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The Characters of Love extracts
It disgruntled Richard Fisher that he had not made more of his
daughter, but he had justified it to himself by acknowledging he
did not have a feeling for children and that this was a serious
obstacle to their relation. He did not know how to go about liking
children, just as he did not know how to make small talk with the
man that cut his hair, or to feel sexually attracted to a red headed
woman. These were alien, unprecedented things for which he lacked
a paradigm.
Fisher had known almost no children well. He was very familiar
with several important cases, and from the studies he had read and
the research he had witnessed, he liked to think he would be professionally
equipped to handle a child who, for example, had stopped talking
as a reaction to exceptional circumstances in its life, its father
beating its mother, say, or the witnessing of some horrific accident,
should the parents see fit to involve a psychiatrist. But he had
never actually treated a child for more than a single session, fifty
minutes in-out, the parents of such children generally preferring
to consult a specialist.
Fisher knew there was an idea that play could be a useful tool
in building up some sort of rapport between child and adult, but
the world of play was one that he himself had little or no grasp
of. The idea of rough and tumble, standing in goal between two discarded
jumpers, using a slipper for a cricket bat, piggy in the middle,
Kerplunk, snap even, were not things with which he had ever had
any dealings. There was a vast, red and yellow health centre in
North London he had visited when assessing some student work as
an external examiner, where sessions took place in an orange Wendy
house and the sand pit and the finger plaints were employed in the
treatment, but Fisher could not help but feel scorn for the sort
of practitioners who favoured these methods, all belinnened Camden
Town middle-aged divorcees rushing about like toddlers, pretending
to be carefree toddlers themselves, as if they hoped to set an example
in this way. It wasn't exactly that this sort of approach felt undignified
to him, although this was certainly part of it, but mainly he felt-it
was hard to put his finger on it exactly-that it was an insult to
the intelligence of the children. Exposing them to these hideously
neurotic women for long periods of time, he was certain, could do
the children no good and might actually do some harm. For the women
it was a different story: generally it helped them enormously to
have a new focus to carry them away from their obsessions with the
painful, messy, separations, the new romances that their husbands
had embarked on, the distribution of the marital finds and so on.
But it was quite wrong for the children to be called upon as doctors
when they had entered into the arrangement quite specifically, as
the patients. No amount of progressive game playing could alter
the fact. Fisher did occasionally like a game of chess and if he
had had a teenage son he might have played chess with him, possibly:
but he did not have a son, he had a daughter.
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