About Suffering they Were Never Wrong the Old Masters

In this paper I focus on what happens when the analyst, or a member/members of their nuclear family, whose private life remaining private is, or has been, a vital prerequisite of traditional psychoanalysis, or psychodynamic therapy, becomes a traumatic object of public scrutiny and reportage. When my autonomy and private sense of self was stolen away by fate and the media. My situation grows more controversial as a result of the fact that several years later I chose to write and publish a book, which was memoir, rather than theory.

My son in law Jay's death happened almost fifteen years ago now, although due to the criminal complexities of the case and to the legal complexities of his manslaughter and the failure of care by the police we only had the inquest, which lasted for three weeks, in October 2011, by which time my grandchildren who had been children at the time of his death were now both adults, which introduced other complexities. Both in relation to their legal statuses vis-a-vis the inquest and their emotional responses to further inevitable publicity and the arbitrary opinions expressed in the media, from which as minors they were hitherto protected by law and their mother.

Death came to Jay without warning; quite literally as a bolt from the blue. It was in Brighton, late at night, outside of a nightclub. He was about to enter a taxi but he never got into that taxi because unprovoked, between one second and the next, he received a blow that flattened him to the granite curb. He never regained consciousness and died one week later in my daughter's arms when she made a decision to turn off his life support machine. Jay was half Nigerian, he knew life could be dangerous and as a young man had trained in martial arts. He was a third Dan black belt, and a man of immense physical power. But he did not get a chance; when he fell to the ground his hands were still in his pockets. There was not even the chance of a fight for his life. No altercation, not even a raised voice. There was just one fate-filled and fatal blow. His assailants were white, middle aged family men. Would they have acted in the same way if Jay had been white? Maybe. I really could not say. And the police even post McPherson and Stephen Lawrence, forgot, no, chose not to ask.

Trauma invariably occurs like a bolt from the blue, and it is often accompanied by a sense of a fateful intervention as an act of the gods rather than of any mortal. It is unlike the majority of other undesirable life experiences, or even critical illness, where there is a warning point – usually but not always anxiety – which alerts the sufferer/s to seek help. Traumatic intervention changes life between one minute and the next and for its victim, or group of victims the specific expression of unprepared for and disastrous change will impact unsympathetically upon all the victims' bodies, possibly forever. I remember that when my son in law was murdered a colleague rang me up to express her sympathy and said, ‘Nothing will ever be the same again for your family.’ Far from finding her words comforting, because I longed for everything to be same, they made me angry, but they were also true. As my mind returns to the emotion of anger, I recall that I have a client who watched several members of his family explode into ocean and ether as a result of a terrorist attack when he was a boy. For some unconscious and thus involuntary reason whenever, despite the client's previous protests, I refer to this event I will still call it an ‘accident’. ‘Why don't you use the correct word, ‘Murder’?’ he chastises me, but at the same time knowing that we have both endured literal experiences of murder, his crosspatch voice is softened by a smile.

How does this client know about my circumstances? He knows because his GP who has kept many London psychoanalytic consulting rooms fuelled with his patients - happened to read my memoir and asked to meet me and selectively

sends the book as a gift to some, but not all of the patients he now refers to me, in spite of my protestation. He felt that reading it changed his life and he since has confidence that I may be able to assist change not in all, or even many, but perhaps in some of his patients' lives.

For all of us working as therapists, or psychoanalysts, traumatic wounds will become part of our daily bread but how do we make a distinction between the premature or untimely and even tragic but private death of a loved one, even more unthinkable the death of a child, or in the case of one of my clients a mutual suicide pact carried out by her parents, chronic physical pain, or a kitchen catching fire and the home being demolished in the night due to faulty wiring, and traumatic and epic tragedy? I revert to the Shakespearian academe, which makes a distinction between heroic, or epic and domestic tragedy, whereby the former extends beyond the private tragedy of an individual to a societal disaster that invokes external authorities, control, judgment and punishment.

William Blake wrote a complex poem of doggerel rhymes, ‘Auguries of Innocence’ in which he also managed to encapsulate the expected, and even desirable trajectory of human life. Who, I ask myself would want a life of unremitting blandness?

In these simple lines I find comfort and often use them to share and demonstrate to my patients the inevitable course of a psychologically healthy life, which will meet and recover from both joy and woe. I fantasize having them laser projected onto my consulting room wall. As another poet, WH Auden tells us - albeit in more complex form - most human suffering tends to be private rather than epic and takes place unreported in the media while other members of the community continue, unknowing about their small tasks.

