In today's post I am going to be a little self-indulgent and talk some more about my interactions with people in the Mental Health Service. In particular, I am going to elaborate on my conversations with the psychologist I saw in 2014, conversations I have described before in earlier posts, specifically "Definitions of Sexuality" and "The Myth of the Repressed Homosexual". I loathed this psychologist and in today's post I want to try again to spell out why.
In the previous post I outlined a consultation I had with a psychiatrist and social worker immediately before Easter 2013, having re-entered the Service after a year seeing a GP monthly. Something I hinted at but didn't make fully plain in that post is that it was evident that these two both expected me to come out as gay – this being six years after I first became a patient of the Service and me then being then thirty-three. In fact I didn't but it was horrible to be in that situation, to sense that this was the reason they thought I wanted to see them. The psychiatrist, a locum who I had never met before and only had one or two appointments with afterwards, was an Indian man with a rather high voice. In 2014 I started seeing a psychologist, Simon Judkins. On one occasion Simon asked me if I thought this psychiatrist, Dharma, was gay. I said, immediately, no, that he was "a straight man with a high voice." Judkins completely ignored what I had just said told him and went ahead with his pre-prepared script, "Well... you might be surprised to know that he's getting married."
It was evident that the psychologist had formed an impression of me before even meeting me and was unwilling or incapable of altering his opinion. It was also obvious that he couldn't tell the difference between straight men and gay men and based his judgment of this matter solely on whether a man was married or not. We were living on two totally different planets. On another occasion Judkins said to me, a little sententiously, "Whether a person is gay or not is between them – and God." The fact that he felt the need to tell me this might suggest that I spent my sessions with him continually outing people but this is not true. The only people I claimed were gay were a colleague at the radio station at which I worked when I first became unwell, and the psychiatrist I saw between 2007 and 2012, one Tony Fernando. I reported this remark Judkins had made to my then key worker, one of the few genuinely good people I have met through the Service, and he commented, "Simon said that – to you, did he?" Presumably Simon's statement, given the situation I was in, was objectively insane.
This psychologist's attitude to sexuality was all fucked up. On my first appointment with him I said I was straight several times. His eyes took on a strange shifty look. He said, "You shouldn't divide the world into homosexual and not-homosexual." I said, "Do you mean homosexual and heterosexual?" He said, "No, I mean homosexual and not-homosexual." I said, "Do you mean homosexual and bisexual?" He said again, "No I mean homosexual and not-homosexual". In a later session he told me that sexuality was "fluid" and called me "aspergerous" for refusing to believe him. He expressed incredulity that I believed that one homosexual experience was proof sufficient of homosexuality. All this leads me to one simple conclusion. According to Theory of Mind, a person makes sense of another by imaginative putting himself into the other's shoes. This psychologist thought everyone was bisexual. Presumably this must be because he is bisexual himself. And by 'bisexual' I mean that he fantasises about both men and women when he masturbates.
I should say that Judkins is married (to a woman) and has two children. He couldn't identify himself as 'straight' but, under pressure to try to say he wasn't gay, this was all he could tell me.
Simon presumably feels himself to live in a world full of secret sinners. On another occasion we got to talking about cannabis and he said that many people come home and smoke pot every day to relax in the same way that other people have a beer. Having known very many stoners in my life, I was inclined to agree with him about this, that pot is often harmless, but, given attitudes to marijuana prevalent among Mental Health Professionals, it seemed an inconsistent, hypocritica, event bizarre opinion for a representative of the Service to offer. Presumably he was trying to manipulate me, trying to fossick out of me an admission that I was a cannabis user – without realising that I have been candidly speaking about my former occasional use of drugs to people in the Mental Health System since at least 2008. I suspect Judkins was seeking to put me in a relaxed environment in which I could talk about shameful secrets - without realising that all the 'shameful' secrets in my life I had already talked about. Once again Theory of Mind comes into play. Presumably Judkins tends to assume that others have shameful secrets because he has a few himself. Given his bisexuality these secrets presumably involve at least a few homosexual experiences. Did he give a couple of men hand jobs? Blow jobs? Did he engage in anal sex with a man or two and, if so, was he the giver or the receiver, the top or the bottom?
