts. " He spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital that fall, and then returned to Harvard and began what Bean-Bayog describes as “regression therapy. "
What that is, other psychiatrists seem unable to say. Some psychiatric therapy entails “regression, " in which the patient relives emotions from his childhood. But the therapist isn’t supposed to direct and orchestrate this process, which is what Bean-Bayog seems to have done. Among the papers filed with the court are “flashcards " she prepared for him, bearing soothing evocations of childhood, such as these: “You can too act like a 3-year-old when you’re 25, " says one. And: “You can curl up with a sweater, and the pound puppy [a stuffed animal toy] … and you can breast feed and be cozy. " Some were not so childlike: “I’m going to miss so many things about you … phenomenal sex and being so appreciated. Maybe you’re having trouble getting used to being loved. "
Did Bean-Bayog have sex with Lozano? She “categorically denies " it. But he was clearly on her mind. A Cambridge social worker who knew them both relates in an affidavit that Bean-Bayog talked at “great length " about her “erotic sexual feelings " toward Lozano, and that Lozano (separately) described a longstanding sexual relationship with his therapist. Lozano said the same thing to Dr. William Barry Gault, a psychiatrist he consulted after Bean-Bayog terminated his therapy in 1990. Gault reported the conversations to the state medical board. Lozano’s sister says he told her that Bean-Bayog began masturbating during their second session. Going through his belongings last year, the sister found descriptions of exotic sadomasochistic fantasies in the doctor’s handwriting.
With her career and reputation at stake, Bean-Bayog is fighting back hard. She disputes the charges individually and collectively. “No male therapist, " she charges, “has ever been the subject of such an assault “–a debatable assertion, since feminists have said things almost as bad about Freud himself. Moreover, unlike most sexual-misconduct charges, which come down to one person’s word against another’s, there is the testimony of other parties and volumes of written evidence in her own handwriting. For every piece of evidence she has an exonerating explanation. The flashcards, she says, held “supportive " messages; the remark about “phenomenal sex " was actually something Lozano fantasized about hearing from a girlfriend. She admits discussing her attachment to Lozano with other therapists, but as a case study in how a therapist must control her feelings to avoid impropriety. She has struck back at Lozano’s family with a charge that he suffered “horrendous " abuse as a child-an assertion the family denies and Gault calls “utterly without basis in reality. " And even Lozano’s reputation has been sacrificed posthumously in Bean-Bayog’s defense. She accuses him of breaking into her office to steal her private papers, purportedly explaining why his sister found those lurid descriptions of sadomasochistic sex in his apartment. And what did those accounts represent? Her dreams, Bean-Bayog says, only her own dreams.
Photos: Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog (above), as photographed by former patient Paul Lozano. At left, Lozano in a 1978 track-team photo from his Upper Sandusky High School yearbook.