Private tragedy is often heralded by an untimely phone call and the news is then passed on swiftly by word of mouth. Bad news is said to travel fast. In contrast to the instant technology of the twenty first century, recall John Keats's death at the age of twenty three in Rome at the end of February 1821, news of his death did not reach London until early March. Personal suffering tends to be silent and even the public and visible rituals of mourning have all but disappeared as has the frequency of funeral cortileges in London streets which are replaced by sinister, rather nippy-quick and anonymous black private ambulances. We deodorize, control and diminish death at our psychic peril. As Auden puts it:

Jay's death brought my life to a standstill, whose familiarity was eclipsed by one early Sunday morning telephone call. The kind of call that nobody ever wants to receive, but when it comes we have very little choice but to carry on listening whilst longing to put the phone down and say, ‘This cannot be happening to me. There has been some dreadful mistake’. I hate the sound of a telephone ringing at an unsociable hour because I always dread its potential to be a harbinger of ill-wind. Whenever my daughter, who is a systemic family therapist who worked in the NHS for thirteen years and now shares consulting rooms with me, or myself, answer the phone to each other, any pleasure continues to be eclipsed by what has become a habitual reflex, ‘Is everything OK?’ Trauma engraves its own hieroglyphics of terror in the mind long after there has been superficial recovery, or treatment. The breath seemed to have vacated my daughter's voice as her hoarse tones informed me that Jay was in hospital with a bleed in his brain. I barely responded before I dropped the phone down and started fumbling, in jumbled circles, for my clothes and a case. I was incapable of coherent thought.

I was also responsible for the psychological care of the individuals in London who were my patients, and who woke up the next morning to find that I had left London for an uncertain period of time, and without warning. I knew that despite the unfamiliarity and trauma of the world that I had been catapulted into, I wanted to stay in touch with them, rather than request that one of my colleagues make the necessary communications on my behalf. It felt important, from the beginning, that I told as many of these people as possible the changing truth of my circumstances.

There were some patients whose own situations were still too traumatic, or whose personalities were too pathologically narcissistic to burden with the explicit, or in some extreme cases, any details at all of my trauma. It was not easy for me to ring everyone personally; I was emotionally and physically exhausted and even the thought of the impact of a limited communication tired me but for my own individuation and future as therapist it was vital to me that I did. I instinctively knew that I would not be able to return from living through the trauma of murder without my patients knowing what had happened to me. Nor did I want them first to read about it in the newspapers. Although Jay was murdered in Brighton he had recently joined a ‘magic circle’ city London firm and the journalists were already on our doorstep.

Once I was in Eastbourne where my daughter lived and I realised that Jay was dying as a result of his injuries, I couldn't bear, in contrast to speaking to my patients, to speak personally to almost any of my friends or colleagues in London. I resented having to tell, in detail, or dilution, our story to anyone, besides those people who had already formed a closed community at Jay's bedside vigil. I did not then understand why it felt otherwise with my patients, although I do now. When you are seeing people on a long term basis between two and four times a week it can seem as though they are more intimate, more attuned to your sensibilities - by which I do not mean your biography, or life - than anyone except your most intimate associates. This may sound as though I had expectations of sympathy from my patients, which I did not; one or two even without narcissistic personality disorder were openly angry with me, which I perceived as a healthy if unsympathetic response. I remembered that at the beginning of my own analysis my analyst had been absent for several weeks due to acute illness and that mixed in with my sympathy was my resentment and some anger. There was guilt too that, by becoming his patient, I had harmed him.

From the start my telephone number was available to everyone and I never wavered in my wish to remain in open communication with those patients who wanted that information or reassurance that I would be returning to work. It is very important to me as a therapist who -

during my own long analysis - experienced the irony that when some of the most critical moments of my life occurred my analyst was unavailable that my patients all have my mobile phone number available to them 24/7. I cannot recall when I have been inappropriately disturbed or taken advantage of by telephone, although the advent of texting and emails now make the situation of intrusion more complex to assess.

I knew that when I returned to practice it would be impossible for me to face my patients like a closed book. One of the immediate consequences of suffering a traumatic shock can be that you feel as though you have become transparent and that complete strangers have access to the fact that something sensational has happened to you. As you shop in the supermarket still in a daze, but life must, as Auden reminds us continue, you cannot imagine that your circumstances are not transmitted across your features. You no longer know what you look like, if you ever did; whether you look as devastated as you feel, or whether you have aged and become unrecognisable overnight. Later on my appearance became important to me, not only out of vanity but also from self-preservation and the expectations of some people that one must inevitably look visibly ravaged by trauma. Most people assume you are depressed and wounded by the tragedy and of course you are; but at the same time all sorts of other emotions like humour, love, courage and a new vision of relatedness may, if you are fortunate in your support systems, also begin to emerge. There were even inappropriate moments of family hilarity which of course were born out of hysteria and not unrelated to the gallows type humour that keeps many doctors and particularly surgeons sane.

