Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations by Alexander McCall Smith

Author:Alexander McCall Smith [Smith, Alexander McCall]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Humorous, Romance, General, Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
ISBN: 9781841954271
Google: GeQvmRT9IBAC
Publisher: Canongate
Published: 2003-11-14T18:30:00+00:00

Intimate Accounts

I am not at all sure whether I should be telling you this. My difficulty is that this is a grey area of professional ethics, and, quite frankly, no definitive guidance is available. Of course every doctor is subject to the usual rules of confidentiality – which are exceptionally strict – and this means that one should say nothing about what passes between psychiatrist and patient. So one simply could not telephone a patient’s wife, say, and tell her what her husband had just revealed on the couch, tempting though that may sometimes be. That would be a clear breach of professional ethics and the medical authorities would raise a song and dance. And rightly so.

But it’s by no means clear what the rules are when it comes to writing in a general way about what has happened in the consulting room, especially when there is no mention of names – or when false names are used. If one doesn’t say anything that gives away the actual identity of a patient, then has any confidence been breached? The answer to this must be that if there is good reason to reveal – in this anonymous way – what has passed between analyst and patient, then one is doing nothing unethical.

Yet is there good reason for my telling you what follows? After a great deal of deliberation, I have decided that there probably is. I know that these are not the pages of a professional journal, where there would be every justification for the publication of case histories. I know, too, that some will be reading this in the wrong spirit – in a prurient way perhaps – but others (I hope most) will be reading this because they have a real interest in human nature. It would be professional arrogance of the worst sort if psychiatrists were to decline to speak about the more curious interstices of the human mind. The workings of the human psyche are not our exclusive preserve: Freud’s essays, and the other classics of our craft, should be read by all. They are wonderful, liberating documents – profound literature, in fact. And if they are suffused with sexual matters, that is simply because human life itself is suffused with sex. There is nothing abnormal in wishing to understand how this affects the way in which we live.

Of course there is a great deal that is surprising in this part of people’s lives. Nobody leads the narrow sex life which restrictive notions of normality impose on us; the human mind is too imaginative for that. Even the most unimaginative – the dullest – have their fantasies (dull fantasies perhaps), although very few confess them. And there is nothing inherently wrong in fantasy – as long as it remains fantasy and does not intrude upon reality. For most people the dividing line is quite clear; for others the distinction between the world of the imagination and real life becomes blurred, and it is at that point that behaviour becomes bizarre or inappropriate.

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