It was Abraham’s idea (his surname is withheld) that his therapist, James O’Neill, should write a book about him. This removes, for the reader, the potential for unease about literary profiteering – sometimes a nagging undertow when reading books by analysts about their patients. O’Neill’s extraordinarily moving book is about mutual disclosure, a shared story between patient and therapist. Abraham went to see O’Neill for more than 12 years; and when he first showed up, 30 years ago, at a therapy centre in the grounds of a Catholic convent in west London, he was zipped into a green anorak he was unwilling to take off. This detail fascinates – not wanting to take off a coat when indoors and warm is something I have anecdotally observed to be a sign of depression. Abraham had come to London from Africa (we are not told from where), the son of well-to-do parents, and had a devastating history of repeated sexual abuse. For a long time, silence was a cloak on top of the anorak – his way of trying to be safe.
This is, as Adam Phillips writes in his introduction, a story about trust. And O’Neill wins ours with his unvarnished prose. He describes his own version of abuse: punitive years in a Catholic school in Canada. He confesses that, as a gay man, his relationship with his father was strained and recalls how he wanted to escape his father’s deathbed and later felt that he had failed him. There is, early on, a telling moment when he explains how much he wants to help Abraham, a man about whom he knows next to nothing, and one wonders to what extent this doubles as a need to help himself. He is a trainee analyst with everything to prove, yet Abraham proves frustrating. In the early days, he often shows up late and speechless with only minutes of the session to run.
“Abraham was silenced,” O’Neill writes, “and this locked him into an intimate relationship with his abusers; he was left sharing secrets only with them.” It emerges that Abraham has not seen himself naked since he was abused and it is he who, gradually, puts this right. Little by little, he tells O’Neill his story and orchestrates his recovery, selecting his own rituals. He practises getting undressed in front of a mirror in the flat he has painstakingly furnished to his liking, his organisation of the room a version of the gradual rearrangement of his mind. It is shocking to consider the depth of disturbance that makes his undressing such a challenge. The mirror proves no ally; it offers Abraham merciless messages about his body and O’Neill is acute on the mirror, comparing it to “a piece of sticky flypaper, trapping and binding us to our narcissism”. Nakedness is actual and metaphorical. O’Neill quotes the novelist Richard Ford: “Our most profound experiences are physical events.”
O’Neill knows when not to intervene. But when Abraham announces that he intends to undress in front of him, he is taken aback. This breaks all therapeutic protocol. And at this point, O’Neill’s own journey is under way. He is exploring, outside his consulting room, a new silence. He describes a lecture (he attended reluctantly) in which a Tibetan Buddhist speaker offers one thought: “Ladies and gentlemen, I must tell you, there are no reference points.” He recognises the comic mileage in this but is drawn to the man’s simple serenity. He later explains the message as follows: “I was being told to trust myself, to relax, to enjoy being myself.”
This becomes the goal for both men, but the patience involved in the process is extreme. Towards the end of the book, O’Neill likens himself to a father figure or uncle to Abraham and alludes, in passing, to Iris Murdoch’s sense of the importance of aunts (Murdoch is quoted several times, perhaps because O’Neill’s partner, Peter Conradi, is a Murdoch scholar). O’Neill goes on to allow himself some quiet, brief, well-earned self-congratulation and if this unnerves slightly it is only because of the reflex fear that in congratulating himself, he is tempting providence. Abraham’s story, after all, is not over.
But the book’s ending is remarkable: a heartening letter from Abraham, written to O’Neill earlier this year, describes being back in Africa and meeting, by chance, one of his abusers at a family gathering. If you had been reading Undressing as if it were a novella, you would hunger for the easy narrative satisfaction of a confrontation with the abuser. But Abraham’s decision to keep his head down and hold on to a Christian idea of forgiveness rings truer. And what’s more, his resolve turns out to be a triumphant use of silence.
• Undressing by James O’Neill is published by Short Books (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
