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When Michael Bacon had his first therapy session as a shy 11-year-old, he sat on a bench just inside the door of the room because it was the nearest seat to the exit and had comfy cushions on it.
For his psychoanalyst Edna O’Shaughnessy, however, this choice was thick with hidden meaning. The cushions he gravitated towards were “desexualised parents who he holds apart and around himself”. His tendency to stare at the floor was because he saw on its surface “a confused vagina and mouth”. His gazes towards the door were not prompted by a desire to escape the strange encounter, but because he discerned on it “a penis and testicles”.
Bacon, now a friendly, youthful 50-year-old, endured three years of psychoanalysis in the mid 1980s. He found it boring and hated it, eventually calling a halt when he was 14. Since then, the lecturer in political theory at Royal Holloway University of London, would, at times, puzzle over the aberrant period in his otherwise fairly standard childhood. But in the main, he didn’t dwell on it.
That changed one day in 2022 when, sitting with his wife in a pub, his idle googling unearthed an obituary of O’Shaughnessy, who had died six months earlier.
The tribute to the well-respected child psychologist, who worked out of the Tavistock Clinic, in London, referred to her published case notes. His interest piqued, the next day Bacon searched for the documents and sent them to his wife who was keen to read them.
“Half an hour later she came running in saying ‘I’ve found you, you’re called Leon’,” he says.
From details in the case notes, it was clear to Bacon that the “crushed, lumpy boy”, as O’Shaughnessy described Leon, was indeed him.
“I was reading an essentially fictionalised version of myself that was nevertheless me,” says Bacon. “It was very strange. It is me, combined with this psychoanalytical template which is imposed on me.”
What was even more strange, and concerning, was the huge gulf between his memory of events and the interpretation being given to them by O’Shaughnessy, a devotee of Melanie Klein, one of the first child psychotherapists, born in 1882 in Vienna and heavily influenced by Freud’s teaching.
Klein’s theories focus on the very early development of the psyche, proposing that babies experience intense internal conflicts between love and hate for their mother. The earliest “objects”, such as the mother’s breast, become the focus of a child’s unconscious fantasy life and shape their personality and relationships.
As a child, Bacon liked school and had friends but was introverted. Like most children, he was apprehensive about going to secondary school. So far, so normal. Bacon’s father, however, was a fan of psychoanalysis and had been in therapy for 15 years. Overcoming his wife’s misgivings and with the best of intentions, Bacon’s father signed him up to therapy.
At O’Shaughnessy’s first meeting with her 11-year-old client, the therapist decided he was “very depressed”. When “Leon” starts to cry but doesn’t know why, she tells the schoolboy “there is a deep sadness” in him. She recommends a staggering four, 50-minute sessions a week.
According to the case notes, “Leon” lived in a world of lurid symbols. O’Shaughnessy came to believe that Bacon’s transition from the “paranoid schizoid position”, which, according to Klein’s theories is the starting phase for every baby, had become hampered by the fact of his mother’s pregnancy when Bacon was four months old. His “depression”, she surmised, was down to his struggle to reconcile that the “mother’s breast, is not solely for you – she has other even greater sexual intimacies with father, and perhaps father and mother are parents also of others”.
In the case notes, O’Shaughnessy spends more time interpreting Bacon’s actions, body language and facial expressions than anything “Leon” actually says.
When Bacon brings a roll of sweets to a session and asks O’Shaughnessy if she would like one, she writes: “I interpreted that he wished to know whether I liked what he was offering and, really, whether I liked him. I went on to say that he was expressing his longing for me as a mother who had only him, rather than the mother who had his brother, too. Leon was furious.”
In another session she notes that he unconsciously “bulged his jacket out like a pregnant woman”, claiming “his face had changed and become his mother’s”.
Even an innocent drink of juice, in Kleinian hands, exposes dark unconscious fears and desires buried deep in the unconscious.
“He has brought with him a carton of Ribena, a children’s drink, on which, in big print, is written ‘FIFTEEN FREE EXTRA’. Through a straw he starts sucking the drink. He looks no more a schoolboy, but every bit a baby as he empties the carton, which is collapsing in a grotesque shape,” she writes. “Desperately, he sucks for the last drops. I also speak about how he is not satisfied, and desperately still needs and hopes for something more, ‘extra’. There is a long silence.”
In this session, O’Shaughnessy concludes, Leon is “weaning after a feeding that leaves him desperate and unsatisfied and his object grotesque and ruined in his mind.”
