The Skeleton Cupboard by Tanya Byron Page A

in my throat. What was wrong with this little girl? Why wouldn’t she communicate with me? How could I possibly help her if she wouldn’t talk?
    I thought about transference and countertransference, tried hard to work out whose rage I was experiencing. The look on Imogen’s face left me in no doubt that she was pissed off at being thwarted in her attempt to hang herself. She wanted to die, and we had stopped her. I got that.
    But there was a lot of my rage sitting there with us.
    I’d been seeing this twelve-year-old since she was admitted three weeks ago. As a clinical psychologist in my first year of training, and eager to prove myself to Chris after the last debacle with Ray, I had specifically requested that I be assigned to Imogen as her individual therapist and case manager. At first I was refused on the grounds of lack of experience—she was a tricky one, a complicated case. The social workers wanted her, the family therapist wanted her and the analyst wanted her.
    But in the end I got her. No one else was receiving training in cognitive behavioral therapy. She came from a loving family, so no social work was needed, thanks. The soft-spoken, leather-moccasined, vegan family therapist had too many other cases, and anyway, the focus needed to be on the child this time around, not the family. And the analyst? I wouldn’t let him near any child, especially not one like Imogen.
    Instinctively, I leaned toward the here-and-now type of therapeutic intervention. I was suspicious of therapists who asked their patients to lie down and then took them back to their relationships with their mothers, spending most of the session out of their line of sight, in silence.
    I didn’t get analysis. I might have been much more open to the ideas if the analysts themselves weren’t so bloody full of it. They were up their own rectums with self-importance; they seemed to believe that only they had read and understood the Holy Scripture of mental health.
    For me, analysis had always been a bit too much like religion—purporting to possess the key to understanding the fundamental questions of life, but unable to provide any evidence to back up its case.
    â€œI am so sorry that you don’t feel any better about life after two years of thrice-weekly sessions. It pains me that you are still unable to form a meaningful relationship, and that on some days even washing your hair feels like an unattainable goal, but to question whether lying here on this couch while I silently write notes and say little is the right approach is—forgive me for pointing it out—a symptom of the difficulty you have in really connecting with this therapy, indicative of your difficulty in connecting with other people more broadly. It is clear that this rebellion is you acting out and sabotaging our relationship—as you so readily sabotage other relationships in your life. It suggests to me that you now need to see me five days a week instead of three, for an indeterminately long time—apart from every August, when I will be away on holiday.”
    As I understood it, Sigmund Freud was a coke addict who fabricated the father-rape-wish-fulfillment scenario of his abused female patients in order not to upset the conventions of the time. Fathers and uncles were busy raping their daughters and nieces, but this wasn’t the moment to out them. So Sigmund snorted another line and created the most damningly misogynist theory of all time. As I had seen firsthand with Ray, there may be a time and place for Freud, but Imogen’s case wasn’t it.
    That analyst was not going to treat Imogen. I didn’t like him and I didn’t like the way he worked. And he knew it.
    As I was sitting there, staring at Imogen, the words were just not coming. I had to move past my own frustration and relax. But it is very hard to relax when you are looking into the eyes of a mute little girl who wants to be dead. You don’t want