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Character may indeed be fate, but caricature would seem the fate of most fictional psychoanalysts. From F. Scott Fitzgerald's troubled hero, Dr. Dick Diver, to Sailboat Selzer, Lillian Ross's send-up of sixties analysts, to the latterday creations of Philip Roth, Judith Rossner, and Adam Gropnick, most often the analyst of story and novel tends to be a character tethered to a stereotype, the fictional incarnation of whatever popular notion of analysts is current at the time.
While unquestionably a caricature, Ernesto Morales, the antihero of Daniel Menaker's amusing, intriguing, and provocative novel The Treatment, is no stereotype. Quite the opposite. He is, in fact, like no other analyst one is likely to encounter, in life or in literature.
One of the more outrageous creations in modern fiction, rather like an imaginary mix of Bruno Bettelheim and Señor Wences, Morales is a refugee Cuban, a Catholic Freudian analyst whose office is adorned with a crucifix and whose preferred way of working is to nail his patients, hands and feet, to the flimsy planks of their own rationalizations.
The patient in this case is Jake Singer, a thirty-something high school English teacher who is floundering badly in life. Isolated, joyless, unable to love, Jake is still grieving the mother he lost in childhood. The novel chronicles Jake's growth from this condition of misery and unproductive self-involvement to a place in life in which he is not only happily married and is a successful and mature educator, but has become a generative person able to give to others.
To accomplish this, Jake has had to come to terms with the devastating loss that he suffered in childhood, and by helping others who have suffered similar losses—all of the major characters in the novel have had to contend with such traumatic experiences—he has found a way to repair himself.
What seems initially, then, a straightforward and familiar tale of a young man growing into responsible manhood, turns out to be much more th