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
At a later session, I leant him a short story I had written "69". (I published this story in this blog some time ago; it is funny and well worth a read, dear reader, if you are interested in what many regard as my best short story.) This story is about a menage a trois, a man sleeping with two lesbian women. When I saw Judkins next, he said, as if he was telling me something I didn't already know and not literally quoting back at me a line from the story I had given him, "It's a male fantasy to have sex with two women at once". At the end of the session, he said something about how he thought writers would often lie: a liar's response to a truth teller. Now, I admit I have never in reality slept with two women at the same time but it is one of my staple sexual fantasies, something I continually return to in my own imaginative life. Judkins couldn't seem to comprehend this notion of 'fantasy' at all. When Judkins delivered my own line back at me, he said the word "fantasy" in a strangely uncertain way, as though he couldn't quite understand what the word meant. This makes me wonder if perhaps I am wrong in supposing he fantasises about both men and women. Perhaps he doesn't fantasise at all. Freud argued that homosexuals narcissistically turn their libidinal energy upon themselves and perhaps Judkins fits this Freudian definition of a Narcissistic homosexual – he takes himself as the sole object of his own sexual desire.
Regardless of whether this psychologist is a bisexual who fantasises about both men and women when he masturbates or a Narcissist who fantasises only about himself, one thing is clear. He gets his idea of sexuality from Kinsey, as do most of his colleagues. This is a problem. What followers of Kinsey, widely regarded as the seminal thinker about sexuality, don't appreciate is the fact that the theories he came up with and the research he performed were almost certainly skewed, distorted, because Kinsey himself was a sexual pervert, a man who in his childhood and early adulthood would insert objects into his urethra to punish himself for his homosexual desires. It seems possible that Kinsey projected his own perversions and sexual self-hatred onto others to make himself feel better about it, less ashamed ("I'm not unusual; everyone does it!"). The whole discourse about sexuality is bent because it was written almost entirely by homosexuals and by sexual deviants (Michel Foucault included). It is from Kinsey and those who came after him that we derive our general notions of sexuality, and in particular the pernicious idea that ordinary people are frequently off clandestinely enjoying homosexual trysts with each other. This perspective, of a world full of secret perverts, is sick and has noxious consequences. It makes psychiatrists, the ones who are not themselves perverts anyway, view themselves as the lonely inhabitants of a lofty mountaintop, themselves square, straight, morally unimpeachable, peering down on the masses below all cavorting with each other like bonobo monkeys. But they are wrong. Homosexuality is less common than they believe and, when it occurs, almost always tends to publicly come out.
If I can alter my appraisal of his psychologist I saw, this man who couldn't seem to believe that I might indeed be totally straight, I might suggest that he views himself as the only heterosexual in a world of homosexuals. His is a worldview warped by theorists like Kinsey. But, in the real world, most people are zeros on the Kinsey scale, most people are totally straight. Ordinary heterosexuals exists and most ordinary heterosexuals regard homosexuality not just as repugnant but actually unimaginable. A world of people secretly fucking each other while professing sexual rectitude, full disclosure, a world of hypocrites, is not the world I want to live in, not the world I think I inhabit. But it is the world in which Judkins imagines himself to live. I only saw this psychiatrist for eight or nine months but it was like banging my head against a brick wall of stupidity, hypocrisy and mendacity. I concluded our relationship with an email which I cannot quote verbatim but included the following immortal line: I told Judkins that he was in denial of his True Self and that if he didn't already fantasise about men when he masturbated, that he should start.
This email got me into serious trouble. But I don't regret it. Judkins was an asshole. And psychologists like him cause more harm than good.
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