When the bandages came off
Michael Church
THE MAN WHO LOVED A POLAR BEAR AND OTHER PSYCHOTHERAPIST'S TALES by Robert U. Akeret Constable, £14.95, pp. 235 Judging by the way it's talked about in the press, you'd think psychoanalysis was on the ropes. Its reputation has been heavi- ly dented by the wacky excesses of West Coast gurus and by the preposterousness of the only-the-mad-are-sane brigade. Prozac- junkies claim pills do a better job for a fraction of the cost. Freud's character is assassinated, and his method rubbished, as in Richard Webster's monumental indict- ment, Why Freud Was Wrong (never mind that Freud neither aimed, nor claimed, to be anything so banal as 'right'). This con- certed barrage may for the most part be irrelevant, but it does place an onus on defenders of the talking cure: to make sense, and to cut the crap. It's a shame that Adam Phillips — author of Terrors and Experts, and psychoanalytical darling of London's literary intelligentsia — should be so in love with obfuscation.
Enter Robert Akeret, with a title recall- ing Oliver Sacks's brilliant collection of case-studies, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. Akeret seems a wonky advo- cate for the psychoanalytic cause. Sacks may be a neurologist, but one senses that, psychoanalyst though he is, Akeret wants to follow in his footsteps. Sacks's work has given rise to a play, a film, and two musi- cals. Why not a similar afterlife for The Man Who Loved a Polar Bear? Akeret is curiously shameless about his literary intention: if he has successfully made this book `read like a novel', that is because it has been 'rendered into a narrative' by a novelist roped in for the purpose. This fact, lurking behind a narrative purporting to be documentary truth, induces a queasy mistrust.
And this is a very peculiar 'novel'. It opens with a declaration of frustration: as an analyst who sees his 'children' disappear at the end of treatment, Akeret never knows how the story ends. When his back is turned, does his work unravel? Breaking a cardinal professional rule, he decides to find out. Five former patients express a willingness to meet him after an interval of 30 years. In the course of his journey from
one to another, something else emerges: he has had a nervous breakdown after gam- bling away his family's savings, and he is on a quest — more desperate than he seems to realise — for proof of his own worth.
He finally concludes that three of the five are therapeutic successes — sad misfits who have turned into eager embracers of life — but it's the failures who make this book riveting. I won't spoil the reader's pleasure by retailing the post-analytical life of Sasha, a novelist and wife-tormenting narcissist, or of Charles, who loved — truly loved — a female polar bear. Sade might have written Sasha's story, but it would take the combined talents of Pirandello, Genet and Borges to create a tale of such piercing strangeness as that of Charles. Innocently inquiring why his young patient had chosen one particular bear out of a cageful of shaggy white giants, Akeret had drawn a witheringly scornful reply: 'Why does anybody fall in love with anybody?' Detailing Charles's early conditioning at the hands of parents who were both polar bear-obsessed and barking mad, Akeret soberly concludes that it would have been hard to imagine him being sexually attract- ed to anything other than polar bears.
But Charles had originally arrived on Akeret's doorstep swathed in bandages: his inamorata had been rough with him. Like any responsible therapist, Akeret saw it as his prime duty to save his patient from self- destruction, by deflecting him from further advances into her cage. He succeeded, but at a price. The middle-aged Charles is a sado-sex-club performer, visibly drained of all ardour. 'To save his life,' says Akeret, smiting his bosom, 'I had amputated his soul.' Meanwhile, Sasha the narcissist accuses Akeret of trying to 'shrink his spirit': as a celebrated but pseudonymous novelist, he systematically sacrifices his life to his art, and genuinely believes he would have nothing to write about if he were 'cured'. Akeret's discussion of the madness-and-creativity conundrum is impressive in that it avoids pat-conclusions. As he rightly points out, any therapist seeing Pablo Picasso would have diagnosed him as suffering from a narcissistic person- ality disorder. 'But who would dare recom- mend him for treatment? Not me.'
So what, in his view,-is psychoanalysis? Not a science but an art, and to be evaluat- ed as such — subjectively, intuitively, with imagination and leaps of faith. If it has an aim, it is to help the patient lead a 'better' life, in some way to 'feel better'. This may be hard to pin down objectively, but the patient knows when it happens, and that's what counts. Whether Akeret himself now feels better is a side issue (analysts are often helped by their patients). But in the course of his journey he tells epic tales of the human spirit, and he convincingly argues the case for free-association and dream-analysis, Freud's much-maligned weapons of happiness.
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