The Other Side of You

The reasons for choice of partner are obscure and what passes for love is generally a decidedly mixed bag: lust, anxiety, lack of self-worth, sadism, brutality, the need to control, the urge to be looked after; most dangerous of all, the desire to save.

I had a habit I'd picked up from Gus Galen, who supervised my analytic training. He told me that all he needed to know about a patient could be written down on a postcard. When a course of treatment finished, he said he often looked back and saw that everything that had been uncovered could be discerned in what he had noted there. 'It's all in how you interpret information,' he added. 'It can take years to understand in your head what your gut knows from the start.'

"At that time, Jane Austen was my staple reading, a bulwark, I dare say, against my more disturbing professional encounters. For me to think of someone as a character in Jane Austen was a compliment. But, truth to tell, psychiatric patients are not really Jane Austen people. The Austen world has its quota of narcissists, hypochondriacs, low-grade psychotics, and the marginally depressed. But none would fetch up in a psychiatric unit."