An Ambivalent Heritage

I have always felt a profound ambivalence towards the legacy of analysis and therapy, on both personal and political levels. This has taken me in and out of practice as a psychotherapist and in the summer of 1989, whilst still seeing clients, I found myself writing out some of the contradictions in the form of fiction. It started with a story about a psychodrama workshop - based loosely on a weekend I had attended - its protagonist being a man familiar with psychoanalytic work and theory. He was highly sceptical of the apparently rapid healing on offer through the catharsis of group theatre and his doubts and misgivings run through the resulting tale, ‘Future Perfect’. Like him, the narrative is torn between analytic insight and a less detached position that asks whether his scruples and knowledge are not after all the very things that prevent him from participating fully and so benefiting from the experience.

Other stories quickly followed, exploring parallel and related themes, and a collection of tales about psychotherapy emerged and was published early in 1991 - The Eye of the Buddha and Other Therapeutic Tales (Jackson 1991). There are many dilemmas being worked out through them, but one of the key ones is the tension between what we might term ‘orthodox’ analysis and more radical or ‘new age’ alternatives. The title story, ‘The Eye of the Buddha’, is perhaps the closest to an allegory of the various conflicts I was trying to resolve. There an analyst (male) is married to a Buddhist (female), and although I use to the full the licence of fiction to exaggerate, their rather extreme positions are in fact only magnifications of arguments I have actually heard. On the one hand, the psychoanalyst's dogmatic defence of his profession and what he regards as its monopoly on truth, on the other, the mystic's turning away from what she sees as the bigotries of a depressingly rational science - though her embrace of alternatives may be an even more fanatical and exclusive