LA child psychologist Alex Delaware was my first fictional psychologist, and remains my favorite. Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware novels, beginning with When the Bough Breaks in 1985, have always been as much about psychology and psychologists as they have been about one fictional shrink.
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| 1989 |
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January, 2009
I'm currently re-reading Silent Partner (1989). My first impression of it was that it was depressing as heck, my second that I'm not sure how I feel about recommending it to clients--both because it gives such an awful impression of psychologists. Other than Alex and his good friend Larry, the psychologists and wannabes in this novel are a hot mess. Reading it is like observing the proverbial train wreck: You know there is no way this is going to end well, but you can't stop looking.
The backstory involves Alex's grad school and as I read I kept saying to myself, "My graduate school experience wasn't like this!" But it was, at least in part. We, too, had faculty who violated boundaries or who were cynical about private practice. I was never in a practicum seminar as bad as the one Kellerman portrays, but I was in one with ever-changing completion requirements that conflicted with the requirements of our site. And I can recall at least one clearly impaired fellow student. Then there was the murder-suicide a few years back of a psychologist couple who were important players on our local scene. So the events Kellerman portrays do happen. But they don't happen the way they do in the novel, in such a small community and over such a short period of time. The density of events in Silent Partner makes our profession look much, much more dysfunctional (and dangerous) than it really is. On the whole, we're actually well-trained, ethical professionals who put our clients' best interests first.
Delaware himself is a pretty good egg. The worst thing I can ever remember him doing in the whole series is having a beer at lunch before seeing a client in the afternoon. As Silent Partner opens, however, Alex's personal life is in some disarray. His on-again, off-again relationship with Robin Castagnega is currently off, and his emotional vulnerability leads him to some behaviors that could probably best be described as "codependent". And as always, he's better at listening to his friends' problems than he is at talking about his own. (This, by the way, is not atypical: It has been said that many of us enjoy the one-way intimacy of the therapy session for just that reason. It can give some of us a feeling of closeness without our having to take any emotional risks ourselves.)
The novel revolves around sexual improprieties--first, a professor with a student, and then the student with her clients. This, too, is all-too-depressingly realistic. Kenneth Pope's 1979 survey found that 25% of recent female graduates had sexual contact with a supervisor during their training. Other research suggests that students who have witnessed or themselves been victims of boundary violations are more likely to violate boundaries themselves in the course of their professional careers. Exploitation of students aside, most graduate schools don't actively provide guidance about how to handle sexual attraction towards clients, feelings which most therapists will experience at least once in a career.
Novelists and movie-makers have a distressing tendency to portray therapists as routinely becoming involved in relationships with their clients. In reality, only a small percentage of psychologists engage in such behavior. It is also distressing that fictional accounts of therapist-patient sex rarely portray the almost universally destructive consequences. This does a tremendous disservice to the public, as clients and their significant others are not primed to run for their lives when they encounter such a therapist. Kellerman's novel, in contrast, graphically recounts the swath of destruction that predatory therapists leave in their wake.
First off, being as it is, after all, a murder mystery, there are dead bodies everywhere. There are the damaged relationships of her client victims (and yes, therapists who do this do tend to be serial offenders) and the damage to the practices of other health professionals who referred patients in good faith. Kellerman shows the damage to the profession's public image, and how knowledge of such shenanigans makes some people less likely to seek desperately-needed help.
Towards the end, it becomes evident that two therapists have been using hypnosis to exploit others. To my knowledge, in the ordinary course of affairs, an incompetent or unethical hypnotherapist could certainly make a hash of things, but not to this extent. This is not proof that it never happens, but I can say that in 30 years in the business I have never heard of a case like the fictional scenario in Silent Partner.
As is more often the case in Kellerman's later work, the lives of the characters are depressing, dysfunctional, sordid even. And there are loose threads at the end. Nevertheless, it's a good novel, as his always are, and makes a great weekend read.
Trigger Warnings: graphic violence, graphic sex, pornography, exploitation.
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