THE INNER WORLD TURNED OUT

A novel focuses on the strained relationship of two California psychotherapists.

Lingen centers his tale on psychologist Petter Lyngen and his wife, psychiatrist Thea Elden. The author, a licensed clinical psychologist, shows how they navigate not only the turmoil of their own marriage, but also the demands of their separate practices and all of the patients they interact with every day. Petter and Thea live in a condo in San Francisco’s Marina district and have been in couples therapy for a whole range of problems between them, including Petter’s buried resentment that Thea makes more money than he does and is better educated (she went to Stanford; he attended California State). Despite these and other issues, the couple seem reasonably happy at the start of the story, bantering, showering together, and enjoying long bike rides. Through them and their patients, Lingen is able to dramatize a wide variety of psychological complaints as well as the office politics and inner workings of psych departments and treating hospitals. Readers also get an extensive guided tour of the psychological backgrounds and key developmental issues faced by both Petter and Thea, including a shared history of parental abuse. This material helps ground them in the imagination as they face an array of people with psychological troubles as well as their own complicated feelings for each other

These glimpses into the professional world of psychotherapy are related with the detail and confidence that only an insider could provide. Lingen imbues some of his professional and interpersonal scenes with a very dry sense of humor, a tone that extends to the book’s abundant sexually explicit content. But the potential for a great psychology novel is blunted by several narrative flaws, starting with the work’s self-indulgent length (595 pages). Petter and Thea are seldom rendered as actual human beings; too often they’re depicted as stereotypes, calling each other “my love” while lounging in their condo living room reading their professional journals. Thea employs her “brilliant medically analytic mind” and reels off stiff exposition like “Ketamine enhances domaminergic neurotransmission to NMDA receptor sites in both the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.” At one point, she asserts to her husband: “As you are always saying, Petter…you can’t secure a hook inside someone’s chest unless there is something in there upon which you can secure the hook.” This decision to portray Petter and particularly Thea as vamping, hyperintellectual androids—him a passive-aggressive snob and her a controlling bully—undercuts the effectiveness of the story in humanizing the world of professional psychology. Likewise, the author’s choice to have characters lapse almost at random into all-caps profanity almost always seems forced and artificial, further driving a wedge between the players and the audience’s empathy. The characters are forever dissecting their motivations for doing the things they do, but the narrative seldom gives readers reasons to care about those actions.

A richly detailed but uneven tale about the marriage of a psychologist and a psychiatrist.