ABSTRACT
This is the myth. The reality is different. Perhaps there are lots of happy and successful therapists around, but I have not met them. Even the great Sheldon Kopp, (1) whose books chart his painful progress in self-knowledge, still describes himself as shy, unable to engage easily in social conversation. Some of my therapist friends have periods of profound sadness, while others engage in somewhat frantic activity which seems to indicate a desperate desire to experience all the pleasures of this world. Such greed, they sooner or later find, does damage to their relationships with their nearest and dearest. I view all this with the eyes of a survivor whose last five years have been the happiest of a very fraught life. I have worked out some solutions, but these are very personal ones, not generalizable to rules about how we should all live our lives. This is why I always feel sorry for our candidates for posts in clinical psychology. They are hoping to be let into The Secret. And, of course, the secret is that there is no secret.
