Physician, heal thyself

The journalist Auberon Waugh, in whose time-capsule of a flat I briefly lived in 2000, once summed up what he took to be the primary motivations for writing books. ‘With women, there is this tremendous desire to expose themselves. With men, it is more often an obscure form of revenge.’

In the case of the clinical neuropsychologist Dr A.K. Benjamin, both of these seem to apply. He is impelled by the desire for revenge, mainly on his own self-important profession, but also on women for being nuts. Or perhaps, because he’s scrupulously fair about this, that should be ‘nuts in a different way from the way men are’.

As for Benjamin’s self-exposure, it’s a striptease. His maddening, saddening, slow-burn belter of a book at first seems to be a series of case studies, an episodic but more or less conventional memoir of his career. We learn about the boy who gave himself sexual thrills using a loose electrical wire from his train set.