What fantasies do people have when they meet psychoanalysts?
AP: A range of things – from assuming that the psychoanalyst can read their minds or see through them (as though they were frauds), to the inverse assumption that the psychoanalyst is likely to be a fraud, posing as a deep, intelligent, thoughtful person, while actually suffering from some terrible personal problem which makes them need to be an analyst. AdB: And where does the truth lie? (I don’t think you have a terrible personal problem.) AP: Well, analysts are like accountants or bus drivers. They comprise all sorts of people. AdB: What’s your new book about? AP: Its about escapism and the sense in which we define ourselves partly by what we think we need to escape from – and what we believe we need to escape to. It runs together emblematic scenes from the escape artist Houdini’s life, and a fictional case history from a man who wanted to escape from women (or rather to escape from his feelings about women). I suppose it’s also a book about the way in which our lives are dominated
