Read Online Walking in the Shade by Doris Lessing - Free Book Online

will be forced by a hundred powerful needs to sleep with women, have women, assert life, make life, move on.
    In no way can I—or could I then—accuse Jack of letting me down, for he never promised anything. On the contrary, short of actually saying, ‘I am sleeping with other women; I have no intention of marrying you,’ he said it all. Often joking. But I wasn’t listening. What I felt was: When we get on so wonderfully in every possible way, then it isn’t sensible for him to go away from me. I wasn’t able to think at all; the emotional realities were too powerful. I think this is quite common with women. ‘Really, this man is talking nonsense, he doesn’t know what is right for him. And besides, he says himself his marriage is no marriage at all. And obviously it can’t be, when he is here most nights.’ How easy to be intelligent now, how impossible then.
    If I needed support against my mother, soon I needed it because of Jack too. He was a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital. He had wanted to be a neurologist, but when he started being a doctor in Britain, neurology was fashionable and ‘a member of a distant country of which we know nothing’ could not compete with so many British doctors, crowding to get in. So he went into psychiatry, then unfashionable. But soon it became chic, even more so than neurology. He was a far from uncritical practitioner. He was no fan of Freud, and this was not only because as a communist—or even an ex-communist—he was bound to despise Freud. He said Freud was unscientific, and this at a time when to attack Freud was like attacking Stalin—or God. One of my liveliest memories is of how he took me to Oxford to listen to Hans Eysenck lecture to an audience composed almost entirely of doctors from the Maudsley, all of them Freudians, about the unscientific nature of psychoanalysis. There he was, this large, bouncing young man, with his thick German accent, telling a roomful of the angriest people I remember that their idol had faults. (He has not lost his capacity to annoy: when I told a couple of young psychiatrists this tale, thinking it might amuse them—in 1994—their cold response was: ‘He always was unsound.’) Jack admired him. He knew psychoanalysis had feet of clay. This scepticism included Mrs. Sussman: And if Freud was unscientific, what could be said of Jung? But I didn’t go to Mrs. Sussman for ideology, I said. And anyway, she used a pragmatic mix of Freud, Jung, Klein, and anything else that might come in appropriately. He did not find this persuasive; he said that all artists like Jung, but this had nothing to do with science: why not just go off and listen to lectures on Greek mythology? It would do just as well. He was unimpressed by my ‘Jungian’ dreams. And even less when I began dreaming ‘Freudian’ dreams. And I was uneasy myself. I was dreaming dreams to order. No one need persuade me of the influence a therapist has on a confused, frightened suppliant for enlightenment. One needs to please that mentor, half mother, half father, the possessor of all knowledge, sitting so powerfully there in that chair. ‘And now, my dear, what do you have to tell me today?’
    Some things I wouldn’t dare tell Jack. For instance, about that day when she remarked, after nothing had been said for a few minutes, ‘I am sure you do know that we are communicating even when we are not saying anything.’ This remark, at that time, was simply preposterous. As far as she was concerned, I was a communist and therefore bound to dismiss any thoughts of that kind as ‘mystical nonsense’. She was not talking about body language (that phrase, and the skills of interpreting people’s postures, gestures, and so forth, came much later). She was talking about an interchange between minds. As soon as she said it, I thought, Well, yes…accepting this heretical idea