A Reflection on Alice Munro

Alice Munro evokes a powerful metaphor of the therapeutic process. She is a storyteller and has evoked a house, an enclosed space, in which to create the stories. The psychotherapeutic practitioner’s tools are also words; listening to what the patient is saying, and carefully exploring its meaning; reading the words together, hearing and retelling a story.

Together patient and therapist wander in the internal rooms of the mind, learning where thoughts lead, seeing different refractions from the same object as it appears from different angles. For psychodynamic practitioners there are no straight lines. Someone crosses the threshold into the consulting room because something is out of order for them. Ways and means of thriving, of evading capture by pain, no longer work. The therapist offers an enclosed space, a safe place to tell and hear the story.

The patient might feel thoughts in their inner landscape to be difficult or vulnerable or unthinkable, even unspeakable. Very often they will say that no-one ever hears them. The story metaphor suggests the possibility of a safe space because there are many rooms and many ways of looking out of them or around them. We are free to wander in the house, and to come and go. Each time we return we learn something new, building a therapeutic relationship.

So far, so good. But any relationship can hit a rough patch and feel dangerous or constraining. I have said in another paper, “The idealised safe place can be experienced as dangerous. Psychoanalytic work may be a great threat to a deeply repressed fear. … therapist and patient might often have found themselves contained over an epicentre of psychic fear and hate, facing each other.” (Foster 2020). Some of the rooms may therefore be shadowed and dark.

And in the Munro house there was a dark room. In an essay in the Toronto Star, (Skinner 2024) Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robbin Skinner, described how her stepfather sexually abused her when she, aged nine, visited her mother for a summer vacation. The abuse continued until the age when she reached puberty, when “he lost interest.”(Victoria News 2024) In 2005, in her twenties, Skinner went to the police to report the abuse and for the first time to tell her mother, who apparently refused to accept the truth of her daughter’s story. Her stepfather pleaded guilty.

The Times Literary Supplement reported “horror and confusion” in the literary community, not just at the abuse but also at Munro’s callousness.(M.C. 2024) The TLS also wondered if this would affect how people read Munro now as they had to come to terms with the literary saint’s feet of clay. I wondered, too. The metaphor of the many roomed house had seemed so apt to describe the passage between minds as therapy unfolds. And the consulting room is the essential safe place. But Alice Munro does not call it safe; she calls it enclosed.

Does the dark room in the Munro house affect its value for me as a metaphor for therapeutic work?

Even thinking through the problem, I find myself looking out the window or being distracted by citation problems or wondering about Joe Biden’s resignation from the presidential campaign. So plainly, I am not finding a simple yes or no answer. Would the house full of rooms in which you can wander time and again, be less acceptable now, with Munro’s name associated with it?

Let’s imagine that a hypothetical 60-year-old Alice went to a therapist in 2005. What questions might the therapist have wanted to explore after a few sessions when the reason for the first visit emerged, for example, as concern about the state of her marriage to her second husband. Alice had learned that he had many friendships with young girls, which he ended before they reached adulthood. Staying focused on the patient, we would be asking what this conveyed about the capacity of her husband to have a relationship with an adult woman. What did this do to her own sense of self-worth? She had left her first husband in Vancouver, with their children and moved to live in Clinton Ontario. Her youngest daughter visited every summer, and as we know was one of the “young friends.” The therapist would also be asking if there were still vulnerable children at risk. If so, at least in some jurisdictions the therapist would need to report these concerns to a law enforcement agency, and even without that the therapist would be pondering if they should break the bonds of confidentiality in the interests of the safety of a child.

In 2004 Alice Munro published a short story in the New Yorker called Silence,(St. Denis, n.d.) about a renowned journalist and her relationship to her daughter who had disappeared from home. The fictional journalist had carried on her life, and although she had learned where her daughter had gone, had not tried to find her, nor did she try to find out why she had left. She remained silent. It is as if she found a dark room in which to speak in the shadows.

If the patient we saw were hypothetical Andrea, the most telling aspect of her story must be that she was comprehensively unheard. The first person she told of the abuse was her biological father, who not only said that they must not tell her mother, but also sent her out every year for the summer holiday to her stepfather’s home. It would not be surprising if her mother’s outright denial in 2005 created deep despair. And the most important thing for the therapist to do would be to bring Andrea out of the dark silent room into the light and air so she could be heard.

These stories, these experiences, and these fears are not unusual in any consulting room and would not be unusual in the metaphoric house that represents therapeutic work so effectively. It seems to me that Alice Munro’s metaphor is even more powerful where some of the rooms are dark, or frightening, or demand an exceptional reticence on the part of the therapist until the work itself leads to a safe place and helps us come to terms with what we have learned.

A colleague criticised my paper on Not Knowing(Foster 2020) as not giving enough attention to the shadow side of the work. I did not explore fully the idealisation of the safe place. We know what it should be and why we and the patient need to be safe. But it does not always function in the light. We must be alert at all times to what lies hidden, as well as what has come to light. Light and shade move through a house during the day. Alice Munro’s metaphor if we explore it fully, and the possible implications of those rooms, is even more powerful.

References

Denis, Jen St. n.d. ‘Alice Munro’s Daughter Breaks Her Silence | The Tyee’. Accessed 27 July 2024. https://www.thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/07/08/Alice-Munro-Daughter-Breaks-Silence/.

Foster, Anne. 2020. ‘Therapists and Patients at the Epicentre of a Pandemic of Not Knowing’. https://www.therapyroute.com/article/therapists-and-patients-at-the-epicentre-of-a-pandemic-of-not-knowing-by-a-foster.

M.C. 2024. ‘NB Column, Saints and Sinners’. Times Literary Supplement, July. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/nb/saints-and-sinner/.

Skinner, Andrea. 2024. ‘A Family Matter’.
 

Anne is a qualified Psychotherapist (Registered), based in Speen, United Kingdom.

With a commitment to mental health, Mrs Foster provides services in English and French, including Psychotherapy (Dynamic).

Mrs Foster has expertise in Anxiety Disorders, Bereavement and Loss and Depression.

Click here to schedule a session with Mrs Foster.

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