The thing that I have found most difficult about my associations, or should I say intimacy, with trauma is that most people expect you to be diminished by it and of course you are. I have been diminished and permanently wounded and my natural inclination to pessimism has been intensified into something that possibly goes beyond even the philosopher John Gray's vision of the world. I cannot take anything for granted which is exhausting and yet at my best I am still a celebrant of life and yes, I try consciously to seize every day. Carpe diem! indeed. In the terrible sacrifice of life, Jay's precious life, there also existed tissues of transfiguration, growth and individuation and that was most of my family's long-term experience although you can never compensate children for a lost father. I knew at the deepest level of being that if I could consciously endure the pain of Jay's murder without becoming its victim I could, ultimately, be of more value to my patients, and not less. I also knew that when I returned to my consulting room I would not be able to hide behind the mask of an anonymous bereavement - I decided that my long-term patients had the right to know - and to dismiss what had happened to me. I kept my initial communication to the bare minimum but at the same time I knew a statement had to be made, as I did not want to take the risk of my circumstances being discovered in the newspapers. Whether they wished further to address it in greater detail, or to cross over, as many of us may do when we meet death, to the other side of the road was their choice. Some people did, metaphorically as it were, cross to the other side of the road and relieved me of the exhaustion of sharing a part of my story. Others not only accompanied me along my difficult way but also, through their continued confidence in my therapeutic capacities, played an active part in my recovery and self-composure. It was different with patients who came into my care after the event, and with whom I had no desire to share the tragedy, although for several years it felt as if I was being dishonest in some perverse way and presenting a distortion of my self. In fact when new patients want to refer to my book, it almost feels as if they are talking about somebody else, and they will seem far more affected by my historical life than I now am.

One of my fears during the first weeks that followed Jay's death was that I might become too depressed to return to work, and become unable to concentrate upon other people's unhappiness. This, it transpired, was also a common fear for many of my patients. But that did not happen. As soon as I returned to London, I discovered that my desire to work and become re-engaged with my patients was, apart from my family, the most important thing in my life. I

am grateful that it never became a question of having to work but that I was still motivated out of a desire, or a passion to work. The origin of the word ‘patient’ is to suffer and the Shorter Oxford Dictionary offers the following: ‘Bearing or enduring (evil of any kind) with composure; exercising or possessing patience…quietly awaiting the course or issue of events…Persistent, constant, unwearied in the face of difficulties and hindrances’. To varying degrees these are all vital qualities that have to be forged in the consulting room, out of the mire of our being, for any meaningful outcome of therapy and whatever it is that I wish to help my patients achieve is also relevant to achieve for myself.

Why might I have wished to take a different course and to hide my suffering from my familiars and fellow sufferers? To begin with many patients presented me with the same answer again and again, ‘I will never be able to talk to you about my own problems which are insignificant and indulgent now that I know what you have been through’. Some were terrified by the word murder and others said, ‘How on earth can you feel like listening to me droning on about my boring old self?’ ‘Aren't you feeling distracted?’

I have never believed that human misery can be measured. Some of the worst damage that I have witnessed inflicted on individuals has been due to chronic and low levels of emotional abuse which have gone undetected for many years, and long term experiences of living in a ‘double bind’ rather than the consequences of an acute trauma. To begin with I had to offer my patients the opportunity to see that although my family would carry the scars of its violent bereavement for life this did not mean that we had to become its victims. I had to reassure them that with the long term but temporary re-organisation of my working week into four days it would be possible to redistribute my time between them and my family appropriately. I had to let them know that I had not forgotten all the small details of their own lives and wounds, that I had not lost my desire to return to the uniqueness of those dialogues which I still felt and continue to feel privileged to share. And they believed me. Well, nobody decided to terminate therapy with me. For some people my visible vulnerability also became my strength, for others it became an anxiety, but a shared anxiety, which could also act as a threshold to an honest dialogue and to their increased consciousness about the random nature of our lives. For one particular patient I am about to quote verbatim, I now know that my disclosure changed the course of his therapy, which I only found out many years later. (I have to admit how angry I become about a number of patients' experiences who have found their way into my consulting room for a second therapy and who have had therapists or analysts who have concealed diagnoses of terminal illness, trauma, or temporary breakdown from them, and even refused to discuss their patient's observations by batting them off with a transference interpretation. I perceive this to be abuse).

