Shrinks have been getting a tough time of it in novels for a while now. Patrick McGrath’s Trauma, Will Self’s Doctor Mukti and Tony Davidson’s Scar Culture all feature morally compromised head-doctors, One might put this down to dramaturgical licence: shrinks, like any authority figures, are sitting ducks. But then again, fiction often acts as a sort of cultural dowsing rod.
Several months ago I visited a therapist. “I’d just like to get this out of the way,” the good doctor said when I sat down at a table stocked with the requisite glass of water and box of Kleenex. “I like to have the money on the table at the start of the session.” Fair enough, I thought, and reached for my wallet, only to be told, “No, no, that’s okay, it can wait.”
Mixed messages were the order of the day. Over the next hour, the shrink expressed disdain for other practitioners in the arts of psychotherapy and psychiatry, expounded theories on my inner wiring that sounded as faulty as the wiring itself, and made several remarks that I believe were borderline unethical.
It wasn’t my first jaunt on the therapy-go-round. Several years ago I underwent counselling for about six weeks. It was useful in the short term, but I discontinued the sessions mainly because I noticed that every Friday – Therapy Friday – I’d come out of that little room feeling overly vindicated, a bit self-obsessed, and with a terrible thirst for a drink. Rather than forcing me to question my own motivations and behaviour, the process was having the opposite effect. It was making me feel pumped up with my own bullshit.
In any other area – including general medicine – you go to a professional in the hopes of soliciting advice on how to solve your problem. But many therapists seem to take the tack that the patient should, with a lot of prodding and poking, self-diagnose. It’s not in the shrink’s remit to tell you to chuck in that soul-destroying job or leave that wife-beating bastard.
I understand that many psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists do heroic work with what Nietzsche called the bungled and the botched. There are plenty of damaged people out there, and they need help. But I’ve also had conversations with reputable head-doctors who’ve displayed all the empathy of a vending machine. From now on, I think I’ll take Crocodile Dundee as my oracle.
“Why would I want to talk to a shrink?’ he said. “I’ve got mates.”