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The Devil You Know is a collection of portraits divided into 11 chapters. The Introduction, Authors' Note and Coda bookend and possibly buffer the reader from some of the material within which, at its rawest, renders the book a challenging and at times, disturbing read. Written responsibly, with the lay reader in mind, this is not a textbook, but a vivid series of encounters, each one portraying an individual, each chapter named after a patient whose unique history is uncovered as we read. Most are forensic psychotherapy patients; those who have committed offences and so the naming of chapters is perhaps more significant here - as when someone enters a prison, their identity is reduced to a number which, from the outset, the authors are reminding us of the need to re-humanize by giving them names. These characters, we are told, are composites, the identities of individuals protected from the possibility of any further exploitation. As the authors point out, the relationship to a patient is ‘privileged’ in both senses of the word and so the anonymity of those who may have previously known little protection is therefore preserved.
The book, which aired on BBC Radio Four's ‘Book of the Week’, is described as a collaboration between Dr Gwen Adshead, a forensic psychotherapist and psychiatrist and the writer and dramatist Eileen Horne. As forensic psychotherapy is not usually practiced alone, and by this I am referring to the ever present ‘third’ - the criminal justice system, it is perhaps fitting that similarly, The Devil you Know is the work of more than one individual.
The cover of the book shows the image of a boy in latency, shot through a blue lens, partially obscured by the wording from the title, but the expression in the boy's unblinking eye is sadly both recognizable and compelling. It is the intense stare we encounter from patients who have experienced the legacy of severe neglect, often violence, and echoes of these feature repeatedly in the pages that follow.