Luckily I had prematurely white hair in my twenties, which added some much-needed gravitas to my demeanour. I sat behind my huge mahogany desk looking like a cross between Anna Freud and Joan Crawford. I was newly transformed from a student in jeans and a T-shirt to a professional, decked out in a silk blouse and a designer suit with linebacker shoulder pads, de rigueur in the early eighties.
She was referred to me through a general practitioner, who in his recorded message said, “She’ll fill you in on the details.” I don’t know who was more frightened, Laura or I. No one brought this home to me more than Laura Wilkes, my first patient. I had no idea on that first day that psychotherapy wasn’t the psychologist solving problems but rather two people facing each other, week after week, endeavouring to reach some kind of psychological truth we could agree on. Instead, I had to learn how to be flexible as new information trickled in weekly. Fortified with the knowledge I’d acquired, taking comfort in the rules I’d learned, I looked forward to having patients I could “cure.”įortunately, I had no idea at the time what a messy business clinical psychology was or I might have opted for pure research, an area where I’d have control over my subjects and variables. THE DAY I OPENED my private practice as a psychologist, I sat smugly in my office.
0 kommentar(er)
