When the eighteen-year-old Dawn Henley meets the forty-year-old Lulu Shinefeld at the latter’s office on Central Park West, she’s just moved to the city from Vermont to start her freshman year at Barnard. As with therapy, you need to sit with these outbursts for a while before you begin to discover why you decided to show up in the first place. But this was something different: heaps of melodramatic stories, recounted in sessions between a therapist and one of her patients, interspersed with scenes from the therapist’s personal life, and written by a master of middlebrow genre romps that were themselves informed by Freudianism and developmental psychology.
Before coming across “August,” I’d read some novels in which characters go to therapy, others that take the form of a patient’s confession from the couch, and plenty with characters trying to overcome their pasts. Reading it for the first time, last year, was like returning to the home of an old family friend after a long absence, somewhere filled with the comforting noise of loved ones rattling off associations. This is the sort of enthusiasm for the drama of psychoanalysis that animates Judith Rossner’s novel “ August,” from 1983.
(She has no wardrobe budget for this fantasy.) In another, which was written as a play, two characters-Freud and his unconscious-are each other’s friends, family, lovers, and enemies. One was about a woman who shows up to every session dressed as a different historical figure who shares her name. It was all very exciting, enough so that this method I barely grasped inspired me to begin writing fictional stories of comically exaggerated circumstance. Strangers met up in the same room for years to talk each other into new realities. As a result of these sessions and of being exposed to the new terminology floating around our household, I began to sense that a problem, stared at over time, changed form-it generated its own alternatives. Occasionally, she would arrange for a classmate to try the inkblot test on me. This intrigue began in high school, when my mom went into training to become a clinical psychologist. Before I’d read any psychoanalytic texts, or attempted therapy myself, I was drawn to the practice for its facility with plot.
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