Ulf was not sure whether they really had made much progress.
This uncertainty as to the benefits of the expensive sessions with the psychoanalyst might have prompted him to end his treatment, but an almost superstitious reluctance to sever the relationship had meant that it continued. And it was undoubtedly interesting, he had to admit, to delve into the depths of the subconscious mind—at least, he sometimes thought this was interesting. At other times he felt that the subconscious mind was capable of such a degree of banality that it might be best to leave it undisturbed, as one did with the other detritus of one’s life. Ulf did not disclose these unsettling thoughts to Dr. Svensson; perhaps they would emerge, in due course, when dredged up on the psychoanalytical couch.
His colleague Anna was very dubious about Ulf’s therapy. “Frankly, Ulf,” she said, “I don’t know why you bother with all that. You are the best-adjusted, most resolved person I know. And that includes me and Jo.”
Jo was Anna’s husband, a mild-mannered and largely unobtrusive anaesthetist. Dr. Svensson had identified him as Ulf’s rival, but as far as Ulf was concerned—at least, as far as his conscious mind and super-ego were concerned—there were no grounds for rivalry, because Ulf had decided that he could never do anything about his attraction to Anna. She was a colleague and a married woman, and both of these considerations precluded any emotional entanglements between them. How could he even contemplate, he asked himself, doing anything to disturb Anna’s settled life with her husband and her two daughters, both breaststroke champions and tipped for great things in the swimming world? How could he?
But here was Anna implicitly suggesting that she and her husband were less well adjusted and resolved than he was. Ulf doubted that: they were the progenitors of a perfect, two-child family; he, by contrast, was a single detective, living by himself, undergoing therapy and with a hearing-impaired dog.
“People do not want their friends to be successful,” Dr. Svensson had once pointed out. “The success of a friend underlines our own failures. We don’t want our friends to have more money than we do; nor more friends, for that matter. Envy, you see, Ulf, lies deep-rooted in our psyche.”
“But if this envy is so pervasive,” Ulf asked, “then does it mean we can never take satisfaction in the good fortune of anybody?”
“At one level we can experience such pleasure,” replied Dr. Svensson. “But it will be superficial. Deep down, in the profundities, we do not welcome the advent of good fortune in the lives of others.”
The profundities...Ulf pondered the expression. Dr. Svensson occasionally referred to profundities, but never fully explained where the profundities were. Ulf did not doubt, though, that they existed. He was aware of his profundities when he encountered some egregious instance of human cruelty; he felt a revulsion so intense that it sickened him to the stomach, and the stomach, he imagined, must be close to the profundities, if not their actual seat.
Did his profundities have anything to do with his attitude towards Anna’s marriage? If he did not want her to be happy in that marriage, that might be simply a question of self-interest and a rational calculation as to what was best for him. Or was it because of the prompting of blind envy—because he himself had been widowed after so short a time? One part of him, he realised—his id—would very much welcome a rift between Anna and Jo, as it would open the way for it to succeed in its undoubted desire to start an affair with Anna. That was typical id—always concerned with animal satisfaction, with sexual drives, with hunger, with grasping and consuming. How much stronger, thought Ulf, was the position of those who denied the id its ambitions; who rose above the carnal, soared above it with their lofty high-mindedness. Of course, that was illusory. The ascetic, the saint, the self-denier, usually had their grubby secrets, their hidden appetites, their failures. The id was not to be put off so easily; it demanded attention and usually got it.
Hans Ebke might be able to throw some light on these matters, thought Ulf as he advanced up the long driveway that led to the Wholeness Centre. Yet Dr. Svensson had warned him that the day would involve group work, and Ulf was not sure that he wanted to share his feelings about Anna with a whole group of strangers. He had not even confided these feelings to Dr. Svensson, who was bound by a strict code of confidentiality, and was certainly unwilling to do so with people bound by no such obligation. And so, if envy came up, as it might well do, he could hardly admit to being afflicted by it because the obvious question that the other participants would wish to ask was: What are you envious about? He could hardly say, “I experience envy when I think about my attractive colleague who has two daughters and a husband who keeps putting people to sleep.” Poor Jo, with his gases and masks and so on, and his terribly earnest manner, which some might call soporific; Ulf felt a certain sadness at the thought.
He parked the Saab in the small car park to the side of the house. Others had arrived before him, as there were already six cars parked there. Ulf surveyed the other vehicles, his detective’s mind already trying to establish which was Dr. Ebke’s car and which belonged to the patients. That assumed, of course, that Dr. Ebke would already have arrived—which he would have, beyond all shadow of a doubt. Dr. Ebke was German, Ulf had been told, and Ulf had yet to meet an unpunctual German. He himself was late—arriving about fifteen minutes after the time that had been stipulated in the letter from the Wholeness Centre secretariat. So Dr. Ebke would definitely be there. That left five cars, and according to the letter Ulf had received, there were four other participants. One of the cars, then, must belong to the centre’s administrator—the person who had written the letter to Ulf confirming his registration. The names of the patients had been listed in an appendix to the letter, along with the short biographical notes they had all been asked to provide. These would be shared with the other participants, the letter had warned, and as a result people were told not to include any confidential matters that they did not want to be disclosed. Permission had been given to use a pseudonym, if one felt more comfortable with that, and when Ulf turned to the list, he saw that three of the others had taken up that offer.
Ulf had read the biographical notes with interest. There were two women and two men. The first woman on the list was called Henrietta. An asterisk next to the name indicated that this was a pseudonym.
“I am a wool buyer,” wrote Henrietta in her note. “I am unmarried. I buy wool for textile companies. Sometimes I travel to Australia. I like tapestry, needlework, and salsa dancing.” There was then a brief paragraph about her reasons for seeking psychotherapy. “I feel I owe it to myself,” she wrote.
Ulf turned to the second entry. This was from Ebba, who, like Ulf, was not using a pseudonym but who did not give her second name. “I am Ebba,” she wrote. “I have a job in a creative agency. I write advertising copy and also come up with marketing ideas—when these come to me! My problem is indecision, but I am working on it. This is the first time I will have been to a group encounter and I am really looking forward to it. Or am I?”