Anger management

The psychoanalyst I’m seeing thinks I’m mad. At least I think she’s a psychoanalyst. If I ask her what she is exactly she goes all bristly and reels off some unfamiliar acronyms. She sees me once a fortnight for an hour in a small room at the local doctors’ surgery. A duty doctor referred me to her. I’d gone to see him for another month’s worth of happy pills and he’d intuited that half my trouble is that I am angry all the time. In fact when I came through the door of his consulting room, he said, I looked so angry he was afraid. All I really needed, in his opinion, was somebody to talk to, to get to the bottom of what it is I’m angry about.

At our first meeting, the psychoanalyst must have formed a similar impression to the duty doctor. I’d been with her about ten minutes when she stood up abruptly, left the room and made arrangements with a doctor in the room across the corridor for me to be given a packet of chemicals right away. When she came back she said I could say what I liked to her during our sessions together, but I mustn’t hit her.

I’ve had five sessions with her to date. As neither of us has any confidence in the other’s intelligence we aren’t getting very far, I’m afraid. She thinks I’m not quite right in the head, while the narrowness of her views makes me contemptuous and rude. ‘The trouble with you is,’ I tell her, ‘that you think that the tenets of your class and generation are the laws of Nature.’

Although she hotly denies that anything I say has the power to disturb her emotional equilibrium, she doesn’t like it when I insult her.