What to do?

Peter D. Kramer examines the challenges of commitment in Should You Leave?

by Bill Rodriguezk

SHOULD YOU LEAVE?, by Peter D. Kramer. Scribner, 320 pages, $25.

IF ONLY we were entirely rational creatures, psychiatrists and therapists would have jobs as easy as bricklayers. Fact upon observable fact could be plunked next to each other and soon the entire edifices of misery people have been inhabiting would be towering before them. All we'd have to do is slam the door and walk away.

Unfortunately, what psychotherapy seeks to assemble looks more like a rat's nest. We construct our psyches unconsciously, from scraps and shreds of experiences. Even Freud's squabbling psychiatric progeny agree that motivations usually can be traced from actions only through murky, circuitous pathways. Successful therapy leaves mud on the shoes.

Peter D. Kramer starts from that humbling point-of-view at the outset of his new book and maintains the perspective throughout. Should You Leave? takes on the most daunting of life-changing questions anyone could bring to a therapist. Leaving a spouse or partner is a chilling prospect for most who bring doubt to the consideration. (Kramer makes clear that he isn't addressing people who are being abused. No time for chin-pulling there: flee.) There's usually a lot of on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand involved in decisions about leaving. Perhaps one of the author's most helpful accomplishments here is to give permission for uncertainty, on the part of therapists as much as for those considering breaking up.

Kramer writes that, compared to the sober therapists he most admires, he would "appear a lightweight optimist." Yet the minefield of potential marriage traps he guides us through makes the trip seem like sidling through wartime Sarajevo. We can be attracted to an idealization rather than to an actual flesh-and-flaws person. We might marry someone who makes us feel worthless, for the comfort of hearing an old script. We can even fall victim to pathological possession or emotional enslavement. All that in addition to the trite old story of finding a partner who exemplifies the bad traits of your parent of the opposite sex, so that you can finally work out that relationship. Optimism notwithstanding, early on Kramer admits that he has "been trained to mistrust claims of happiness."

All of Should You Leave? is a rumination on how Kramer might deal with someone who stepped into his office to ask the big question. It's written in the second person, addressing the reader as such a patient and discussing other cases, which are fictional composites. The rhetorical style does

have a certain vividness and immediacy. (My favorite example has been noted in other reviews: "She was a shy woman with an aggressively homely face and a knockout figure, like a grotesque child might make from a mix-the-body-parts flip book.") Examples accumulate of the kinds of problems and relationships that might ring a bell with the reader. The trouble with this approach lies in the difference in appeal between true crime books and murder mysteries. Nonfiction accounts, full of colorful scene-setting, grip us more deeply because we picture events as actual rather than imaginary. Kramer's sometimes convoluted relationship dramas don't have the impact that true case studies would have, since we know he's fiddled with the facts. And they don't have the impact of fiction because they're not complete stories. (Ironically, Freud's own ostensibly factual case studies have come to be seen as tainted and distorted by the master's own special pleading, as Kramer discusses in one instance.) As far as true life application, it's hard for the mind to get completely out of fiction gear when Kramer makes his factual observations. It can be a bit like reading a post-modern metafiction about Anna Karenina psychoanalyzed on a couch.

Yet Should You Leave? should be enormously useful to its target audience. Such a broad spectrum of problems and personalities are examined that anyone can find their stand-ins. And this is no glib, easy-answer self-help book. Several therapists and theories of therapy that influenced Kramer are summarized and discussed in fascinating detail: non-academic but thorough. Exploring the process of therapeutic decision-making is the aim here, not finding easy answers.

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An interview with the author

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