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When the funeral service for Dr W- was over, five mourners adjourned to the large Victorian pub adjacent to the Crematorium. Although strangers to one another they shared one significant characteristic: each had for many years been in analysis with the late Dr W-. At this hour the upper lounge stood empty and therefore it was possible to speak freely. Mr A-, who had taken the initiative to invite the others, raised his glass in welcome:
‘This is indeed a unique occasion. I confess I find it strange and even moving to meet face to face those whose existence I previously knew of only by the ring of the doorbell or the distant click on the latch. I address you as strangers and yet I am inclined to look on you as members of my family, discovered only in the hour of our bereavement. I -.’
At this point Mr B-, more inclined to argument than sentiment, interrupted him: 'What you say presupposes that you saw the doctor as some sort of parent. Before I am enlisted in a family I had not expected to join, let me hasten to declare that I never did. For me he was always simply the “doctor” and I the “patient”. I brought him my illness, he provided the remedy, and for that I paid him his fee. It was a purely professional arrangement.
‘I am aware,’ he continued, 'that his treatment was of rather a special kind and that the instrument of his cure was neither the knife nor the bottle but word of mouth. By registering precisely the words I used he could identify the submerged areas of my disturbance with the accuracy of an echo sounder. That was his great skill. In my view Dr W- was a man of science who applied a technique according to strict scientific principles. Indeed only with the certainty that derives from the laws of cause and effect can one presume to treat the sick, whether in mind or body.
‘I would remind you that Freud, in his classical papers on technique, compares the analyst to the surgeon and this ideal Dr W- fulfilled in an exemplary fashion. By listening attentively he