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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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A conversation like no other: In Therapy by Susie Orbach

25/11/2016

7 Comments

 
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Psychotherapists face a dilemma when it comes to sharing the fruits of their discoveries with a wider public. The technical language, especially regarding psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which practitioners use to communicate between themselves, can be cumbersome, offputting and open to misinterpretation by the uninitiated. Case studies, such as those assembled by Steven Grosz, can be both extremely readable and illuminating, but they do present a problem of confidentiality: even when clients give their consent, some would question whether, within the power dynamics of the relationship, this can ever be freely given yet, the more the details are anonymised, the greater the potential distortion. Susie Orbach is a British psychotherapist, activist and writer who has done much to demystify psychoanalytic thinking (e.g. with several comment pieces in the Guardian, including this recent one on Brexit trauma). Her latest project, on which this short book is based, is a radio series mimicking the experience of the consulting room.

Professional actors were given brief character sketches which they then enacted in a shortened (thirty minutes) session with Susie. Each chapter is an edited script of that session interspersed with commentary on the therapist’s thought processes. The fact that the therapist was often surprised, confused and made uncomfortable within these encounters, is testament to their unscripted nature, rendering the listening experience as near to being a fly on the wall as is possible to get, for example with a client who asks for a relationship outside the therapy (p91-2):

surprise is what keeps the therapist on her toes. We can never know what is coming because therapy is a subversive kind of conversation which can crackle with energy, or fear, or despair or hope. We follow the feelings, the ideas, the tempo, the timbre of the patient’s voice, finding ways of connecting even when we might … refuse what he wishes

These five vignettes – of individuals and one couple on the brink of becoming parents – are poignant portrayals of people in distress, and of people trying to hold that distress at bay. The therapist’s responses explode some of the myths about therapy: some readers might be surprised how little Susie speaks; at the plain language and absence of jargon; at how much, while maintaining the boundaries, she’s moved by her clients (p84):

Therapists, or at least this therapist, always falls for some aspects of the person they are working with. I don’t mean this in a sexual manner but in the sense that a deep affection, a desire to understand and reach the other, a wish to connect and to be helpful are powerful dimensions of my experience.

Misunderstandings about therapy abound, both in real life and in
literature. Perhaps because most people will have had at least one conversation with another human being in which one of them was significantly helped, many assume therapy is an extension of ordinary interaction. While the language used might seem ordinary, psychoanalytic therapy is a (p101):

work of deconstructing and restructuring … you don’t just learn a new language to add to your repertoire, you relinquish unhelpful parts of the mother tongue and weave them together with the knowledge of a new grammar. The curiosity of therapist has towards the analysand’s structures designate us as anthropologists of the mind.

I’d recommend this book to anyone curious about therapy but especially to other writers
wanting to explore their own creativity. I’d make it required reading for any writer with the temerity to create a fictional therapist, which is extremely difficult to pull off (to my perhaps exacting standards) if you haven’t been there personally. Thanks to Profile Books for my review copy.
Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
7 Comments
Norah Colvin link
27/11/2016 10:23:36 am

Hi Anne,
I really enjoyed your review of this book. It's an interesting look at the workings of a therapist. What a fascinating way of getting material for each chapter. I was particularly interested in the passage about language. I think I'd enjoy this book. Thanks for sharing.

Reply
Annecdotist
27/11/2016 01:07:43 pm

I think it’s very accessible without being superficial. Some reviewers on Goodreads have referred to it as an “introductory text”, but I don’t see it that way, the commentary is really interesting. Since you like audiobooks, I don’t know if you’d be able to access the BBC radio four programmes in Australia to read it through listening.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
1/12/2016 10:25:09 am

I'll have to check it out.

Kate Evans
28/11/2016 02:53:02 pm

I enjoyed some of these when they were on the radio, but I did sometimes find Suzie a bit 'all-knowing' which could come across at times as patronising. It was on the radio and I didn't hear them all, perhaps in the book she explores more about the therapist's vulnerabilities. Interesting though, thanks for the review.

Reply
Annecdotist
28/11/2016 06:43:04 pm

Thanks for adding that perspective, Kate, because I haven’t actually caught any of the programmes. In the book, I did feel that she acknowledged her vulnerability regarding the surprises, especially in this example about the man who had fallen in love with her. Another difficult area was in the first session where she didn’t realise the client had come to her by way of a friend (of the client’s who was also seeing Susie) – I think she might have struggled to manage this within the allocated time and it could have come across as patronising (although I didn’t read it that way initially).

Reply
Charli Mills
29/11/2016 05:22:10 am

I can understand why you'd call for this book to be required reading for anyone interested writing a therapist as a character. I had already decided there was a deep creative element to this book and its process before you recommended it to other writers. I don't think I remembered to tell you about an author reading I went to because it was right before the reality of losing my home hit, and that wiped much from my thoughts...At that reading, the author had a character who was a therapist, and I asked him how much research he did. The answer? None! He felt the character allowed him to use her role as a device to move the story and didn't require being authentic. I thought, wow, I have to Anne!

Reply
Annecdotist
29/11/2016 04:23:20 pm

Glad you like the sound of this, Charli. You did actually mention the author at your conference, but worth reiterating in this context. In a way, of course he’s right, writers should be free to make things up in whatever way best progresses the story. And it depends how credible they want their characters to be. But I do think it’s a shame, when some authors do manage a good enough job, that others don’t do their research, both from the point of view of authentic fiction but also because it perpetuates the misunderstandings of what therapy actually is. Writers rightly complain when people who’ve barely picked up a pen assume they could write a novel if they didn’t have better things to do, but don’t often see that they doing something similar in relation to therapy.

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