ABSTRACT

We ended the previous chapter with a rhetorical flourish which John Bowlby, however much he approved of its sentiment, would probably have considered overstated, insufficiently underpinned by close-grained scientific fact. This is perhaps excusable as we near the end of this book. As suggested in the Introduction, the biographer is both patient and therapist to his subject. At the end of therapy a patient will often yearn for a ‘verdict’ and ask, implicitly or explicitly, ‘Well, what do you really think of me, what is your opinion?’ But the therapist has already done his work, said all he can say in the course of the therapy. What more can he add? In the CAT model of brief therapy (Ryle 1990), this dilemma is met by the introduction of the ‘farewell letter’ which the therapist presents to the patient in the penultimate session. This attempts to summarise the patient’s strengths and weaknesses, the progress that has been made in therapy, and some predictions for the future. This heterodoxy is not, it should be noted, the exclusive preserve of eclectic therapists like Ryle: Clifford Scott records that the most moving moment of his analysis with Melanie Klein in the 1930s occurred when she read out to him a long interpretation she had written over the weekend. ‘This was proof that I was in her as well as she was in me’ (Grosskurth 1986).