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. Then there’s the alpha male who suffered a TBI (traumatic brain injury) while base-jumping (the nutter!), and seemed to recover. But his family detected tiny discrepancies in his character and grew to hate him. Or perhaps, Benjamin conjectures, the injury merely gave them an excuse to indulge resentments that had long been suppressed.
The slippery nature of the truth is one of his favoured themes: the idea not just that truth is hard to pin down, but that it may not exist in the way you suppose. It’s one thing to make this argument, another to embody it in your prose — actually far harder, given the linear nature of language. Benjamin does both.
It emerges that, in a way that seems peculiarly contemporary, this book is all about him. It’s about the subjectivity, unreliability and instability of psychologists in general, and him in particular.
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