‘She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?  

Most pretty women do.  But there is a fashion in pasts just as there is a fashion in frocks.  Perhaps Mrs Chevely’s past is merely a slightly décolleté one, but they are extremely popular nowadays.’    

So is she a clever but dangerous woman who lacks any scruples to get what she wants, an adventurer, a dangerous seductress, a victim?  

‘Oh I should fancy Mrs Chevely is one of those very modern women who find a new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the park every afternoon at five-thirty.’ 

Bored, frustrated and manipulative, her intelligence and sexuality are but instruments in a game of power and influence.  She seems so far into it that she has forgotten how to feel. 

‘She wore far too much rouge last night, and not enough clothes. That is always a sign of desperation in a woman.’  

She blackmails Sir Robert Chiltern into protecting her investments by threatening to expose him.  She has in her possession a letter proving that His Majesty’s Foreign Secretary kick started his career by selling secret government plans to a speculator. 

‘I think that in life, in practical life, there is something about success, actual success, that is a little unscrupulous; something about ambition that is always unscrupulous.’   

But Sir Robert’s young wife, as beautiful as she is uncompromising, has put her husband on the fourth plinth, making it perfectly clear that her love for him is purely a projective identification of one with perfect morality. 

‘I remember having read somewhere that when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’

In so doing, her principles damage Sir Robert far more then the bribery and manipulation of Mrs Chevely could ever do.  

‘And is Lady Chiltern as perfect as all that?  What a pity!’

Sir Robert cannot face telling his wife the truth.  He knows it would destroy their marriage. Mrs Chevely knows this and is prepared to destroy both his career and his marriage.    

The fact is we all have our dark sides, the things we are ashamed of.  It never does to have such high principles (one wonders what is being defended). 

‘Well, the English can’t stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits he has been in the wrong. It is one of the best things in them.’

Lord Goring is the catalyst in Oscar Wilde’s wittily observed play (The Ideal Husband).  He’s rather like Falstaff or the wise court jester, but in this case it is the dandy philosopher, brilliantly played by Eliot Cowan.   He enters as a louche and dissolute character, but he understands the flaws of human nature; everybody is capable of doing wrong. 

‘Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing.  Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.’

Idealisation is a very fragile basis for marriage.  Acceptance and forgiveness are more important.  As Sir Robert complains:  

‘Why can’t you women love us, faults and all?  Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals?  We all have feet of clay; men as well as women, but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more for that reason. It the imperfect, not the perfect who have need of love.’

But is it that gender specific? 

An Ideal Husband, probably Oscar Wilde’s best play, is currently at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand and stars Samantha Bond, Rachel Stirling and Eliot Cowan.  It doesn’t deserve a half empty house.  

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Nevertheless, attempts to bring the different therapeutic disciplines together has been beset with difficulties, so much so that the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy has relinquished the effort and claims instead to supports diversity, whatever that means.  Clearly integration is seen as a bridge too far. 

Separation cuts deep into the human society.  It exposes enormous ambivalence.  While we desire to belong, at the same time we wish to also be separate, independent, autonomous.  Donald Winnicott captured the resolution of that dilemma, when he said that the aim of our psychological development is have ‘the confidence to be ourselves in the company of others’.  But the company of others implies belonging to certain professional groups, societies or teams that encompass a particular set of interests or attitudes. 

That immediately introduces a split. If we belong to a certain group, we don’t belong to other groups.  While Pi, in Yann Martel’s wonderful allegory, The Life of Pi, might practice as a Christian, a Moslem and a Hindu, he causes consternation among all three sects.  He must choose; he can’t be all three.  The same seems to apply to the psychotherapies.  Psychoanalysts tend to dismiss cognitive behavioural therapy with ill concealed disdain, yet they would agree that the goal of psychoanalysis is for an understanding that brings about a change in thought and behaviour. 

Even the most inclusive societies seem to demand we make a choice.  This starts early in life.  At the age of 14, I had to decide whether I was going to study arts or sciences.  Later I decided to be a doctor, which meant not dedicating myself to my first love, zoology and ecology.  Then I chose gastroenterology and not neurology.  More devastating in its consequences, although I discovered it was possible to love more than one woman, I had to choose one and abandon the other.  To fudge, to be indecisive or deceptive challenges the social order, even though it might make perfect psychobiological sense. 

So perhaps separation is part of our encultured identity.  Society demands difference, encourages diversity.  There must be something about agreement, sameness that does not lead to progress.  Society is like a shark; if it doesn’t keep moving forward, it dies!  Difference and the anxiety and competition this induces, keeps society alive.  If The Government were not continually being challenged by the opposition, then there would be no recovery.  The only time coalitions thrive is when there is an overwhelming external threat.   

So each of us embodies a certain set of beliefs and attitudes that make us who we are and sets us apart from others.  That is socially acceptable as long as understanding and tolerance exists between groups.  It’s when different groups feel attacked for their beliefs and are forced to adopt adversarial positions and ever more extreme attitudes,  that difficulties ensue. 

Unfortunately psychotherapy, which purports to be the most understanding of professions, is riddled with sectarianism to the detriment of therapists as well as their clients. 

We need to built bridges, not broad bridges that reduce everything to its lowest common denominator, but bridges with a café in the centre of them that facilitate communication and understanding.      

At the last meeting of The Hallam Institute of Psychotherapy on July 1st, Keith Tudor, a Humanistic Psychotherapist and co- founder of  Temenos, a Sheffield group promoting Person Centred Therapy, delivered a seminar entitled Building Bridges over Troubled Waters;  regarding humanistic and psychodynamic psychotherapies. 

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