Article : I read my therapist’s notes and realised she was the one that needed help

[Sly Saint]

interesting but quite disturbing article in the Telegraph.

When Michael Bacon had his first therapy session as a shy 11-year-old, he sat on a bench just inside the door of the room because it was the nearest seat to the exit and had comfy cushions on it.

For his psychoanalyst Edna O’Shaughnessy, however, this choice was thick with hidden meaning. The cushions he gravitated towards were “desexualised parents who he holds apart and around himself”. His tendency to stare at the floor was because he saw on its surface “a confused vagina and mouth”. His gazes towards the door were not prompted by a desire to escape the strange encounter, but because he discerned on it “a penis and testicles”.
Bacon, now a friendly, youthful 50-year-old, endured three years of psychoanalysis in the mid 1980s. He found it boring and hated it, eventually calling a halt when he was 14. Since then, the lecturer in political theory at Royal Holloway University of London, would, at times, puzzle over the aberrant period in his otherwise fairly standard childhood. But in the main, he didn’t dwell on it.

That changed one day in 2022 when, sitting with his wife in a pub, his idle googling unearthed an obituary of O’Shaughnessy, who had died six months earlier.

The tribute to the well-respected child psychologist, who worked out of the Tavistock Clinic, in London, referred to her published case notes. His interest piqued, the next day Bacon searched for the documents and sent them to his wife who was keen to read them.

“Half an hour later she came running in saying ‘I’ve found you, you’re called Leon’,” he says.

Bacon is amazed anew every time he reads the case notes. He likens the psychoanalyst’s adherence to theory to a religion. “O’Shaughnessy’s account of our relationship is almost entirely her own invention,” he says. “Reading her essays as an adult, I see how she was trying to fit me into her theoretical framework – sometimes by revising the theory to match our interactions. Her weighty sense of her own importance led her to strip my life of any meaning beyond analysis.”

MSN

 

[rvallee]

For his psychoanalyst Edna O’Shaughnessy, however, this choice was thick with hidden meaning. The cushions he gravitated towards were “desexualised parents who he holds apart and around himself”. His tendency to stare at the floor was because he saw on its surface “a confused vagina and mouth”. His gazes towards the door were not prompted by a desire to escape the strange encounter, but because he discerned on it “a penis and testicles”.

LOL, LMAO even. No need for the prompting title to go straight to "oh wow this person has serious issues".

He found it boring and hated it, eventually calling a halt when he was 14

Smart young man.

I was assigned a psychiatrist for a few months when I was trying to find a GP who would do something, anything, to help me. Saw her maybe 10 times. As soon as I found a GP she was more than happy to discharge me. I saw zero usefulness in the experience, and clearly neither did she. Fortunately it wasn't weird, featured no psychoanalysis, and an appropriate round number of talks about genitals. But it was a waste of time. Boring. Pointless. She photocopied her notes for me to bring. I read them. It wasn't exactly wrong, but none of it was right either. It was an approximation of reality, something like it, but a pale imitation, not even margarine trying to pass as butter.

I had a similar experience with a psychologist in the early days when I got ill. It was entirely a waste of time. Once we exhausted the reason for why I was told to consult ("I am ill and have no idea why and can't find a physician who is interested") we ended up spending the remaining 5-6 sessions talking about something that was the first thing that popped into my head when she prompted me what else should we talk about.

Had she had the wit to ask, at any point, whether what we spent roughly half the 12-pack of sessions (it was a graduate student psychologist under supervision with an appropriate discount) was any concern to me, maybe something like how much it bothers me, or how often I think about it, I would have simply said: zero, none at all, this is totally unimportant to me, it was just the first thing I thought of because I had nothing of relevance to talk about.

Her supervisor obviously did not think about asking either. In fact there were no questions asked about whether I found something useful, or anything like that. It was a complete waste of time, but I was severely cognitively impaired and just went along with it. I'm sure she passed. None of them have any idea it was a total waste of time.

Mental health care is really not a shining city on a hill, uh?

 

[bobbler]

I'm glad that someone in a position to not be undermined and have it twisted back on them has been allowed to say it as it is that there are a lot of people out there who are very deluded and live their entire lives seeking out positions where they seriously harm large numbers of individuals because of their need due to this to find vulnerable people they can claim 'have the problem' to cover up for it being theirs.

ANd yes, some illnesses like ME/CFS are buried in this type and the more unsupported they are by being less fortunate in their support network sometimes the more targeted they are. And noone wants to address the real problem source 'out of politeness' whilst telling themselves that's the nice thing to do even though it is ignoring the fact that the victim of it is enduring worse harm than the 'being offended' would involve if they said something.

But that is power and culture for you. Either people valued 'keeping in' with those people more than those others to open their ears or eyes to it, or were happy to blindly believe in it because of that choice of who was a more useful or worthwhile friend to have etc. Or because they found it useful in the sense of muddying the cause/action-consequences equation regarding the hurt or less fortunate.

It's obviously not good for them either for people who are bystanders to choose to not think and call it out as maybe a bit dodgy because I guess it is so many people letting them go along with it for too many years that makes people assume that what they are doing is really helpful rather than update and learn.

I can't imagine what it might be like to spend decades of a career being allowed to do the wrong thing and ignore feedback or assume things not working is 'the other person' and if at any point, but it being past the point where their ego or conscience could take acknowledging it, they start getting little pangs of realisation and it all starts to pull against itself in strange ways with goodness knows how many sticking plaster cognitive dissonance things being needed when you mightn't want to say out loud that the beliefs you built your life and identity on and personality and choices and habits mightn't add up, but you can't stop on your own.

Which is why this unquestioning methodology to theories ie belief-driven 'psych' cannot and should not be seen as anything other than harmful if it doesn't come with these proper questioning checks on a regular and open-minded audit basis that is very independent to anyone with a belief or conflict of interest. however common sense they might seem at the point in time they are invented, pushed or someone comes across them in their lives.

Or how every single person that goes through these same people end up apparently sounding like one of a very small number of cardboard cut-outs rather than recognisable to the situation and what people familiar with them would describe the person as.