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Jan's real life cases: Adam and the 'mercurial ' character

Jan's real life cases: Adam and the 'mercurial ' character

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Posted by Jan den Breejen on March 03, 2000 at 12:24:09:

Jan's real life cases: Adam and the 'mercurial ' character

What do you think is the enneatype which best typify's the character style Adam represents?

Jan


RELATIONSHIPS: TO POSSESS AND BE POSSESSED
Adam M., a music critic, met Ursula T. at a reception following her famous brother's cello recital. Af ter speaking to her for less than ten minutes, this predominantly told her he knew that they were meant to be involved in each other's lives. "I will fall in love with you," declared the tall, tuxedoed, well-spoken middleaged gentleman. Ursula, a thirty-one-year-old music teacher and sometime performer, could only blush. This elegant man was coming on to her so strongly; ordinarily she would have made her polite excuses and moved off. But he seemed so genuine, and his eyes seemed truly to pierce her soul. UncharacteristicaIly, this normaIly reticent woman took him at his word and gave him her telephone number at his request.

Notwithstanding his cutting review of her brother's performance, Adam phoned Ursula the next day. He had to attend an opera that evening - would she grace him with her presence? Ursula had other plans, but at Adam's urging she agreed to go with him. Never previously married or even deeply involved with anyone, the sober woman had never experienced such attention. Adam was intense, emotional, insistent - he wouldn't allow her to be slow, cautious, quiet, restrained. "This is meant to be," he continued to tell her, and although in the back of her mind a voice said, "Slow down," she let loose with this intenselv romantic, beautiful, changeable man. "You are the world to me," he would tell her. Even after their love affair was over and his passion and fury were spent, and years af ter Adam had died, Ursula knew that during the time they had been together, she really had been his entire world.

It's in the Stars
Mercurial individuals like Adam are never casual about the people they care for. As between Adam and Ursula, they immediately feel a magnetic involvement and a powerful sense that the relationship is destined. The relationship then becomes the center of their lives, the heart of their beings, and they pursue it with an intensity unlike any of the other personality styles. A love affair -even a friendship- with a Mercurial individual is unforgettable. These individuals put their lovers, friends, even colleagues on pedestals; they worship their perfection; they thank the heavens for blessing them with such a person. They must talk to the other person every day, sometimes several times a day. They must know everything the other thinks, does, and feels. They must fill themselves up with the other person. If the other person resists, dark clouds gather; Mercurial hurt and fury mount, as we will see later .

Adam drew Ursula closer than anyone had ever before desired her to be. "We breathed life into each other," she says now with shy
embarrassment about the early days of their relationship. He had to have her with him everywhere -at every concert, at every meal, to visit friends, to shop for groceries. He introduced her to his vast circle of friends and insisted that they welcome her with open arms. He wanted to attend her music classes, he insisted on hearing her play her violin, he suggested new music to her, he urged her to perform at his weekly music salon and he introduced her to new sensual pleasures in the bedroom. Ursula's famous brother disapproved. He thought Adam was arrogant, grandiose, and a poor judge of musical performance. The cellist believed that Adam's feelings for a performer got the better of his judgment of the performance. It was true that on occasion Adam would be so taken with a performer that he would hear nothing short of perfection, whereas the audiences and other critics might hear an off-register note, sloppy technique, or an ineffectual interpretation. Similarly, he could get a bad feeling about a performer and perhaps Ursula's brother was among these; and pan a performance that others considered accomplished or even exquisite. While Adam was not the most universally respected music critic, and although he was rather poor at the business details of his life, he had a wide audience who enjoyed his critiques on music and musicians. On the radio program he hosted for nearly a decade, he was considered fascinating, erudite, outspoken, controversial. and invariablv interesting.

Giving All

Adam could be difficult, agreed virtually every one of the hundreds of people who attended his funeral. But once he reached out and pulled you forcibly into his life, you were forever changed by his love. Despite his shifting moods, his incessant demands, and the ease with which he became disappointed in people, he created for himself a permanent place in the hearts of many throughout the world. One conductor known widely throughout Europe eulogized that one of Adam's greatest gifts was his encouragement and backing of talented, gifted young musicians. Many musicians who now have careers in classical and even popular music credit their success to Adam's ability to urge them to greater heights, to recommend them to gifted teachers, and to put in good reviews for them.

