Mantrapped (23 page)

On psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists - and how to lose readers

The
Times
was vague about the difference between these various professions when in 1993 it set up a debate as to the value of therapy and put me on a platform to oppose Dr Anthony Clare, the psychologist. We had very little to argue about, both having doubts about the value of the 'talking cure' - so it was not a particularly conclusive or lively debate, though uncomfortable for me. I was certainly unpopular. I had written a novel called
Affliction
in which a couple of wicked therapists destroy a marriage. It had sparked a public debate. The vast Central Hall at Westminister was packed with indignant therapists and their patients, all attesting to the value of their treatment, and determined never to read a thing I wrote again. I was castigated in the press, at literary festivals and in radio and TV programmes for moral and social irresponsibility: everyone knew that therapy was a good thing. I was blaming therapists for my failure to keep my own marriage together. They understood my anger but if only I had sought treatment sooner! In vain to say, '
But look, I was only writing a novel
.'

I had been an analysand myself for eight years, two or three times a week, with breaks for babies. When puzzled and distraught it is nice to have a hired hand to talk to - though a week's silent reflection might do as well. Ron said he would not marry me unless I went into analysis, and it seemed a small price to pay, and I did. Ron's theory was that only those in analysis could communicate properly with others in analysis: it was a closed circle. There was some truth in it at the time. Now everyone knows everything about the inner workings of the mind, the processes of projection, the Cinderella complex, the importance of self-esteem, the tug of obsessive compulsive behaviour (me, apparently), but in the Sixties they did not. These ideas were new. There was a blessed elite of Enlightened Understanders, and this I was invited to join.

For eight years I went on and off, two or three times a week, to visit Miss Rowlands, to lie upon her couch, confess my boring sins, and keep hidden the true ones, hating every minute of it. I never found out anything about her, and she told me nothing about herself, except once she let slip that she had worked with victims of Auschwitz. She was Welsh, older than I was, pretty and stern. She would open the door to me, gravely and courteously, and I would follow her in and take my place upon her couch. She lived in a block of red-brick Victorian flats in Bloomsbury, and it was this block I described thirty years later in a novel,
The Bulgari Connection
- another book which got me into trouble: I had been taking money from commercial sources, and so blackened the Good Name of Literature. Perhaps, come to think of it, I hoped for some kind of absolution from Miss Rowlands.

The custom was for the analysand to lie on the sofa with their head nearest the analyst's chair, so the expression on his or her face could not be read. This I did. She spoke very little and offered no advice. The theory was that if left to themselves the patient would investigate the patterns made by their own statements, come to their own conclusions about the yarns they were spinning to themselves and others. It must have been so boring. I would hear a constant click, click, click behind me and I realised she passed the time by knitting, though what she knitted, and for whom, she never said. I knew nothing about her at all.

When I told her my sister Jane had died - that was in 1969, and Jane was 39 - she wept a little and said, 'She was like a walnut withered in its shell,' which seemed true enough to me, and was the real sentence of death. It came home to me properly then that Jane was indeed dead, had died, was no longer my beloved, tragic, beautiful sister but in a grave, buried in a rural churchyard in Newport, Essex. More, she had left three children behind and they too must be my responsibility. My mother was beside herself. There is nothing worse than the untimely death of children. I must have been in a state at the time, too, I can see.

I had been on holiday with Ron and the three children, in a camp site at Les Sables-d'Olonne on the Atlantic Coast of France, south of Nantes. I knew Jane was ill but not how very ill she was. She had a malignant melanoma, a rarer disease than it is now, and terminal if left untreated, which it had been. I should not have gone away. When the telegram came from my mother saying I must come at once I took the train home from France leaving Ron to pack up the tent and follow me home with the children. He did not alas follow me.

That month men first walked upon the moon: anything could happen. The cosmos became our oyster, but I was dizzy with distress. Like Annette in the novel
Affliction
, unable to believe what was going on.