Bacon is amazed anew every time he reads the case notes. He likens the psychoanalyst’s adherence to theory to a religion.
“O’Shaughnessy’s account of our relationship is almost entirely her own invention,” he says. “Reading her essays as an adult, I see how she was trying to fit me into her theoretical framework – sometimes by revising the theory to match our interactions. Her weighty sense of her own importance led her to strip my life of any meaning beyond analysis.”
Bacon recalls a particularly shocking example of her attempts to uncover his Oedipus complex. In one session, the schoolboy steeples his forefingers to rest his chin on as he listens unhappily to O’Shaughnessy’s endless suppositions, a pose he’d borrowed from Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the hit Granada TV series of the 1980s.
“O’Shaughnessy indicated my fingers and said ‘Is that your father’s penis?’,” says Bacon. “As far as I remember, I wasn’t using this language. When she references the “confused vagina and mouth” that I was supposedly staring at on the floor, at no point is she clear that I told her I could see those things. I’d be surprised if I had, given that ‘mouth’ was the only one of those words in my vocabulary at 11. What we have here are projections, not from Leon’s unconscious but from the ramshackle warehouse of Kleinian theory.”
Even more astonishing in O’Shaughnessy’s case notes is the account of a therapy session with an unfortunate three-year-old, “Tim”, who she says, at one point, is “having the feeling now of owning daddy’s big feeding penis that is so beautiful I must be a mother who admires and wants it”.
To the uninitiated, these essays on psychodynamic therapy are horrifying. The sexual language, the blatant suggestion, the sheer amount of time Bacon spent with the psychoanalyst away from his family, peers and hobbies, are extraordinary.
Of course, the intended audience for the notes are other psychoanalysts, not the general public. Some would argue that it is unfair to take them out of the context of the complex theories that inform them. Kleinian theory, and its practice, after all, gave rise to the development of other ideas, such as John Bowlby’s attachment theory, that many professionals working with children regard as indispensable.
Nevertheless, there is no denying the ethical and safeguarding issues raised by Bacon’s experiences, the wider implications of which he is currently researching for a book. For him, O’Shaughnessy’s essays illustrate the potential for error and harm in cases where dogma overrides common-sense.
This warning is particularly pertinent at a time when the UK is in the grip of a “therapy culture”. According to a report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, nearly a million (949,200) children in England were referred to Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services (CAMHS) during 2022/23. With long waiting lists, families who can afford it are seeking out private therapy, yet many people know little about who their children are seeing and what they are getting. Despite calls for government action, including from the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy, the sector is unregulated and anyone can set themselves up as a therapist.
Qualified professionals working with children argue that things have moved on in the decades since Bacon’s dismal experiences. A dogmatic devotion to one theory or another has given way, by and large, to more systemic approaches, which mix and match theories depending on the needs of the client.
Prof Vivian Hill, programme director of the UCL Institute of Education’s doctorate in child, adolescent and educational psychology, says: “Now, you would be looking at weeks of intervention. Often it is evidence-based, like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), where you are absolutely focusing on a target behaviour for a sustained period of time; the focus is not on what happened in your childhood, it is on outcomes. You concentrate on the thing that the young person is struggling with and help that person to develop strategies to challenge that behaviour and manage it differently.”
But even with these wider, more practical approaches, some experts are fearful that our creeping therapeutic culture – that labels everyday stresses and strains as mental health issues – could be doing more harm than good, particularly when it comes to children.
The former head of Ofsted Baroness Spielman has said that children are being encouraged at school to identify negative emotions that are just a normal part of childhood. She warned in The Times that some schools have become “therapeutic institutions” and that if they “are looking for things to be wrong with the child, they’ll probably find some”.
Prof Dr Sami Timimi, a consultant psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author, says: “We have created a whole panic around the concept of mental health.”
He points out that problem behaviour or feelings are “not like cancer, where early intervention will make a huge difference”.
“You are more likely to create a long-term problem [with early intervention] than head it off at the pass... Once you start looking at things through a certain lens, you become convinced that there is something problematic going on; it is very hard to get out of that mindset.”
Instead of listening to the constant “turbocharging” of mental health awareness, parents need to try to be patient and understand that children change.
Bacon agrees: “Freud famously described the job of the psychoanalyst as ‘transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness,’” he says. “We all experience unhappiness, of course. It’s unfortunate though that some psychotherapists work hard to transform it into hysterical misery.”
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