There was nothing Adam would not do for the people he cared for . He had his Self-Confident side, too. The way he saw it, he and "his people" were special, superior, different - and not because of class, wealth, or education. In his Mercurial way, Adam was open to anyone. When someone struck him as belonging in his life, he did everything in his power to bring that person in. He could be sharply critical and unforgiving if the individual wasn't interested in being his friend, and he would fight to hang on to someone who he felt was slipping away from him.

A month after the emotional end of their yearlong affair, Ursula retreated to her tiny mountain cabin 250 miles away. The next day she heard a car drive up, and there was Adam, with his three cats, his typewriter, a suitcase full of cassettes, and a huge wicker basket filled with cheeses, sausages, breads, caviar, smoked fish, and two bottles of cognac. Indulging his Dramatic theatricality , he threw himself on her couch, sighed, and said, "It is simply that I cannot be without y ou." He said he'd driven up only for the day, but he stayed the week. He cooked for her, tended her garden, read to her, filled the cabin with recorded music, and sipped rare cognac. " All I ask from you is that
you play for me," he'd plead. Each time she played, Adam wept. Then, on the seventh day, he heatedly took issue with her interpretation of a sonata. His irritation grew to intense anger at her. "I don't want you, Ursula!" he shouted. He cast her a look of pure hatred and walked out.

Stay Close

How deeply Ursula had loved Adam! Still, she had been the one to end their affair. It all just got too much for her. She had wanted to settle into a quieter, calmer love life with Adam once the infatuation began to subside into a more abiding love. But that wasn't Adam's style. His ceaseless activity, his pushing, his intensity, and not least his changeable feelings began to drain her .For all his enthusiasms, Adam, like most Mercurial people, was a brooder. He'd go through more moods in a day than Ursula would in a month. Ursula was mature enough to allow him his moods, but they all seemed to involve her. If she was quiet and thoughtful, Adam would worry that she was withdrawing from him. If she played particularly weIl, Adam would be in ecstasy. If she played badly, he would snap at her as if she were a child who hadn't practiced her lessons. He seemed always to be watching her; she couldn't escape his eyes.

Adam needed to be involved in everything Ursula felt, and vice versa. If one day he felt that there was no meaning in his life, he insisted that she cleave so closely to him that she experienced his ennui. Many times she tried to explain to him that she was a separate human being with individual feelings, and that if he didn't always pull so very close she wouldn't need to establish a distance from him. She had never experienced such ardent moments as when she and he truly connected with each other, but she found she could not sustain that intensity as a way of life. Ursula began to feel pulled in two directions-toward the man she most assuredly loved and admired, and toward her own independent identity. Increasingly, Ursula needed time away from Adam to marshal her inner resources for her teaching and for her own performances.

Needless to say, Adam took her need for emotional distance badly. He became angry, critical, convinced that she was letting him down. Here he had given her his whole world and she could only think of herself. "Ursula, my Ursula," he would sigh sadly. "You and I are among the very few special people in this world. We understand what life really is. It is music, it is love, it is beauty, it is knowledge, it is, after all, you and me. Why am I not the world for you? Why do you break my heart? What have I done to you that is so terrible? I love you!" Ursula could not make him understand that she wasn't like him, that she had needs that had nothing to do with him, but that she still loved him. She could not get through to Adam that he demanded more than a "regular" person like herself could consistently give. " Ah, don't put yourself down," he would insist. "Y ou are a superior being, capable of more than y ou think." lt caused her unbearable pain to end the most passionate and beautiful experience of her life, but emotionally Ursula could not endure it any longer. Even as she broke off with him, she knew no one would ever give her the kind of love Adam had- and that she would probably never care for anyone as much as she still cared for him. lndeed, no one but a Mercurial individual like Adam is quite so focused on y ou, so endowed with attention, totally filled up with you, and so generous. Adam gave Ursula his entire Heifetz recording collection after she mentioned that she admired the virtuoso.

