Client R.

Having confessed her feelings for me last week, I now have an honest job of work in gently dismantling her transference. Yet as I took an inconsequential shit, I understood that I could, perhaps, accept my place in the animal kingdom, as a man in time and space, and seduce her, thereby relieving a few of my own not insignificant feelings. There are some moments in the therapeutic process, such as these, when the delusions inspired by seduction can conspire to convince me that sex is not only the fulfillment of the therapeutic process, but it's most profound answer. And so I sat with client R., ignoring her skimpy top and tight, barrister's skirt, and decided instead to compound the vulnerability
of her confession by taking offence.

Why, do you think? Having worked on, extirpated grief, why now as we wind down our sessions, why now reveal feelings for me?

She looked down at her feet and, to enhance the rebuke, I looked up. We spent a moment in silence which I chose to spend examining the spine of my student monograph on sexuality and death, aware that I sounded like her old and worst adversary from her courtroom days. I also understood, in our silence, the intense lust that surely operates in the working world of the judiciary. And yet, at the risk of hearing her say anything unusually pathetic, thereby diminishing my own passion, I answered for her.

Is this a way of sabotaging the work we have done?

This was certainly one of many truths in the matter and, in the uttering, I was able to remain entirely professional while also inflaming her righteous ego and all the passion for which it seeks an end.

You seem upset by my feelings.

I was devastated. Nothing in the room was equal to my loss, so I glanced at a mole on her arm. And from this, her minor imperfection, I was able to nimbly turn the tables back on her and end on a productive, continuing note, but the session left me with a grime in my heart, a yearning for all the lost time, attentive hours I have spent with clients who I craved, and failed, to touch.