Client R.

Sex, of course, is the most florid, quick, most satisfying way of ending client R.'s transference of feeling onto me and this is, perhaps, one of the less obvious reasons for disreputable behaviour in my profession. I hadn't ruled it out. Yet today, I opted for something more surreal. I rolled up one trouser leg to the knee and sat in my room, waiting. She entered and sat down, smoothing her skirt. She didn't laugh or register any emotion and I understood the depth of her transference in this quiet acceptance of my ridiculous pose. So I decided to say one true thing about me. I took a breath and summoned a boy, the fearful, blonde boy who couldn't speak for shame, and madness. I'm a bedwetter, I am. I am seven and I wet my bed. I repeated this, and trouser leg, ad infinitum until her face crumpled and, trying to wipe a tear away, she gave in and buckled over. Of course, if I were a therapist in the seventeenth century, god knows, I could have released her from this transference in slowly, but surely, pinching her nipples till she screamed. Yet in enacting my regression and seeing me as a child, indeed, a pathetic one, client R. had experienced an equal, if not greater brutality. And so as I saw her, doubled over, filled with her new loss, I almost forgot to reflect that I was never, in fact, a bedwetter, not once, and that I had told her nothing true of myself. Falsehood, as ever, had served equally, if not better than the truth. Who cares for the truth? It's a shabby thing. And yet, as client R. sat up and we stared at each other, two animals alone in their bodies, I understood the falsehood as more interesting, viable, more powerful than the truth because I always felt like a bedwetter, yes I did, all day long as a child, little bedwetter. And so, finally, the session ended and client R. left, forgetting to smooth her skirt and grateful to be alone with herself, at last, as she always had been.