Two years ago I was asked to give a paper at the John Bowlby Memorial Lectures. I have become tired of writing papers that focus only on my own voice and without the opportunity of a response from the people I may be writing about, or evidence that my theoretical hypotheses have been affirmed, or not, by a patient's improved health. I responded to the invitation from Sir Richard Bowlby by saying I would only accept if I could write collaboratively. I then invited an ex patient, Harry, who had been in therapy with me between two and four times weekly for thirteen years, to write a joint paper giving his account of our therapeutic work around his acutely damaged infantile attachments. Only when I read his first draft, did I discover that the session when I had shared my son in law's death with him had also become a moment of epiphany in his trajectory towards health.

Harry:

I was in therapy with Jane for thirteen years. Even as a patient, I always believed it was vital to keep a formal, professional environment of studied trust in the therapeutic space. Therapist in chair, me on couch, safely locked door, fifty-minutes-to-the-minute, a complete absence of my therapist's personal life: not the faintest whiff of counter transference to my suspicious nose. A

dog barks downstairs, a son walks past on the landing, someone heard at the front door during the session: if these were understandable as lone incidents, my rational mind shrugged even as my hackles rose in resentment at the intrusion. Is it possible to keep such formal boundaries between two people sacrosanct, for so long? Fate, chance, luck must inevitably play some role. In fact, it was precisely when immediate life intruded dramatically into the space of my therapy – those moments of more major intrusion – that proved crucial fulcrums in my evolution to the person I have become: a man built on the words and syntax I have chosen; not the confused polyphonies of other people's voices; those other people's charismatic, dominating characters with which I first arrived in therapy. Yet the enlightening outcome of those moments of intrusion would have been impossible without a pre-existing and personal space of sympathy between Jane and I. This was born partly from the formal therapeutic trust, but was not its constituent. It was more: unique, personal, intimate – human.

Three particular intrusions stand out.

1. I am twenty-nine. A year into my therapy. Studying for my master's degree in medical anthropology. One afternoon, I stop in at the Student's Union bar for coffee, en route to see Jane. As I am leaving, two young students push past me, laughing, cheerful daytime drunks no older than nineteen. “Fuck off!” one of them laughs at my protest. Still holding my briefcase in my left hand, I punch him hard enough to split two knuckles, and am in the process of dragging the other down the ramp to throw him in front of traffic on the Euston Road – my mind crystal cold in its planning – when the security guard who was standing at the door steps in to separate us. Twenty minutes later I arrive at Jane's, breathing short and hard with elation. Carrying a briefcase, nice, middle-class boy – but finally here to prove what I really am. She sends me to clean my hand, which is dripping celebratory blood onto her sanded floorboards. At last I have shown her what I've been trying to explain was my true character.

2. In 1999, Jane's son-in-law was killed after being attacked outside a club in Brighton. It was all over the press, and Jane inevitably was forced to tell her clients what had happened. So many of the stories of my past are wreathed in violence (as we shall see). But what can I now do, hearing her story? I stop being involved in the casual violence I have described at the Students' Union. Up to that point, I had a certain strut that my propensity to violence gave me. An identity. An identity at odds with my first class degree in anthropology, my M.Sc.with distinction. Now that strut shames me. I am tongue-tied in my sessions with Jane. I resent her not a little for forcing her private life upon me and, in doing so, taking the split syntax of my defensive dual personality from me – the boozer and fighter, and the public school boy.

I may not need to remind that Google, which has inevitably had a huge impact on the requisite blank screen persona of the analyst became first available in limited form in September 1998, and for many months afterwards remained an unused object of mystery to most of the population, which did not begin to peak until 2004. My son in law was attacked on the 29^th January 1999 at which time Google's search machine would not have had the exposure to be relevant. I am not the kind of therapist who sees it desirable to maintain impermeable and rigid boundaries between my professional and personal life. There are some aspects of one's personal life that are private, even secret and other areas where it may be appropriate, or even beneficial to share selectively with one's patients. But any disclosure requires careful thought and personal scrutiny and it is in these creative tensions that distinguish spontaneity from impulsiveness that wisdom may possibly inhabit. I am well aware that my later decision in 2008 to publish a memoir, which included my private childhood experiences of trauma, my analyst's shocking death and an account of Jay's death was and still is controversial. I was determined that the book's existence would not be indebted to a cathartic act on my part and I therefore delayed publishing it for several years after my analyst's death and his wife's as well.

