In psychoanalysis, the full-blown, long-drawn-out, daily unburdening that can take years, or decades to complete, the change of an analyst can be a disaster. Indeed, such is the dependence that may develop between analyst and analysand that many psychoanalysts simply cannot find it in themselves to retire, and continue to sit and listen to their patients until the very end, either for the patient or the analyst. Freudian lore is full of stories of analysts who have died of sheer old age in their psychoanalytical chair; or patients who have similarly succumbed while on the couch. The narrative falters and stops; the word-association suddenly becomes one-sided, with words hanging in the air unanswered.

This dependence, though officially discouraged in psychoanalytical circles, can be quite touching. In both Vichy and occupied France, psychoanalysis hardly flourished. There were, however, a few elderly analysts who were, on liberation, accused of collaboration. These had little alternative but to move to Morocco, where they established themselves in Casablanca. Their patients moved too. And when these elderly psychoanalysts died, their patients arranged, in due course, to be buried alongside them. Thus did the relationship continue beyond the grave, as if the analyst lay interred for all eternity, patiently listening to all the unresolved issues emanating from the next-door plot.

Six is not an easy age at which to change one’s psychotherapist, and indeed Irene was concerned that the experience would be so traumatic for Bertie that therapeutic support would be required for the consequences. This, of course, was not the case, as Bertie, who was an entirely normal little boy, had no need of psychotherapy in the first place. But she was loath to accept that, and when Dr Hugo Fairbairn, author of Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Three-Year-Old Tyrant, went off to Aberdeen, she was concerned that his successor, Dr St Clair, would be able to pick up the strands of the complex therapeutic process to which Bertie had been introduced.

For Dr Fairbairn, the offer of a chair from the University of Aberdeen had come at an opportune time. The chair in Aberdeen was prestigious, and it would give him the opportunity to write a book that he had recently been planning, The Psychopathology of the Over-Intrusive Mother, or Mater Dentata. But there was more to it than that, and had his own decision been subjected to the scrutiny that he gave to decisions made by his patients, it would have been apparent that Dr Fairbairn was running away from Edinburgh because of what he had himself termed his rucksack of guilt.

This guilt came from the fact that he had, many years ago, slapped a particularly trying young patient, Wee Fraser, after Wee Fraser had, in a quite unprovoked manner, suddenly bitten him.