For Suzy & Julie.

Spent a lovely evening with two intelligent and honest women kicking therapy around like a game of football. First thing to note is honesty without intelligence and intelligence without honesty suck. Another is that when choosing a therapeutic road it’s worth comparing one’s early experiences with that of its originator. Rogers for example suits those who were unloved as a child, Pearls suits those who spent their early years playing cowboys and Indians on a climbing frame, Freud, those who, though favoured parentally, are as a result disassociated from their fellow siblings and contemporaries, and Jung if you’re prone to fainting and your mother was a loony. The dangers of each ones implicit assumptions are obvious. In a group of Rogerians intent on exposing one’s deeply unloved condition it’s not acceptable to say, “but I was”, it just shows denial and a need for further therapy. Freudians will assume you are merely a specimen and Pearlsians will be perplexed by your inability to don war paint and distaste of muddy puddles. And then there’s the rag-tag of social services. Here again the implicit assumptions of funders, that not being middleclass and the receiver of a comfortably large salary makes one a failure as a human being, and as ‘a successful human being’ they must guard against over providing a sense of worth to those innately unworthy. As a result those providing these services are on the one hand strung up by their testicles, or uterus though testicles is easier to imagine, whilst on the other carrying the combined weight of their clients.