Ten Years in the Tub (95 page)

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am?: The Journal of a Psychotherapist—
Jane Haynes

     
  
The Birds on the Trees
—Nina Bawden

     
  
The Driver's Seat
—Muriel Spark

     
  
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
—Muriel Spark

     
  
A Far Cry from Kensington
—Muriel Spark

I
f you are reading this in the U.S., the presumption over here in the U.K. is that you have either just come out of a session with your shrink or you're just about to go into one, and for reasons best known to ourselves, we disapprove—in the same way that we disapprove of the way you sign up for twelve-step programs at the drop of a hat, just because you're getting through a bottle of vodka every evening after work and throwing up in the street on the way home. “That's just life,” we say. “Deal with it.” (To which you'd probably reply, “We are dealing with it! That's why we've signed up for a twelve-step program!” So we'd go, “Well, deal with it in a less self-absorbed way.” By which we mean, “Don't deal with it at all! Grin and bear it!” But then, what do we know? We're smashed out of our skulls most of the time.)

Recently I read an interview with a British comic actress, an interesting, clever one, and she articulated, quite neatly, the bizarre assumptions and prejudices of my entire nation when it comes to the subject of the talking cure. “I have serious problems with it… The way I see it is that you're paying someone, so they don't really care about you—they're not listening in the way that someone who loves you does.”

There's a good deal in that little lot to unpack. The assumption that if you give someone money, then, ipso facto, they don't care about you, is a curious one; the chief complaint I have about my dentist is that he cares too much, and as a consequence is always telling me not to eat this or smoke that. According to the actress, he should just be laughing all the way to the bank. And how does she feel about child care? Maybe she can't bring herself to use it, but in our house we're effectively paying someone to love our kids. (Lord knows, it wouldn't happen any other way.) But the real zinger is in that second argument, the one about “not listening in the way that someone who loves you does.” Aaaargh! Der! D'oh! That's the whole point, and to complain that therapists aren't friends is rather like complaining that osteopaths aren't pets.

One of the relationships described in
Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am
?, psychotherapist Jane Haynes's gripping, moving, and candid memoir, is clearly a defining relationship in her life, a love affair in all but the conventional sense. The affair is between Haynes and her own therapist, and the first half of the book is addressed to him; he died before their sessions had reached a conclusion, and Haynes's grief is agonizing and raw. So much for the theory that a bought relationship can't be real. In the second half of the book, Haynes describes the problems and the breakthroughs of a handful of her patients, people paralyzed by the legacies of their personal histories, and only the most unimaginative and Gradgrindian of readers could doubt the value of the therapeutic process. Pills won't work for the patient whose long, sad personal narrative has produced an addiction to internet pornography; pills didn't work for the woman who was saved from suicide, tragicomically, only because of a supermarket bag she placed over her head after she'd taken an overdose. (The maid cleaning her hotel room would have presumed she was sleeping had it not been for the fact that her face was obscured by an advertisement for Tesco.) As Hilary Mantel
says in her quite-brilliant introduction, we don't enter the consulting room alone, “but with our parents and grandparents, and behind them, jostling their ghost limbs for space, our ancestral host, our tribe. All these people need a place in the room, all need to be heard. And against them, our own voice has to assert itself, small and clear, so that we possess the narrative of our own lives.” In a bravura passage, Mantel goes on to describe what those narratives might read like: “For some of us, they are a jerky cinema flickering against a rumpled bedsheet, the reels out of order and the projectionist drunk. For some of us they are slick and fake as an old dance routine, all high kicks and false smiles and a desperate sweat inside an ill-fitting costume… For others, the narrative is the patter of a used-car salesman, a promise of progress and conveyance, insistently delivered with an oily smirk… There is a story we need to tell, we think: but this is not how; this is not it.” If you think you can find a friend who is prepared to listen hour after hour, year after year, to your painful, groping attempt to construct your own narrative, then good luck to you. Me, I have friends who are prepared to listen for ten minutes to my list of which players Arsenal Football Club needs to mount a serious challenge next year—but then, I'm an English bloke. My therapist, however, has tolerated more agonized, baffled nonsense than any human being should endure. And yes, I pay him, but not enough.