A friend of mine whose husband had just left her had joined us for comfort and consolation, and had set up a tent next to ours, beneath the pine trees. Around the 16th of August every year the wind turns on the wild Atlantic coast and the hot sands are whipped with cold rain. The summer announces it is over. But this year the turn in the weather was late and Ron's version of consolation took a practical form, and he did not arrive home for another ten days, or phone me, or write, by which time Jane was dead and the funeral over, and Julia - I will call her that - presumably well bedded.

But like so many men of his generation Ron found death embarrassing. He sometimes did not know where to put himself in a crisis except somewhere else. As for Julia, she was a nice, baffled, terrified girl with a difficult husband and I forgive her. She had three small children whom she would drive round in the car between six o'clock and eight o'clock every morning so as not to disturb her husband with their playing and crying. He was a copywriter and needed sleep to fuel his creativity and made a terrible fuss if disturbed. Now he had left. I daresay I would have done the same in her circumstances. Nevertheless it was painful.

Had Miss Rowlands been trained by the Jungians, not the Freudians, had she belonged to some newer, younger, post-feminist school of therapy, I would have been out of the marriage like a shot, divorce papers flying - but the law was not so kind to women in those days, and the current wisdom was that men would be men and women should put up with it. And my children loved their step-father and father, and my niece and two nephews their step-uncle, and, like it or not so did I. And I have had to break the news of enough deaths to enough children in my time not to want to go round rocking any more boats than necessary. I stayed, and had another baby.

Doralee and Peter don't have this kind of problem: the new young are trained to look after their own best interests. They have support groups and are there for one another, and tragedies are only allowed to hang around for so long before acceptance is reached and closure obtained. Though for Doralee and Peter it does seem unlikely that there will be many others in a similar predicament to their own, and 'sharing' they can see may be a difficulty in this particular case.

I do not think Miss Rowlands helped me come to terms with my masochistic tendencies or my low self-esteem, or any of the other neurotic ills that plagued my young life, but it was here in her consulting rooms that I learned to finish my sentences when speaking aloud. I learned to distinguish between what is a feeling and what is a thought, which is trickier than you might think, but useful for novelists. Before Miss Rowlands, feelings and thoughts lay in a viscous muddle inside my head. After Miss Rowlands I could sort them out, put them into the heads of fictional characters, and consider them.

When I started psychoanalysis I lived in a short-term world. This lover, this baby, this profound but passing emotion, this TV commercial - and I could just about manage a thirty-second script but fifteen would be better. After that I would lie back exhausted. Eight years later I could undertake a television drama, a full-length novel, a radio or stage play. I did not need the gratification of instant results: I could cover more than a single page without pausing to be admired. I preferred to sell ideas rather than products. Was that an achievement? I had the feeling Miss Rowlands thought it was, but she did not say so.

How I hated going to see her, how hard the sofa was, the time went so slowly, it was as bad as being five years old and made to lie down for a nap after lunch. I hated the suspension of real life that occurred in those lunchtime sessions, I hated the sound of my own voice as I searched my past for patterns. I could have been off lunching with one of the colleagues at the Strand Palace Hotel, flirting with my boss, or drinking in the American Bar at the Savoy. Yet I knew well enough the better path was to lie there on the couch, undeserving yet one of the privileged who had found a watering-place in a desert, a tiny oasis of wisdom, and that it was my path and purpose in life to pass it on.

My conversion to anti-therapism came as a bolt from the blue: a flurry of enantiodromia to the head, in fairly dreadful circumstances. Enantiodromia is a Jungian and very useful term for the process of conversion, when someone goes as far down the road of obsession as possible, comes to the end of the tracks, and has no option but to go back the other way. It is the moment when Saul the persecutor of the Christians turns into Paul, the great saint and protector, the flash of light on the road to Damascus.

It was 1991. I had been asked by a group
of
psychotherapists to talk to them about the role of the archetype in my novels. I demurred. Not my scene: mine to write, theirs to analyse. They persisted, I went. A large house in North London, headquarters of some kind of association for the dissemination of emotional literacy. Here were courses for policemen, social workers, magistrates, priests, politicians - my, they were busy! Laypersons streamed in, converts flowed out, with the jargon of knowledge, kindness and understanding at their fingertips. Couldn't be bad, I thought. But my audience of therapists seemed to want only to know how to get their novels published. And they were cross with me because without training, without their insights, I managed to do it. And I realised with some alarm that what they did professionally was write their novels in other people's heads, turn their lives into narratives, and give it the end their particular training suggested. The beginning was theirs to define (cold mother, abusive father), the middle (be more assertive, find your self-esteem), theirs to develop, the end (mostly to split with the heretofore loved one) theirs to conclude. Members all of a living creative-writing course.

