Chapter 1


The Statue and the Bust

I entered your consulting room on a mild afternoon; the sun was shining and it was July; a gentle day. Blue tits chased between the shrubs and then were lost amongst a tangled squall of briar roses. Distant but audible church bells rang the hour as I imagined myself setting out on a pilgrimage that felt as seductive as a cliché . When I entered your room I was confronted by an open grand piano. I felt intimidated because I knew so little about music. I am tone deaf and ever since my school days, when I was excommunicated from the choir, I have been anxious about my inhibitions to respond to rhythm. Your room seemed arcane; it seemed to me that the belly of your piano contained mysteries of nature. I remember thinking, as I monitored my reflection in its surface, I could not raise my eyes to look at you, that you knew all sorts of things that were still out of my reach. I felt uninitiated and excited. The timbre of your voice appealed to me and I liked my first impressions of your self- possessed confidence and the absence of flamboyant male ego. I did not like the fact that the book-lined walls were crammed with ancestral authorities; a large figurative painting of a naked couple took me by surprise and, at once, made me curious about your taste. I imagined you to be married - but there was something androgynous about your presentation - and a faded quality of blue to your eyes. I started to think of you as that Greek trickster Tiresias who 'though blind, throbbing between two lives, /Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see.'*


Half way through this consultation, or should I say epiphany, you said, 'You do know that my agreeing to see you for a consultation doesn't mean that I shall be able to take you into analysis?' My only response was to choke on my invisible tears. I already knew that I didn't want to go anywhere else and you didn't raise the issue again.

What I couldn't then know was that I was going to return to your room five times a week for thirteen years and that this experience was fundamentally going to change my life so that I would even forget about my intention to train for several years. It was not possible for me to imagine the nature of the odyssey that I had already embarked upon. Later, I looked back, imagining that I had set sail towards Byzantium . The therapeutic experience did not become less painful as the years gathered pace; neither did it diminish in its intensity. Only with hindsight can I acknowledge that when I first met you I was as damaged as Humpty Dumpty but, as a result of your patience and professional skills, I was able, slowly, to reassemble my shattered internal world. I am not ashamed to acknowledge that I was - to begin with - more damaged and more dependent than many of the patients who subsequently have entered into therapy with me. Yet, I remain wary of the phrase 'a wounded healer': it is not sufficient for the wounds to have healed but rather for that person - who wishes to move from patient to 'healer' - to have also acquired, through a rigorous training, an objective understanding of the common origins of human suffering and depression. This combination of insight and professional competence must be accompanied by the wise acknowledgment that we are all