No shrinking violet

‘I have fallen in love many times in my consulting room,’ writes the psychotherapist Jane Haynes. ‘I do not mean that I want to have an explicit sexual relationship,’ she clarifies. That said, she describes herself as the Desdemona of the consulting room, falling in love as she listens to ‘someone share the pity of their history’. And like Othello’s stories that titillated Desdemona, Haynes’s narratives of her and her patients’ painful lives are compelling, if passing strange, particularly given that her profession is usually reticent about what goes on behind closed doors between shrink and shrunken.

Haynes offers her insight into that secret world: ‘They present me with their “lives” just as Salome was presented John the Baptist’s head on a golden platter.’ Perhaps don’t stress that to prospective patients, eh? Therapists aren’t supposed to write like this. They’re not meant to be seduced by clients’ narratives. And they aren’t supposed to be quite so discombobulatingly gabby in print.