Free The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers Page A

of the things I liked in Gus was that he could pick up one’s state of mind without the need to comment on it. ‘Have you noticed how no one thanks “goodness” any more? Goodness is out of fashion. So is minding. Minding’s considered bad form. God knows why. You must mind. You have to love them—I don’t mean go to bed with them, I don’t have to tell you that, but need them, need them to live, for your sake, too.’
    ‘“It’s in giving yourself that you possess yourself”?’
    ‘Who said that?’
    ‘Lou Andeas-Salome.’ One of Freud’s first disciples.
    ‘Don’t know that one,’ said Gus. ‘But she’s right. The thing is, Freud never intended his ideas to be taken as a recipe for bogus detachment. You know, the Greek potters could tell the very second at which a glaze turned in a kiln from red to black. They didn’t need a thermometer. They trusted the blink of an eye. The same’s true of the heart. The heart can register true or fake before the theorist can say “knife!” Freud, for all his other nonsense, knew that. Naturally, others’ll tell you otherwise.’
    ‘Oh, “others”…!’ I said. ‘You mean like Jeffries?’
    ‘Jeffries wouldn’t save his own mother if she were drowning in her bath. The only reason he’d cite the Oedipus complex isas a valid excuse for refusing to see her naked. You must plunge into it with them. You have to—stand, or sit, splash your feet in it—it doesn’t matter as long as you’re there too. Show them you can bear it, and you’re willing to bear it with them.’
    ‘But can you bear anything for anyone else, really?’
    ‘No,’ said Gus. ‘You can’t. But you can let them know you’ll try. And that, very likely, you can’t bear it either but—’
    ‘In saying so show you are bearing it?’
    ‘Exactly,’ said Gus, again, approvingly, and poured me another large Scotch presumably as a reward. I’d drunk the first one pretty rapidly. It tended to be like that with Gus, I’m afraid.
    ‘The Stoics had the right idea,’ Gus resumed. ‘Trouble with this age is it’s got hold of the crackpot notion you can do away with suffering. Jeffries and his type are responsible for that kind of babyish attitude. Someone says, “Help, help, it hurts,” and they hand out a bloody drug, and say, “There, there, this’ll make it better.” That’s sticking-plaster mentality. It doesn’t make the bloody awfulness go away. It just covers it up. Pathology. The logos of suffering, or the word on suffering. Well, the “word” on suffering is it has to be bloody well suffered, not covered up.’
    I thought of Mrs Beet saying to me they had taken all the sorrow as well as the joy out of her husband when they lobotomised him.
    ‘So how do we help the suffering suffer bearably?’
    ‘The word patient comes from the same root as suffer. Patient: one who suffers patiently.’
    ‘It’s rather a tall order,’ I suggested, nursing my whisky glass. I wasn’t unaware that I used alcohol to make the unbearable bearable.
    ‘Yes, it is,’ Gus agreed. He sounded mournful. I’d never fathomed what his own brand of suffering consisted of. ‘And of course some can’t take it. Like your patient. They want to bale out. You can’t blame them.’
    We sat awhile consumed with our own thoughts. I was reflecting how frequently I wanted to bale out myself.
    ‘What is suicide, Gus? What are people up to, really, when they seriously try to kill themselves?’ You’d be surprised how little my profession generally considers these questions. I suppose it’s because we are kept so busy dealing with the consequences.
    Gus lit another cheroot. ‘Acceleration of life, perhaps? A suicide is someone who wants to take a short cut to one of the only certainties: death and taxes. Only taxes aren’t as sexy as death. You could argue that a suicide is getting straight to the point: it’s a fast-track method of transportation from one realm to another.’
    ‘But there isn’t