Love on an analyst’s couch

Press, 28 December 1985, Page 14

Love on an analyst’s couch

Other Women. By Lisa Althar. Viking, 1985. 326 pp. $21.95. The author of the highly successful “Kinflicks” has now written in the tradition of a psycho-analytic couch spring-board from which one becomes catapulted out of the sludge of past murky relationships to the crystalline self-perception of mental rebirth. A nurse of 35, with a track record of a broken marriage and several affairs, finds a psychotherapist in New Hampshire who explores her bisexuality, her desire to repair other people, and a constant need to be loved. The therapist herself has one disastrous marriage behind her, has lost two children by accidental poisoning, and is going through the hot-flushes period of the menopause. While the patient painfully works out who she is and where she belongs with men and women, children and parents — but maintains her standards by always

having a quick bath in between beddings with her lesbian and her male lover — the therapist works on her personal train of thought. One sometimes becomes concerned for the latter’s objectivity with her patient going through various manoeuvres of anger, eroticism, separation anxiety, and manipulation which the professional has seen so many times before, and whether the therapist is really listening to the patient who is paying big money for this to happen. The development of the therapist’s own lesbian feelings for the client are not satisfactorily resolved in the novel and the whole ends up as a slightly phony exercise in traditional psychoanalysis, typical of those written by an enthusiastic patient who has discovered all the complex turns and intertwinings that can take place in this process. A lesbian lifestyle is sensibly dealt with and, on the author’s reputation as well, this should sell widely to the more brittle introspectively anxious. — Ralf Unger.