I still have many patients who have never Googled me and know nothing about the book’s existence, or Jay’s death and there are others who found out about the book during their therapy but decided not to read it until they had finished the work. Others who have never read it and do not want to read it and yet other patients who have chosen me, and who may never have entered into any therapy except that they came across my book randomly when they happened to Google, Hilary Mantel who wrote the introduction.
Although my advance for the book was modest it has become a valuable and constant source of referrals to me, and has made a difference to my income and to the types of patients who consult me. These people who have read it and are now consulting with me might want to argue that they do not require, or desire their therapist to exist as a blank screen lacking in the three dimensionalities of past, present and future. There will be many others who are seeking therapy and who would disqualify me immediately and I will also often suggest that I am not the right therapist. Anybody who Googles me today will instantly find below my name, this quotation from Stuart Jeffries’ review in the Guardian after the publication of my book, over which I have no control:
Patients who avoid the book will miss the compelling story of how Haynes crawled from the wreckage of her childhood. As a girl, she was abandoned by her mother and raised, albeit briefly, by a father dying of syphilis who ultimately suffered what doctors called “general paralysis of the insane”. He was a tyrant whom Haynes compares to her Hitler, yet whom she also refers to late in the book as “beloved”.
After his death, he became an even more harrowing figure: years later, while doing a doctorate on Jacobean literature, her dreams became filled with horrors such as her father’s face being eaten hollow, just as Dr Pangloss’s were when Candide meets him, ravaged by syphilis, in Voltaire’s novel.
For this presentation I was asked to focus on the specifics of what happens when a therapist becomes the victim of a trauma that attracts public or national interest, and how this impacts upon their professional life. I have experienced both public and private trauma and whereas in the case of the former it was reported in the press and over which my family had no control as to how and when it was reported, the trauma that I experienced as a child would have remained private had I not chosen to write about my life in the form of personal memoir. My son in law did not trigger the book by his death, which tragedy became an object of national scrutiny; it was triggered by the experience of my own analyst’s premature death, which also came as a terrible bolt from the blue. I was already qualified, and when he died I had been in five times a week analysis for over twelve years and I did not then choose to consult anyone else. I chose to write an open letter to him. I chose to make my private life public, I chose to give my past, present and future patients the opportunity of knowing about both the childhood and adult trauma that their analyst had suffered.