More!
In an individual with a moderate amount of Mercurial style among a balanced pattem, this focused attentiveness and generosity can contribute to a powerful, romantic, lasting love-the kind that songs are written about. However, Adam's personality was powerfully dominated both by the Mercurial and the Dramatic styles, each of them emotionally unrestrained and intensely needy. If his pattem had been balanced by more of the stop-and-think styles, such as the Conscientious, he might have been more inclined to give Ursula some breathing space and plan for a longer, more mutually fulfilling life together. But, like other very Mercurial individuals, Adam's needs and expectations of others were enormous, his reactions to them strong and immediate. He needed from others exactly what he gave to them: constant, intense passion and attention. But very few of his friends, although they loved him dearly, were able to give him back the intensity of emotion he required. Again in Mercurial fashion, he sometimes manipulated his friends and lovers to give him more. He would berate friends for not telephoning or visiting enough when he was ill, making them think that their occasional lapses had made his condition worse. One close friend, Eric, became angry at Adam for making him feel guilty. "You know, Adam, if you needed me, you could call and ask me to come over. I never hear from you, yet you expect me always to know what you want."

Adam was hurt by Eric's remarks and felt that he did not deserve them. Mercurial individuals are not, as a rule, skilled at patching things up with people. They tend to feel that they are the ones who give most (often true), and they have trouble recognizing the ways in which they contribute to difficulties within their relationships. If a relationship ends badly, Mercurial individuals will often look back at their whole time together as dark and terrible; they may conclude that the other person was unworthy of them and that they themselves had been blind to this unfortunate reality.

Stress!

Relationship problems are the greatest sources of stress for Mercurial individuals. Trouble comes when they feel that they are not being recognized and treated as special. Like Self-Confident people, Mercurial types feel entitled to more, and when they don't get it, or when the other person tries to establish distance, they feel threatened. They react to such stresses very intensely, of course. Often they'll throw themselves into a powerful, passionate experience -sex, music, alcohol, or drugs- to distract themselves from the abyss that is widening before them. Or they'll step back and act as if it isn't happening, which can seem a little strange. But unless the stress itself diminishes, sooner or later they'll react full force, often feeling that rejection is tantamount to the end of the world. If their outbursts of emotion fail to influence the other person, they may cope by suddenly turning their backs on that person and becoming intensely involved with someone else (itself a distraction from the pain). They hate being without love, and they don't stay that way for long.

Adam's End
Adam was never capable of sustaining a romantic relationship for more than three years. But he thrived on romantic love, so af ter any breakup he would give of himself completely to someone new. Af ter Ursula came Rinaldo, an Italian tenor. Adam had never before (except briefly in his boyhood} had a homosexual affair. But in his debut at La Scala one glittering night, Rinaldo sang straight into Adam's heart. Mercurial individuals, as we will see shortly, are intrigued rather than put off by others' differences. They tend not to categorize people and can experiment with different identities and roles. They attempt new lifestyles easily, and Adam had little difficulty experiencing the love of a man and being comfortable at homosexual gatherings. He didn 't see himself as changed in any way, and he resented the gossip that he had at last "come out" and declared his "true self." This was shortly before the HIV virus was identified. Rinaldo became ill within a few months of their meeting. No one knew what his illness was. By the time the world became aware of AIDS, Rinaldo was dead and Adam was dying. In the last months of his illness, Adam confided to a new friend, Amy, that his friends had all deserted him. At his funeral, when she saw how many tears were shed and heard literally hundreds of people speaking of Adam's profound effect on their lives, she was shocked. How could Adam not have feit the strength of the bonds of loving friendship that he had forged in his sixty-year life? But the sad truth for some ex- tremely Mercurial people is that sometimes, because they feel hurt and abandoned when others simply assert their own needs, and because they expect others to give to them with equivalent intensity , they are the last to recognize how much they mean to the people in their lives.

The Mercurial versus the Dramatic
While in certain respects the Mercurial resembles the Dramatic personality style in passion and feeling, and although the two styles often coexist within the same personality, they differ in important ways. Dramatic men and wollen are other-directed. This means that they will be alert to y ou, to learn what y ou want in order to draw your love and become the center of your attention. Dramatic men and wollen can be deeply sensitive and intuitive to the desires and needs of other people, and they can orchestrate their own behavior to draw y ou to them (as Adam often did). Mercurial individuals are much more intense and demanding. They are not content simply to dance in the light y ou shine on them; they need y ou to step in there with them. They want to fill up their whole world with you. They dream of being together with you as one through-out eternity .Their needs for such a relationship will dominate the picture. Generous and outgoing though they may be, Mercurial individuals are less inclined to moderate their behavior for your sake or to adapt to anyone else's ways of looking at things.

After having read the case; I thought of the character of Freddy Mercury….what's in a name?

Jan




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