Free In the Last Analysis by Amanda Cross

exactly how it must have happened.”
    “No doubt. All we’ve got to do is find this man,
if
he exists.”
    It was, however, with this probably nonexistent man in mind, that Kate tracked Emanuel down in his office some time later. She had, of course, determined that he was free, and, knocking first, had gone in and shut the door behind her.
    “Emanuel, I am sorry, or have I said that already? I keep thinking of all this as like Greek drama; that from the moment of that collision off the Merritt Parkway, we have been heading for this crisis. I suppose there is some comfort in thinking, however literarily, that fate concerns itself with our destinies.”
    “I’ve thought much the same thing myself; you weren’t sure you wanted to be a college teacher, and I had all sorts of ambivalences about psychiatry. Yet here we are, you as a teacher having sent me, a psychiatrist, one of your students as a patient. It seems to have a pattern, yet of course it can’t. If we could just show that it hasn’t a pattern, or that we’re seeing the pattern the wrong way, we’d be clear of all this.”
    “Emanuel! I think you’ve just said something very important and profound.”
    “Have I? It doesn’t seem to make any sense at all.”
    “Well, never mind; I’m sure the reason for its profundity will occur to me later. What I want now is to have you sit down at your desk and tell me everything you know about Janet Harrison. Perhaps what you say will remind me of something I know, and have forgotten. I’m convinced of one thing: if we find the murderer, always supposing he isn’t a homicidal maniac casually in off the streets, we will find him through some knowledge we get about that girl. Will you try to be helpful?”
    Rather to Kate’s surprise he didn’t flatly refuse, he merely shrugged, and continued to gaze out of the window onto a courtyard in which there was almost certainly nothing to see. Kate, with a certain studied carelessness, sat down on the couch. One of the chairs would have been more comfortable, but not to sit on the couch was to avoid it.
    “What can I tell you? The tape recording of an analysis, for example, would be meaningless, in any important sense, to someone not trained to interpret. It’s not full of clues like a Sherlock Holmes detective story, at least not the sort of clues that would be any use to a policeman. Shedidn’t tell me one day that she would probably be murdered, and that if she were, such-and-such a person would probably have done it. Believe me, had she said something definite of that sort, I would not hesitate to reveal it, certainly not from any misguided sense of idealism. The other vital thing to remember is that, to the analyst, it is unimportant whether something actually happened, or whether the occurrence was merely a fantasy on the part of the patient. To the analyst, there is no essential difference; to the policeman there is, of course, all the difference in the world.”
    “I should think it would matter very much to a patient whether something had really happened or not. I should think that would be the whole point.”
    “Exactly. But you would be wrong. And I can’t explain all this simply, without grossly falsifying it, and by making it too simple, making it false. But if you want, I’ll give you, reluctantly, an example. When Freud began on his treatment of patients, he was astonished to discover how many women in Vienna had had, as children, sexual relations with their fathers. It appeared for a time that at least a handful of Viennese fathers had been sexual maniacs. Then Freud realized that none of these sexual experiences had ever taken place, that they had been fantasies. But his important realization came with the understanding that, for the purposes of the patients’ psychological development (though not of course for the purposes of sexual morality in Vienna) it did not matter at all whether the incidents had taken place actually or not. The fantasy had