Espresso Tales - Alexander Hanchett Smith [20]
Bertie thought for a moment. “But you eat trout, don’t you?
38
A Thin Summer
You and Daddy both eat trout. I’ve seen you. Isn’t it just as cruel to eat trout as to catch them? What’s the difference?”
“There’s an important difference,” said Irene. “I’ll explain it to you some time, but not at the moment.” She paused. “Bertie, you know that Mummy does her best for you, don’t you? You know that I love you very much and only want you to be happy?”
Bertie looked down at the floor. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It’s just that I don’t seem to have much fun. I want to have a bit more fun. That boy in Fettes Row has more fun than I do.”
“Oh, Bertie, you can’t say that! Look at all the fun you have!
There’s your saxophone – you love playing that. I bet that boy wouldn’t know how to play the saxophone, or anything for that matter. Anybody can fish – very few boys can play the saxophone. And then there’s your Italian lessons, and your yoga, and . . .” Irene was about to say “and your psychotherapy” but stopped. She was not sure if Bertie was enjoying that as much as she was, and it was best, perhaps, not to mention it in this particular conversation.
Bertie was certainly not enjoying his psychotherapy. It was not that he actively disliked Dr Fairbairn, the prominent psychotherapist and author of the seminal study on that threeyear-old tyrant, Wee Fraser; no, it was not that he disliked him, it was more a question of finding Dr Fairbairn quite impenetrably odd. In fact, Bertie was convinced that Dr Fairbairn was mad, and that the only viable strategy was for him to humour him, hoping thereby to avoid becoming the target of Dr Fairbairn’s unpredictable wrath.
This strategy of humouring had produced the desired effect on the psychotherapist. He found Bertie increasingly co-operative and indeed felt that there were depths to the boy’s psyche that would repay very serious study. There was even the possibility of a paper there – something for the British Journal of Child Psychotherapy or Studia Kleinia perhaps. But that was a long-term goal; the more immediate task, in Dr Fairbairn’s view, was to discover what dynamics were operating in Bertie’s developing ego structure and to work out what blockages were preventing him from developing a more integrated personality.
A Thin Summer
39
Dr Fairbairn was something of a pioneer, and one of the techniques that he had advanced was what he called “Fairbairn’s List Approach”. In this, the child patient was invited to write a list of those matters which were most distressing and to rank these in order of seriousness. This was nothing new in psychotherapy; indeed, some perfectly ordinary parents, untutored in the techniques of Freud and Klein, had used just such a system in dealing with their unhappy or difficult children. “Tell me what’s worrying you – write it down and then we’ll have a look.”
That was all very well, and in many cases it helped to identify the conflict points in the parent/child relationship. But what made Dr Fairbairn’s technique so advanced was that in addition to writing down the matter that was troubling or unsatisfactory, the child was invited to write down, in a separate column, who he thought was responsible for the state of affairs in question. In Dr Fairbairn’s opinion, this gave a direct and useful insight into the child’s view of the problemproducing dynamic. Bertie had been asked to do this. “I want you to make a list,”
said Dr Fairbairn, giving Bertie a piece of paper. “I want you to write a list of things that make you unhappy – things you don’t like to do or would like to change. Then draw an arrow from each thing on the list – a nice long arrow, with feathers if you like