“Total empathy is impossible to sustain. You must realise that. We cannot feel all the pain in the world all the time without going mad. It’s a natural defence mechanism to find reasons for believing that someone else’s pain is not as bad as ours. This is something we are trained as psychologists to recognise in ourselves.”

“How do you cope?” I wail. “You specialise in counselling victims of sexual violence. How do you listen to these stories day in and day out without going crazy?”

“We’re talking about you and your pain.Why do you think you feel the need to deflect the focus onto me?”

And we’re back on familiar ground again. The classic shrink bait-and-switch.

Monday, 10.45, 17 May

Patient: Lucy Lurie

Diagnosis: bipolar, depression, schizoid delusions, borderline personality disorder, paranoia

Referred by: Dr. J. Coetzee

The patient is a twenty-eight-year-old well-nourished woman. She presents with a history of uncontrollable outbursts and delusions. She is trained as an academic and was working in this capacity until recently. She is not working at present.

She persists in her conviction that she was raped two years ago by a group of men who broke into her father’s farmhouse where she was visiting for dinner. This seems to be loosely based on the celebrated novel Disgrace by John Coetzee.

Ms. Lurie identifies with the character “Lucy” in the novel and has become convinced that Coetzee based his book on her experiences. Ms. Lurie and John Coetzee worked in the same department at the University of Constantia for a time, and her fixation on him seems to have begun while they were still colleagues.

When Coetzee wrote his book, which instantly became a massive international success, Ms. Lurie was overcome by jealousy. She has repeatedly stated that she had novelistic ambitions herself.

There is evidence to suggest that Coetzee based the character of “Lucy” loosely on Ms. Lurie. Aside from sharing the same name, they are of a similar age and physical description. Coetzee appears to have drawn some of the details of his character’s appearance and mannerisms from his observation of Ms. Lurie.

These few synchronicities persuaded Ms. Lurie that she suffered the same traumatic experience as Coetzee’s character. This morbid eliding of truth and fiction is one of the most common symptoms of the true paranoid delusional personality.

We have here a classic case of an impressionable young woman who, achieving mediocre results in her own career, fixates on a powerful older man, and persuades herself that he returns her interest. Ms. Lurie has gone so far as to insert herself into the fictional world of Coetzee’s brilliant novel in an effort to occupy the same psychological space as her idol. But, as is also typical in these cases, her love for Coetzee turned sour and may now more accurately be described as obsessive loathing.