Psychotherapy, some people believe, is colonic irrigation for the upstairs. Rich people go along to their therapists, have a speculum inserted into their mind's anus, and watch and wonder at the sight of their own crud being washed out through a clear tube. And no matter how often they take the treatment, there's always more stuff to be shifted.
I've heard this view (or something like it) expressed several times just in the course of the last week. In fact, a disdain for therapy is becoming almost as fashionable now as therapy was in the period after the death of Princess Diana.
Some of this is justified. I could decide tomorrow that it would help your rejuvenation should I, say, dangle a magnet over your invisible aura. This therapy I might name magnetic-auratherapy, and I would start advertising in the Highbury and Islington Express as a magnetic-auratherapist. Roll up, lie down, shell out.
Interestingly, though, the target at the moment is not this proliferating semi-mysticism, but the more respectable forms of psychotherapy. In the past few weeks, several studies have been seized upon as more or less proving that psychotherapy is usually a waste of space. One concludes that the technique of making people face their traumatic experiences actually causes them additional distress, another that "repressing memory" is a good idea.
This, and other surveys doubting the efficacy of trauma treatment, have led to vast conclusions being drawn about the entire business of helping people with their invisible sufferings. After all, who counselled the victims of the blitz? Our fathers and mothers (or, at least, their fathers and mothers), like Norman Tebbit's famous unemployed father, got on their psychological bikes and pedalled off.
This was the line on Thought For The Day last week, when the novelist and evangelical vicar's wife, Anne Atkins, spoke for many (she is, says her agent, "above all clear-sightedly biblical." I don't think she's quite that exciting). Some Leninists still think that psychoanalysis is the selling of self-indulgences to the narcissistic sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie.
A toned-down version of this prejudice is that, while psychotherapy might well be of some use to the totally bonkers, nevertheless too many silly people get down on the couch for reasons of vanity, and simply are not sufficiently damaged to qualify for help.
This is mostly nonsense. Some of my best friends are psychotherapists, they are among the most insightful people I know, and the one thing they do not do is spend time talking to patients who don't have problems. Nor do they soft-soap them, or feel their pain, or let them drone on while falling asleep, waking only to present the bill. Far from being an indulgent process consisting of the therapist listening and the patient regressing into their (unremarkable) childhoods, the therapists I know actively search out the present problems faced by the people who come to them. There are people who cannot form happy relationships, who have lost the ability to communicate, whose path is obscured by a dense tangle of emotions and responses. People quite like us.
One of my friends ends every session by asking himself whether there is anything he should have said to the patient, that he will regret not having said. Usually these are tough things to say. That's because what therapists classically attempt is the breaking of these cycles of thought and behaviour that are damaging, seemingly inevitable and which cause significant unhappiness. This unhappiness may be expressed in the forms of substance abuse, alcoholism, patterns of destructive relationships, depression and a thousand other ways that we have of being mad, and of passing our madness on. Just as we had madness passed on to us.
Myself, I apply this simple test. Of the people that I know who have had therapy, I can't think of any who shouldn't have been there. But I certainly can think of plenty who haven't - but bloody well should have. Instead, they've sat it out, shut it out, and not really coped. Too much psychotherapy, you say? There's nothing like enough.
...just ask Ron Davies
Then there's the Ron Davies affair. Davies was forced to resign as Welsh secretary some years back following an incident involving his wallet, two men, Clapham Common and a flat in Brixton. He then rehabilitated himself as a member of the Welsh Assembly, only to be snapped by the Sun this week, emerging from some bushes at a famous cruising spot near Bath. Davies told Sun reporters, apparently, that as a lover of nature, he had been looking for badger setts.
For everyone apart from Davies and his family and friends, the story is very funny. And the expression to "badger" someone is unlikely to be used in quite the same way again.
The Sun, of course, tried to moralise. "There is no place in public life," said its editorial, "for a man with such perverted tastes." Of course there is. Alfresco gay sex - committed away from the public gaze - will soon not be an offence at all. And I can think of no good reason why a politician should be any less entitled to that fresh-air form of houghmagandy than, say, a Sun journalist. Nor is Davies' sin made any worse for me just because (again according to the Sun) he went cruising when he could have been attending the Welsh Labour conference in Swansea. What rational being would not prefer sex with a stranger to attending the Welsh Labour conference? In Swansea?
One of my therapist friends thought he recognised what Davies was doing - apart from the bleeding obvious. For some people, the main problem with sex is that it requires intimacy. Indoor sex - with the door closed - inescapably implies some kind of relationship. Outdoor sex with someone you've never met before allows you to evade intimacy. Pretty quickly, I'd have thought, depending on what kind of footwear you have.
Not only that, but it is rather addictive, particularly for men who are getting older, and finding it more difficult to be "chosen" as sexual partners in clubs or pubs. As with shoplifting, a successful bit of off-the-peg fun can first adrenalise, and then numb the pain.
The answer for Davies is - as you will have worked out by now - not resignation, but therapy.
