"Sure. We both work, we're gone all day."

Don't look at him when you think about Erika. She focused on the ceiling above his head, the neat line where the ivory joined the pale green of the painted wall.

"Do you often take her advice?"

"Sometimes."

"I suppose you have some personal relationships." Dr. Stewart said. "Do you go out often with men? Any romantic attachments, if you want to put it that way?"

I don't give a damn how you put it, Kate thought. But she breathed easier. "You mean sex. No, not now."

"Have you ever been married?"

"No."

He looked at his desk. Trying to remember what you're supposed to say at this point, Kate thought. The number one guess being wrong, what do the books tell you to try next? There must be a formula for it, they have a formula for everything. Number sixteen: How To Break Down the Resistant Patient. She cleared her throat.

"You realize, of course, that what an analyst is able to do for any patient is more or less dictated by the patient's willingness and ability to cooperate." And by his willingness and ability to pay, Kate thought. He might be more optimistic if I had a better coat. "This is true to some extent in every branch of medicine, even surgery, but it's particularly true in psychotherapy, where the patient and doctor are partners in a series of explorations that may continue for some time."

Very nicely put, Kate thought with some admiration. Reik or Brill? One of the Freud boys; Erika would know.

"When you come to accept the fact that emotional disturbance is an illness like any other, there are a number of techniques that can be brought into use. Counselling, group therapy, hypnosis, electro-shock, the so-called truth drugs, tranquilizers. It may require a series of tests to decide which of these may best suit the needs of the particular patient."

God damn it, I'm not a guinea pig. I'm a human being. Me, Kate Ellen Wood. I may not amount to much, but I'll take me in preference to any goddam guinea pig.

"There seems to be little point in starting a course of analytical sessions as long as you've already shown some resistance to that method. Not that this is always the patient's fault. There may be a number of factors involved."

He paused long enough for that to sink in. Good technique, she admitted. Discredits Liebermann without a single unkind word, even without calling him by name. What a bastard this one is. I bet he has a wonderful bedside manner for well-to-do neurotics. I bet the fat middle-aged ladies think he's God almighty.

"If the alcoholism were the primary problem, a cure would be relatively simple. But alcoholism is almost never primary. It has its roots in neurosis, and that neurosis may stem from something that seems trivial or even impossible from the patient's viewpoint. Some shock received in early childhood that has been lost by the conscious mind—until something brings it to the surface." The classroom manner now, fingers together, eyes fixed on the back wall of he lecture room. "It may be something so unimportant by adult standards that the patient rejects it as a possible source of trouble even when it is pointed out. That's why a good analyst leaves the analysand free to make his own discoveries and draw his own conclusions."