the world and himself, he shrugged off these dark feelings and looked at the bright side of things. He would tell himself that there was really nothing the matter with him. He was probably tired and overwrought. His nerves needed a rest from the constant stream of patients crying for help. A two-week vacation, probably three, would revive him.
Hadn't he told his patients, more times than he could remember, that misery, even agony, is part of life? That they should increase their threshold of pain? He had often repeated to one distressed patient who had tried for the third time to take her own life, that life is not always bliss and she had to take the rough with the smooth.
The elevator took time in coming. He faced an eight-hour working day in a windowless room where the air system was faulty and hummed from time to time. Eight wretched patients would heap upon his shoulders woeful problems that defied solutions, and then demand a redress through cries, tears, veiled threats of suicide and murder. He had to reassure them, unscramble their rotten lives, extricate the healthy parts, and build anew some semblance of a coherent personality. He had not always succeeded. Only a psychiatrist who deluded himself would expect a 'success' in every case. However, there were always drugs to contain the situation; a last resort when every other form of therapy had failed.
In his fifteen years as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Walter had never followed a precise method in dealing with his patients. Early in his career, when he had just joined the clinic as a junior psychiatrist, he had a conversation with an old partner who was about to retire. The man was paunchy. He wore a chain across his waistcoat and exuded an air of haughty benevolence which came with considerable material success and old age. Between dizzying nods of his head, for he suffered from Parkinson's disease, he wanted to bequeath to the young junior member the weighty wisdom of a long life in practice.
'Do you believe in these newfangled therapies?' he asked Walter not really expecting an answer.
'I mean the lot of them, the Freudian shit, the one with Pavlov's dog and the fucking nude encounters, and the one...