Two years ago I was asked to give a paper at the John Bowlby Memorial Lectures. I have become tired of writing papers that focus only on my own voice and without the opportunity of a response from the people I may be writing about, or evidence that my theoretical hypotheses have been affirmed, or not, by a patient’s improved health. I responded to the invitation from Sir Richard Bowlby by saying I would only accept if I could write collaboratively. I then invited an ex patient, Harry, who had been in therapy with me between two and four times weekly for thirteen years, to write a joint paper giving his account of our therapeutic work around his acutely damaged infantile attachments. Only when I read his first draft, did I discover that the session when I had shared my son in law’s death with him had also become a moment of epiphany in his trajectory towards health. ((‘To shed what still attempts to cling as if attached by thorns’, in The John Bowlby Memorial Conference Monograph, forthcoming Autumn 2013.))
Harry:
I was in therapy with Jane for thirteen years. Even as a patient, I always believed it was vital to keep a formal, professional environment of studied trust in the therapeutic space. Therapist in chair, me on couch, safely locked door, fifty-minutes-to-the-minute, a complete absence of my therapist’s personal life: not the faintest whiff of counter transference to my suspicious nose. A dog barks downstairs, a son walks past on the landing, someone heard at the front door during the session: if these were understandable as lone incidents, my rational mind shrugged even as my hackles rose in resentment at the intrusion. Is it possible to keep such formal boundaries between two people sacrosanct, for so long? Fate, chance, luck must inevitably play some role. In fact, it was precisely when immediate life intruded dramatically into the space of my therapy – those moments of more major intrusion – that proved crucial fulcrums in my evolution to the person I have become: a man built on the words and syntax I have chosen; not the confused polyphonies of other people’s voices; those other people’s charismatic, dominating characters with which I first arrived in therapy. Yet the enlightening outcome of those moments of intrusion would have been impossible without a pre-existing and personal space of sympathy between Jane and I. This was born partly from the formal therapeutic trust, but was not its constituent. It was more: unique, personal, intimate – human.
Three particular intrusions stand out.
1) I am twenty-nine. A year into my therapy. Studying for my master’s degree in medical anthropology. One afternoon, I stop in at the Student’s Union bar for coffee, en route to see Jane. As I am leaving, two young students push past me, laughing, cheerful daytime drunks no older than nineteen. “Fuck off!” one of them laughs at my protest. Still holding my briefcase in my left hand, I punch him hard enough to split two knuckles, and am in the process of dragging the other down the ramp to throw him in front of traffic on the Euston Road – my mind crystal cold in its planning – when the security guard who was standing at the door steps in to separate us. Twenty minutes later I arrive at Jane’s, breathing short and hard with elation. Carrying a briefcase, nice, middle-class boy – but finally here to prove what I really am. She sends me to clean my hand, which is dripping celebratory blood onto her sanded floorboards. At last I have shown her what I’ve been trying to explain was my true character.
2) In 1999, Jane’s son-in-law was killed after being attacked outside a club in Brighton. It was all over the press, and Jane inevitably was forced to tell her clients what had happened. So many of the stories of my past are wreathed in violence (as we shall see). But what can I now do, hearing her story? I stop being involved in the casual violence I have described at the Students’ Union. Up to that point, I had a certain strut that my propensity to violence gave me. An identity. An identity at odds with my first class degree in anthropology, my M.Sc.with distinction. Now that strut shames me. I am tongue-tied in my sessions with Jane. I resent her not a little for forcing her private life upon me and, in doing so, taking the split syntax of my defensive dual personality from me – the boozer and fighter, and the public school boy.
I may not need to remind that Google, which has inevitably had a huge impact on the requisite blank screen persona of the analyst became first available in limited form in September 1998, and for many months afterwards remained an unused object of mystery to most of the population, which did not begin to peak until 2004. My son in law was attacked on the 29th January 1999 at which time Google’s search machine would not have had the exposure to be relevant. I am not the kind of therapist who sees it desirable to maintain impermeable and rigid boundaries between my professional and personal life. There are some aspects of one’s personal life that are private, even secret and other areas where it may be appropriate, or even beneficial to share selectively with one’s patients. But any disclosure requires careful thought and personal scrutiny and it is in these creative tensions that distinguish spontaneity from impulsiveness that wisdom may possibly inhabit. I am well aware that my later decision in 2008 to publish a memoir, which included my private childhood experiences of trauma, my analyst’s shocking death and an account of Jay’s death was and still is controversial. I was determined that the book’s existence would not be indebted to a cathartic act on my part and I therefore delayed publishing it for several years after my analyst’s death and his wife’s as well.