Aiding and Abetting

is a novel by Muriel Spark I'm reading now. It's very good, and the beginning has quite a hook. Here are the first couple of pages:

The receptionist looked tinier than ever as she showed the tall, tall Englishman into the studio of Dr. Hildegard Wolf, the psychiatrist who had come from Bavaria, then Prague, Dresden, Avila, Marseilles, then London, and now settled in Paris.

"I have come to consult you, " he said, "because I have no peace of mind. Twenty-five years ago I sold my sould to the Devil." The Englishman spoke in a very forgein French.

"Would you feel easier," she said, "if we spoke in English? I am an English speaker of a sort since I was a student."

"Far easier," he said, "although, in a sense, it makes the reality more distressing. What I have to tell you is an English story."

Dr. Wolf's therapeutic methods had been perfected by herself. They had made her virtually the most successful psychiatrist in Paris, or at least the most sought-after. At the same time she was tentatively copied; those who tried to do so generally failed. the method alone did not suffice. Her personality was needed as well.

What she did for the most part was talk about herself throughout the first three sessions, turning only casually on the problems of her patients; then, gradually, in an offhand way she would induce them to begin to discuss themselves. Some patients, angered, did not return after the first or at least second session, conducted on these lines. Others remonstrated, "Don't you want to hear about my problem?"

"No, quite frankly, I don't very much."

Many, fascinated, returned to her studio and it was they who, so it was widely claimed, reaped their reward. By now her method was famous and even studied in the universities. The Wolf method.

"I sold my soul to the Devil."

"Once in my life," she said, "I had a chance to do that. Only I wasn't offered enough. Let me tell you about it . . ."

He had heard that she would do just this. The friend who had recommended her to him, a priest who had been through her hands during a troubled period, told him, "She advised me not to try to pray. She advised me to shut up and listen. Read the Gospel, she said. Jesus is praying to you for sympathy. You have to see his point of view, what he had to put up with. Listen, don't talk. Read the Bible. Take it in. God is talking, not you."

What I like about these pages is the way our (my!) usual expectations have been up ended by this woman. Instead of playing the good listener, as would be expected of any ordinary psychiatrist, Dr. Wolf (and what a great German name for a shrink) pronounces that she will do the talking for the first couple of sessions. Heterodox, to say the least. Nor is all this up-ending limited to the medical sphere. To a priest who comes to consult her, she advises him not to pray. That's pretty extraordinary.

So we're prepared (I was prepared) to like this Dr. Wolf, but then it's soon revealed that she's a total fraud. Does that mean that her patients weren't actually healed? To the contrary, she has enjoyed tremendous success. Well, that's okay, I say; the whole mental health industry is basically an elaborate scheme to make us all poorer, isn't it? Maybe yes, more probably no, actually, but then it doesn't really matter anyway, because it so happens Dr. Wolf formerly pretended to be a stigmatic before she started up all the medical fakery. Brilliant. Throw in a little soul-selling and exotic locales such as Prague, Avila, and Paris, and what we have is the beginning of a very good read.