We clinked bottles and smiled, but his words stung because the life I’d imagined for myself had slipped through my inattentive fingers. It was not the place that was a backwater, it was me. My spirit had eddied into the shallows of domesticity and beached itself. I had let John down because I had let myself down by immuring my combative originality, which he’d always valued and loved. Yes, my brother’s words stung –look how long I have remembered them- but they were a gift: he would not me forget that I had once known other things and made other plans.

I wanted to grab his cigarette from his rough lips. I wanted to burn my flesh—any cigarette-sized section of flesh—with it. Then, for just a second, I wanted to burn his flesh instead. Perhaps I wanted to see physical pain in his eyes because I couldn’t see my own pain, not really, not clearly. I was horrified by my thoughts, but my horror did not quiet them.

Our therapy took the form of the alchemical solutio, the breaking up of a tightly wrapped image of a life into its parts. Getting cracks in her story was a partial solution, at least, of her problem.

Think about the impasse,’ she said. ‘You know that when there’s a deadlock it’s usually because the impasse serves some function for both the patient and the analyst. Think of this deadlock as an obstacle that the two of you have created. What purpose does it serve you?

Jean had no doubts about who she was. Not only was she wrong to have written the forbidden prescriptions, she couldn’t even focus on her medical records. Nothing was working out the way she hoped. The fan in her life was definitely broken. Were I to focus

only on what was broken, I would be pulled into her suffering instead of pointing the way out. I wanted more uncertainty for Jean, more of that Zen doubt. Whatever conclusion she aggressively threw at me, I parried it back at her until we reached a truce. Surrender was Jean’s rhinoceros. It went against everything she thought.