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Consuming Psychotherapy is an apt title for this volume by Ann France. It is at once at least a triple entendre, overdetermined in ways one comes to appreciate in ever more subtle ways as her narrative unfolds. This is a book about one patient's experience of intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy with three therapists (with a dash of an encounter with a truly
friendly, humane hospital psychiatrist). Rather than being an “account” of her therapy, it is the attempt of a literate woman of letters to integrate her intellectual understanding of the technique and process of therapy with her own intensive emotional experience with the varied individuals engaged in the enterprise of “therapy.” She questions the therapeutic value of what occurred but concludes that, though imperfect, the enterprise was worth the effort. We should all be associated with such outcomes on a regular basis!
To return to the triple entendre, one might imagine first that the book is something of a consumer guide. This might perhaps be construed a typical Americanist egocentric position, but it is far from accurate. France's treatments, in fact, occurred through the National Service of the United Kingdom. She is, therefore, not a consumer of psychotherapy in the sense that the majority of psychoanalytic practitioners in the United States would think of their service. For anyone interested in how treatments can be conducted under a more egalitarian system, many insights are offered here.
A second meaning of Consuming Psychotherapy could perhaps be that facet of analytic therapy that is, in fact, consuming of the patient's attention, effort, and object-seeking drive. The volume itself is a testimony to the all-consuming nature of intensive psychotherapy. Through page after page, France struggles with her many conflicting feelings about her therapists, her frustrations and desires, her doubts and triumphs. Clearly, she experienced these relationships, was changed by them, and, through them, discovered