Stuart Jeffries

No shrinking violet

Haynes continues to go where her fellow therapists fear to tread — even to the extent of confessing her failures

‘I have fallen in love many times in my consulting room,’ writes the psychotherapist Jane Haynes. ‘I do not mean that I want to have an explicit sexual relationship,’ she clarifies. That said, she describes herself as the Desdemona of the consulting room, falling in love as she listens to ‘someone share the pity of their history’. And like Othello’s stories that titillated Desdemona, Haynes’s narratives of her and her patients’ painful lives are compelling, if passing strange, particularly given that her profession is usually reticent about what goes on behind closed doors between shrink and shrunken.

Haynes offers her insight into that secret world: ‘They present me with their “lives” just as Salome was presented John the Baptist’s head on a golden platter.’ Perhaps don’t stress that to prospective patients, eh? Therapists aren’t supposed to write like this. They’re not meant to be seduced by clients’ narratives. And they aren’t supposed to be quite so discombobulatingly gabby in print.

Freud, after all, insisted that the analyst must remain a blank slate in order to facilitate the transference process that he took to be essential to psychoanalysis’s talking cure. Haynes and many other therapists don’t hold with this: she follows Freud’s disciple-turned-critic Sándor Ferenczi, who thought analyst and analysand should be co-participants in what Haynes calls ‘the healing encounter by the creation of a symmetrical dyad’.

But there’s a problem with this. The dyad is never symmetrical — not least because no analyst has ever paid an analysand at the end of a session, so far as I know. Indeed, Haynes points out that ‘long therapy can be the monthly equivalent to a short-term mortgage’, though she admits to ‘fee structuring’ for poorer patients. No matter: her brand of relational psychotherapy, following Ferenczi, holds that ‘self-disclosure of the analyst could be an important reparative force’.

Haynes broke the secular confessional’s seal ten years ago with her first volume of memoirs — admittedly only after clients read and approved what she planned to publish, but still outraging colleagues who one easily imagines flinging scatter cushions around north London couches in exasperation.

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