I found a paperback novel called The Analyst by Jonathan Katzenbach on the table in the front of my local Border's book store, where they put the mass market novels people buy for pure escape reading on the beach or on an airplane. Surprise, it's actually about an analyst. It's a horrific thriller in which a Manhattan analyst named Ricky Starks is threatened by an anonymous psychopath who calls himself Rumplestilskin. Rumplestilskin is apparently seeking the cruelest sort of revenge he can devise against the analyst, for a transgression Ricky can't guess. The evil psychopath has set up a complex mind game the analyst has to pursue to save himself. The “game” consumes Ricky's regular August vacation (and ultimately life as he knows it), alienates his colleagues, and devastates and estranges his patients.
Ricky's an authentic, APsaA-trained (one assumes) Manhattan analyst, a member of the “New York Psychoanalytic Society, an organization that he was a longtime member of, but had had precious little to do with over the years.” He owns a vacation home in Wellfleet, and his office borders Central Park Obviously it's no accident he's called Dr. Starks. A widower, he lives alone in a tiny apartment behind his office on the upper east side of Manhattan. He has little involvement with his colleagues, no friends, no family connections. His life is gray, predictable, and tedious. In the opening of the book he describes his day's work as listening to his patients rail about every variety of horrible mother He finds himself waiting for the inevitable moment when they discover it is themselves they loathe and a cure can begin.
It's a horrific thriller in which a Manhattan analyst named Ricky Starks is threatened by an anonymous psychopath who calls himself Rumplestilskin.
The portrayal of analysis in the novel is often detailed and accurate—the intensity and privacy of the relationship, the centrality of transference, the importance of understanding, the depiction of the “talking cure”. Analytic neutrality, the concept of “grist for the mill,” all are portrayed clearly. Yet overall the portrayal is deadly—who would ever want to enter into such a world, either as patient or practitioner?
For a while I wasn't sure I could finish the book even for the lofty purpose of this bit of TAP entertainment. The protagonist was just too depressing. But gradually he, as well as the interesting psychopath that is his nemesis, engaged me.
Mercifully, this book does not try to portray analytic work per se. The analyst has had his last session by the time we enter the story. So as analyst readers we don't get that cranky pleasure of thinking “I would never have said that.” Rather, the book is a psychological thriller about the mental world of the analyst himself. To survive, and possibly to defeat his psychopathic antagonist, he has to grapple with such professional/personal dilemmas as engagement vs. disengagement, participating vs. observing, passivity vs. activity, mentality vs. physicality. It is not too common an experience to see our traits and predilections turned into a thriller.
The author is clearly no stranger to the world of psychoanalysis, and not just from a patient's perspective, or he did his homework well. The relationship between an analyst and his society, ethical charges, the training analyst relationship, the populations able to receive analytic cane—all are seriously taken up by the book in ways that are intrinsic to the plot. This author seems to know us intimately.
How do we come off in this particular public view of our profession? It's a rather complex picture. On the one hand, the analyst (anti)hero is a dreary guy with a gray life and a limited view of the human world, at least at first. On the other hand, he shows a tremendous capacity for growth, mental depth, and flexibility, and a comfort with human complexities not easily come by. In the end, one admires him, and I'm not sorry to call him a colleague. If he were real that is.
Toward the end, the transformed hero thinks this:
One of the tenets of psychoanalysis is that even though the sessions draw to a close, and the daily therapy finally finishes, the process never is completed. What the therapy brings, at its best, is a new way of looking at who one is, and allowing that new definition of one's life to influence the decisions and choices that come with the future. At best, then, those moments are not crippled by the events of the past, and the selections made are oddly relieved of the debts everyone owes to their upbringing.
Not bad.
—Prudy Gourguechon