3:AM Magazine

By Max Dunbar.

I must have made a childish resolve not to close my ears to the terrible suffering that, as an adult, I was to discover infects a staggering proportion of the world’s population.

Psychotherapy allowed Jane Haynes to overcome a terrible childhood and inspired her to become a therapist herself. Who is it that can tell me who I am? is Haynes’s memoir and casebook.

The book has attracted raves from Hilary Mantel and Kate Kellaway and indeed, if Haynes has a fault, it’s that she’s too self-consciously literary. The prose is flooded with quotation, not all of it apt. No situation is so banal that it cannot be compared to a Shakespeare play. There is also too much preamble, too much discussion of the boundaries between therapist and patient, and not enough of the case files - which is the real meat of the book. The client only remembers around five per cent of any given session. It’s good to have these things written down.

When Haynes relinquishes the spotlight to her patients the results are fascinating. There’s a brilliant study of a man so heavily addicted to internet porn that he can’t make love to his girlfriend. He was so into the passive that he can’t handle the active, and thus the classic simulation of sex becomes more fulfilling than sex itself. The patient delivers a warning to the contemporary male: ‘It’s a nasty, shameful little room that many of us are hiding in. Time to come out, boys.’

The best part of the case file is a long back-and-forth between Haynes and a patient she calls Miss Suicide - she has tried to kill herself in a hotel, and was only saved because the chambermaid noticed the Tesco bag on her head. It’s a screenplay-style dialogue, and in it you understand the very real benefits that talking and listening can bring. Other patients make you realise the sheer existential horror that can come from being alone.

When I spent a long time out working or playing, I’d feel safe and good the moment I stepped into my bedroom. It wasn’t the pride of being in a place of my own - it was like the room was an extension of my body. It smelled like me - my personality was hammered into the walls. I was delighted to discover that Haynes has picked up on the same thing. When she meets a tiny child who takes comfort in smelling her own body fluids because ‘it smells like me’; she knows this isn’t Freud’s anal compulsion.

That’s just one of the insights in this remarkable book, and there’s a lot of interesting speculation on the degree of separation between body and self. ‘She was communicating with me, in uncensored language, that her body was herself,’ Haynes tells us. It strikes me that the imposed distinction may be one cause of the amount of mental illness in the world.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals including Open Wide, Straight from the Fridge and Lamport Court. He also writes articles on politics and religion for Butterflies and Wheels. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry. He is a co-editor of 3:AM and blogs here.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, April 24th, 2009.