Novelists and psychiatrists have a good deal in common. Both scan human behaviour for symptoms of hidden meanings; both are adept at the interpretation of stray words and gestures; both seek to restore a coherent history and context to otherwise isolated characters. When faced by a patient, Dr David McBride, the psychiatrist at the centre of this tender, wise, and beautifully subtle novel, notices with an artist's trained eye "the play of the hands, the flicker of the eyelids, the pallor of the skin, the way the feet make contact with the ground, the pitch of the voice". "It's not the bjg things that demolish you", another character shrewdly comments. "It's the way, for example, people push their glasses up their nose." Both writer and psychiatrist, too, are inevitably caught up with the figures they deal with and the fictions they trade in. Both do what they do out of some obscure need, and the very opaqueness of that need may lie near the source of their achievement.The psychoanalyst is trained to bewary of so-called counter-transference, since investing his or her own fantasises and desires in the person of the patient may prove an obstacle to the cure. Yet in The Other Side of You, counter-transference turns out to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. And the healing it brings is as much that of the doctor as of the patient. "You have to need your patients", one of David's colleagues tells him, "need them to live, for your sake too". David is a psychiatrist rather than a psychoanalyst, and Salley Vickers is one of the few literary artists to appreciate the difference. A former analyst herself, she does not perpetrate the usual literary howlers of having psychiatric patients lie on couches while free-associating or having Jungians doling out drugs.
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