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Go Buttom
Hilary Mantel


What will we find, if we step into the consulting room? Who will give us permission to enter, and who owns the house in which the consulting room is contained?. As I write this first paragraph, I feel I am poised on the threshold, wiping the dust of the streets from my shoes, about to enter a negotiating chamber, a work space, but also a house, a home - perhaps a home away from home.

This is not the first book where a therapist opens her case files, but it is surely the first one where the reader feels so welcomed on an equal basis. Jane Haynes doesn't keep from us her own story - her strange childhood with its enfolded and sequential mysteries - and she explains how the process of psychotherapy has worked for her. This is in fact a book of stories, and the stories behind them. It is commonplace to observe that we are storytelling animals, and that our urge to make sense of our experience through narrative form is ancient and powerful and remarkably strong. The trouble is, though, that many of our stories are fractured, incomplete and incoherent. Jane operates, to my mind, in the territory of healing fiction; if the teller can fix the broken tale, if he can impart it successfully to the people he means it for, then he or she often finds new energy, authority and a sense of completeness.

I first met Jane Haynes not as a patient but as a fellow practitioner in the art of narrative. I found that talking with her provided insights and illuminations that seemed to come out of the blue, and that it allowed me an imaginative freedom that, as a novelist, I am always struggling for. Writers do not have imaginative freedom as a matter of course. They have many different temperaments and many different strengths, and no doubt some of them feel, as I do, that the rash excesses of creativity must be paid for by a daily life that is prosaic, rational and constrained. From day to day my words are under tight control. All the same, I live by metaphor, and sometimes I like to speak in it. It is wise to pick your audience when you do this. Jane was the audience I picked, and she picked me; both of us, in turn and sometimes together, constitute the performance. We have a working relationship, as people say: a friendship which gets results. The knowledge that such a thing could exist led me from a dialogue with Jane herself to a dialogue with her book, and leads me to recommend it to anyone concerned with the life of the imagination and the healing arts.

Sartre says, 'Long before we are born, even before we are conceived, our parents have decided who we will be.' Certainly we are very young when our particular role in the family is allocated to us. Whether we are the favourite or the misfit, Mummy's little helper or Daddy's sugar-plum, whether we are a big brave boy or a nuisance or a mouse or a brat, there is an early disjunction between the reality inside our own heads and the picture that is reflected back to us by others. We are handed our masks very early and forbidden to take them off. I think back to my own schooldays, when hand-writing was taken to be an indicator of character: what most concerned our teachers was that writing must be consistent . You must present yourself, today, as the same person who sat in that place yesterday; in adolescence it is almost an impossible undertaking, but unless you accomplish it you are unlikely to succeed in any terms the world will recognise. The figures who rule at carnival are the ones who have riveted the masks to their flesh; those who pull them aside are likely to be found at day-break stabbed in back alleys. We punish curiosity, difference and variation: ambivalence scares us, and perhaps it is because of this that we find the
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