him Andrew and whilst he referred to her as Mrs Richards, he thought of her as Samantha. In their intimate moments, he did not call her by any name. He didn't usually address patients by their first name and didn't encourage them to call him Andrew, but a few, like Samantha, chose to do so.
He had always strongly believed that it was important to maintain a doctor – patient relationship, where his own personal life and needs would not intrude on the therapy, nor would there be inappropriate intimacy. At least that's the theory, he said to himself with heavy irony.
After several months of therapy and sex, unsurprisingly, Samantha continued to be a needy soul, prone to recurrent bouts of depression and occasional suicidal thoughts. Her childhood appeared to have been a normal one until her father died from a massive heart attack when she was eight years of age. Her mother then struggled to cope with four young children, aged from fourteen years down to the youngest, aged three. There followed a procession of men intruding, as her mother attempted to replace her husband with an urgency akin to a woman dying of thirst. Unfortunately the men she chose were totally different to her late husband, and had no interest in supporting a young family.
Samantha married when she became pregnant at the age of nineteen and escaped the family home, but found no solace in her new home either. Her husband was four years older than her, worked as a bricklayer and outside of work his only interests were the local pub and the local football team. They separated soon after their daughter was born, following three years of a loveless marriage.
Samantha and her daughter lived on their own at first, but in time, like her mother she began inviting a regular stream of men into her life. They accepted her invitation, took what they wanted and left.
Six months after the affair began, Andrew found himself becoming increasingly concerned about ending the relationship with Samantha and encouraged her to form a relationship with another man that she had recently met, in the hope that this would offer Andrew the escape route that he so desperately sought now. Privately, he wondered why he wanted to end the affair, and the best explanation he could arrive at, was that with diminishing excitement he had started to look at the destruction he was causing to his marriage and to the ethics and morals that had guided his life in the past.
For twelve months, his manipulation (for he could not call it ‘therapy’) failed to achieve what he so desperately craved by then. Then when he had stopped hoping, Samantha stunned him with the news that she had met a widower with two young children, who appeared to genuinely care about her. She rang Andrew, and told him that she wanted to terminate therapy as she was not prepared to risk damaging her new relationship. She no longer needed Andrew's therapy nor his sex.
Having penetrated that moral barrier once, Andrew struggled to avoid doing it yet again – and it was a struggle at times. He determined that if a difficult transference developed in treating a female patient, where either he or they developed a strong attraction to the other, he would refer them on to another psychiatrist. He was aware that in psychiatric practice, there was only he and the patient in the room and no nurse to chaperone the situation. Whilst errors tend to occur in the company of other errors, he knew that this was not the type of company he could afford again, as he would risk losing his family, his profession and his self-worth.
Andrew now felt a foreigner in his own moral landscape, struggling to make himself understand what had occurred and why. Karen and his friends noted that he appeared distracted and at times daydreaming. He came very close to confessing to Karen, but avoided giving in to that urge, knowing it would be disastrous to do so.
He had believed for a long time that to confess all was self-serving and the wrong approach. He had seen it happen in many of his patients, where in the guise of an open relationship they confessed wrongdoings, dropping the grenade in the lap of their partner. For a short while it seemed to ease their own guilt, but at the expense of burdening their partner and destroying the relationship.
Andrew had felt for some time, probably since late 1986, that things had cooled in the way Karen related to him. Silently he queried whether Karen could have possibly suspected he had been having an affair, and he continued to live with a lie that brought no peace. He knew he had to sort it out himself, possibly with professional help, rather than dumping the problem onto Karen.
During his medical training he came to understand that the basic goal in medicine was to cause no harm, and then to try and help the patient. He struggled to understand why he had failed to adhere to these guidelines when treating Samantha. Certainly he had recently lost both parents, and struggled to grieve over the loss of his father, a man who had only been a shadow in his life. He was wary of possibly using this as an excuse for behavior that only he could be responsible for. Andrew had been fascinated about the concepts of good and evil for many years, pondering the question of whether people were intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. If they were good, was it the fear of punishment that made them act so? He had come to believe that anyone was capable of doing bad things if their controls were loosened and depending on the circumstances around them. He knew about the mob effect where large numbers of people could be dragged into an environment where they carried out acts of evil, often feeling safe to do so under the umbrella of anonymity that a mob generated. He believed that there was a ripple effect, where having done one bad thing it would be easier to do more of the same.
Apart from his own behaviour, he thought back to his family's experience during the Holocaust where seemingly educated and cultured people could become sadists and murderers. He reflected on how the victims of these atrocities could also be part of a ripple effect, where the damage the victims suffered could cause further damage to the generations that followed because of how they related to each other.
Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil was something he totally agreed with, and recalled how during the Holocaust the people who murdered their victims could have been a former friend, or a teacher whose class the victim attended or even a doctor who used to treat them. People who once had been close to their victim now became their brutal executioners.
Andrew wondered how his own behaviour in having sex with a patient fitted into these concepts. Had his resolve been weakened by events in his life or was he totally to blame? What did it say about him as a person? He worried that he was becoming too preoccupied with these thoughts and whilst they addressed important issues, he feared that he could be buried in an avalanche of emotion. Once the thoughts squatted in his mind, it was difficult to evict them. They were issues he would eventually need to confront, but he increasingly believed that involving a therapist would be a safer approach. The idea of a psychiatrist needing to see another psychiatrist did not sit comfortably with him, but he acknowledged it was necessary. He knew that the saying “physician heal thyself ” didn’t mean going it alone but rather, admitting to himself that he required outside assistance.
He had never felt so alone before.
CHAPTER FIVE
Wednesday, 20 January 1988
11.56 p.m.
‘Get up.’
The command from Deborah met no resistance, and Brett was immediately alert. He checked his watch and guessed that the extra few hours sleep he’d been allowed were more to do with Deborah needing the time rather than any concern about his tiredness.
He knew that whenever Deborah invited him up to her compound, it was never just for a social outing. There was always some underlying issue that she wanted to speak to him about, and on this occasion he suspected that it had to do with psychiatrist Dr Wright and her concern that he might be involved in trying to expose her group.
Through his work with the Victorian Police Task Force, Brett had heard rumours that a number of aggrieved ex-sect members were attending Dr Wright,