After the talk we went to a Chinese restaurant. This was 1991. I was living apart from Ron on the suggestion of his therapist. We 'needed time apart', she said, and had done my horoscope and his, to prove how unsuited we were. I could hardly take her seriously, and was surprised he could, but held the general view that therapy was good, therapists were wise, knew what they were doing and it was all going to be okay. But that evening scales fell from my eyes, the cataract was swept away, I was indeed Paul on the road to Damascus. Not only was I wrong, self-deceived, complacent, unthinking, uncritical, I was stupid. These people were dangerous.

Over sweet and sour pork the group discussed patients and cases, using real names, while pondering what should happen next to them. Over apple and banana toffee and bad white wine they decided Jill must leave Jack - he bullied her. That Jack was in the same line of work as his therapist - both were parsons - and both up for promotion in the Church and there was a conflict of interests here bothered no one. Jack didn't want Jill to leave, and she said she didn't want to go, but they reckoned she could be persuaded. I asked how old Jack and Jill were and was told, 'Oh, in their sixties:' They'd been married thirty-five years. 'Mightn't they be lonely apart?' I asked. They turned to me as one. 'We don't talk about loneliness, we talk about aloneness.' And I saw the tall house in North London as the haunted house on the hill out of which streamed the bats of Satan, leaving a blight of sorrow and loneliness wherever they alighted. I went home and rang Ron and said, 'For God's sake be careful.' But it was too late, he trusted her, not me. If his therapist said I was the source of her troubles, why then he believed her. Besides, he was in love with someone else by then, not that I knew that at the time.

His therapist was a new-age devotee, a lover of nature cures and crystals, and saw the family as the source of many evils, and had
Cutting the Ties That Bind
upon her coffee table, and it was her belief that heart by-passes and angiograms were unnatural, and that blocked arteries and all physical ills could be cured by attitude of mind and the right diet. Think healthy and you will be healthy. And within a couple of years of 'treatment' he was dead, from the unblocked artery, on the day of our divorce.

I still get letters from those who have run up against the cruel side of the therapy industry (an industry is what it is, and a powerful one, with influence in high places) and have suffered greatly. My own family has certainly not yet recovered from their father's visits to the therapist. I wrote another novel,
Worst Fears
, vaguely connected to the events of the death, and then felt enough, enough, and left the subject. In this the new widow discovers the truth about the thorny patch she has so blithely and blindly been living in, while deluding herself it was the Garden of Eden. There's a telephone therapist in this one. She's not wicked, not like the ones in
Affliction
, just not very bright.

That was in the early Nineties when the arcane world of psychoanalysis for the few, for those who could afford it, had turned for good or bad into free counselling for those on benefit. But out of the years in psychoanalysis in the Sixties and Seventies, I wrote a series of short stories twenty and thirty years on, tales told to an analyst to whom I gave the name Miss Jacobs, but of course she was Miss Rowlands in disguise. Miss Jacobs sits and nods and knits while lives ravel and unravel around her, and those in denial come to their senses.
A Gentle Tonic Affect
, the PR girl at the nuclear power plant; the good wife with the hysterical paralysis in
Delights of France or Horrors of the Road; Moon Over Minneapolis
, title story of a collection, in which twin sisters, one pretty, one plain, visit the twin cities and realise where duty lies; and other stories too, and just thinking about them makes me want to write another one, and resuscitate Miss Rowlands, sitting there, calm and kind. I suspect I had a very positive transference, no matter how I denied it at the time, and since. She wept for my sister, when there were precious few to do it. I think perhaps she saved me from self-pity. She had standards in suffering, after all. She had worked with the victims of the camps.