The Mirror World of Melody Black by Gavin Extence Read Free Book Online

countered. ‘Astrology, chakras, numerology. I know enough to know these subjects have no basis in reality, just as I know that Freud has no relevance in this room.’
    â€˜I think you’re missing the point,’ I said. ‘I don’t care if Freud is correct. He’s interesting and he writes well. That’s good enough for me. I’d rather read well-written bunkum than poorly written fact. Wouldn’t you?’
    Dr Barbara was still wearing the same narrow smile. ‘Okay. Let me ask you a question. What do you think your dream means?’
    â€˜It’s obvious,’ I replied. ‘It’s painfully obvious. I’m worried that sooner or later I’ll have to grow up and get a serious, secure job that I despise – like my sister. I mean things haven’t been so bad recently, but most of the time I’m just treading water. Without Beck’s salary, we’d have no security at all, and I hate feeling . . . dependent. But, then, I think I’d feel like a fraud if I did something I hated, just for the money. I’m not even sure there’s any regular job I’d be competent in. That’s why I don’t have any clothes on beneath my sister’s trouser suit.’
    Dr Barbara waited patiently until I’d finished, then nodded again. ‘Okay. And if you know all this anyway, then what’s the point of analyzing the dream?’
    â€˜Yes, fair enough. There is no point. It’s just a more interesting way of looking at the same problems.’
    â€˜It’s a more opaque way of looking at the same problems. If you’re feeling anxious, we should talk about that. But there’s no need to muddy the waters by bringing in dreams and so forth. Why circle the issues when you can confront them head-on?’
    I didn’t know if this was an open question or something more pointed, with implications. Probably both. Whatever the case, Dr Barbara was right. There was no reason to complicate matters by introducing Freud into the picture.
    My second therapist had been a card-carrying Freudian (literally; his card read: Dr Bryce: Freudian Analyst ). I found him advertised at the back of the London Review of Books , and he had been an unmitigated disaster. He was patronizing and arrogant, and far less intelligent than he assumed he was. He reminded me of a medical student I went out with in the first year of university, a pompous idiot who read only the Lancet and genuinely believed that George Eliot was a man. That relationship had lasted three weeks; I walked out on my psychoanalyst after less than an hour.
    The therapist before that, my first therapist, had not fared much better. She was an NHS counsellor, a woman in her early forties who worked three days a week in the local surgery. Her office was an awful pastel blue, and littered with the drawings her children had presented to her at the various stages of their artistic incompetence. For five weeks, I found her to be merely ineffectual. Then, on the sixth week, she started expounding with increasing insistence on the value of medication ‘as well’. Not necessarily lithium, given how it had made me feel the first time round – fat, flat and stupid – but perhaps one of the newer line in mood stabilizers, which might present fewer side effects. At this point, I realized that she was in league with my GP and left.
    Compared with these earlier experiences, Dr Barbara was a godsend. She was neither patronizing nor wishy-washy, and she had no hidden agendas. She might have agreed with my ineffectual counsellor when it came to medication; a mood stabilizer, she once said, probably would be of some benefit to me in the sense that it would do precisely what it was meant to do: it would stabilize my mood. But that was not the point. If I found the cure worse than the disease, she respected my right to refuse it. One day, the balance might change, but that was something I would have to