I still have many patients who have never Googled me and know nothing about the book's existence, or Jay's death and there are others who found out about the book during their therapy but decided not to read it until they had finished the work. Others who have never read it and do not want to read it and yet other patients who have chosen me, and who may never have entered into any therapy except that they came across my book randomly when they happened to Google, Hilary Mantel who wrote the introduction.

Although my advance for the book was modest it has become a valuable and constant source of referrals to me, and has made a difference to my income and to the types of patients who consult me. These people who have read it and are now consulting with me might want to argue that they do not require, or desire their therapist to exist as a blank screen lacking in the three dimensionalities of past, present and future. There will be many others who are seeking therapy and who would disqualify me immediately and I will also often suggest that I am not the right therapist. Anybody who Googles me today will instantly find below my name, this quotation from Stuart Jeffries' review in the Guardian after the publication of my book, over which I have no control:

Patients who avoid the book will miss the compelling story of how Haynes crawled from the wreckage of her childhood. As a girl, she was abandoned by her mother and raised, albeit briefly, by a father dying of syphilis who ultimately suffered what doctors called “general paralysis of the insane”. He was a tyrant whom Haynes compares to her Hitler, yet whom she also refers to late in the book as “beloved”.

After his death, he became an even more harrowing figure: years later, while doing a doctorate on Jacobean literature, her dreams became filled with horrors such as her father's face being eaten hollow, just as Dr Pangloss's were when Candide meets him, ravaged by syphilis, in Voltaire's novel.

For this presentation I was asked to focus on the specifics of what happens when a therapist becomes the victim of a trauma that attracts public or national interest, and how this impacts upon their professional life. I have experienced both public and private trauma and whereas in the case of the former it was reported in the press and over which my family had no control as to how and when it was reported, the trauma that I experienced as a child would have remained private had I not chosen to write about my life in the form of personal memoir. My son in law did not trigger the book by his death, which tragedy became an object of national scrutiny; it was triggered by the experience of my own analyst's premature death, which also came as a terrible bolt from the blue. I was already qualified, and when he died I had been in five times a week analysis for over twelve years and I did not then choose to consult anyone else. I chose to write an open letter to him. I chose to make my private life public, I chose to give my past, present and future patients the opportunity of knowing about both the childhood and adult trauma that their analyst had suffered.

I also chose to stop labeling myself as a Jungian psychoanalyst and if I have to give myself a theoretical name my preference is as a dialogic therapist, which does not mean that I have abandoned my Jungian training, nor my earlier Freudian analysis with a training analyst from the Institute. It means that I will no longer be confined by either orientation or dogma, which returns us to the present and the long-term impact of trauma on a therapist's life. Of one thing at least I have become increasingly sure and that is that the body in pain - whether that pain relates to psyche or soma - is a body that will feel ashamed, infantilized and even humiliated at the thought of needing help. I have discovered that the same is true of analysts who may feel even more shame at the thought of needing help, but that would be another paper in itself.

Over the years I have discovered that people who come to see me may need other types of therapy than the kind I can provide. I referred earlier to the patient who witnessed members of his family being blown up. Since boyhood he had

suffered from nocturnal terrors and since boyhood he had consulted many psychiatrists and therapists who had provided him with support and increased self-knowledge but nobody had been able to subdue the nocturnal terrors. Even more surprising to me was that no professional - and he is now in his late forties - had recommended he try a course of EMDR. The doctor to whom I referred at the beginning of my paper had not, despite his great interest in the psyche, even heard of EMDR. On my recommendation we decided that therapy with me - although it might provoke an interesting and valuable discourse - would not extinguish these terrors, which had become hard wired into his brain. Instead, I asked him to consult Sandy Richmond who is a leading trainer in EMDR in the UK with the result that after ten sessions with her the nocturnal terrors disappeared, and after a preliminary mild depression he experienced an almost cosmic release of psychic energy and the man then returned to therapy with me to continue on his path of individuation.

I am not afraid of my own death, as it is other people's premature deaths that haunt me, although I will confess that I am afraid of uncontrollable pain. I live in constant fear of other people's untimely and premature death. Yes, seize the day! I find it hard not to be tactless and dismissive of ‘timely’ deaths by which I mean beyond the biblical three score and ten, although as the years move on I struggle not to change my measure. My father was snatched away from me, my mother disappeared before I was six and my small grand children's father was not spared; my analyst died almost before my eyes. Why would I now want to work under the exclusive authority of any theoretical father except my own integrity, my continuing desire for knowledge, personal development, supervision and an ethical desire first of all, to do no harm?

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