She lies down slowly and carefully, just as she did the first time.

I want very much to return to the subject of her last photograph, but I sense that Nathalia requires a different angle of approach. Murder, though… Most of my clients come to vent about neuroses of a more everyday kind: problems at work, a complicated divorce, an inferiority complex. They feel disorientated, lost in the modern world – the Covid crisis, international tensions – and they feel its effects in their day-to-day lives, on their savings. Stress. Stress made worse by children who’ve sprouted suddenly into turbulent teenagers, when they were malleable and charming just a year or two before. Not to mention that perennial classic, the Oedipus complex.

I have two of those: Lemont and Robotti. I really should organise a group therapy session, a weekend in the country, so that the two of them can get to know one another. Together, they might almost be classed as a two-man ‘twin complex’, to borrow a term from my American colleagues. Two individuals whose neuroses derive from identical causes, and who express them to their analyst in identical terms. Lemont and Robotti were both stifled in childhood by mothers who dressed them in girls’ clothes, in secret, until they were six years old. Now in his prime, Robotti tells me that these days he would be considered transgender. Lemont has a subtle variation on the same theme: perhaps he should identify as non-binary? And I sit, and listen, and try to help them acknowledge their feelings. It’s difficult, even exhausting at times. It’s quite unusual for an attractive young woman to sit herself down on the couch and just talk to me about her creative block. Murder, rather. Not her creative block: murder.

‘You’ve spoken about your professional life, but not your private life.’ It’s a question I hesitate to ask, but it’s a necessary question all the same. Some patients develop an urgent case of verbal diarrhoea when they hear these words. But not here, not now. All she says in reply is:

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I ask. But her answer is a reassuring silence. I’m not sure I’m in the best frame of mind for a string of childhood stories, each more sordid than the last. In truth, analysis is quite boring. Every now and then a patient will stand out from the crowd – gifted, intelligent, succinct in their answers – you can spot them straight away.

Some analysts call such patients their ‘assistant’, because they assist you in the work of analysis, rather than lying on the couch, passive and unresponsive, waiting for a miracle to descend.

Questions followed by long silences only really occur in here. Out there, if you ask someone a question and they don’t reply, it introduces what Freud terms ‘the uncanny’ – a troubling sense of alienation. Here, nothing is uncanny or strange. Everything is normal. And so I wait.

‘I don’t seem to be capable of living.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I look at other people’s lives and I ask myself: How do they do it?’

‘And how do they do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you see your camera as a barrier between you and the world, a form of protection?’

‘It’s a little like that.’

‘You aren’t taking pictures any more, so the barrier has gone, and you feel vulnerable.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘What do you do all day?’

‘Nothing.’

I wait for her to say something else. Experience has shown that the word ‘nothing’, firmly pronounced, usually prefaces a whole catalogue of activities. One patient, Guichard, assured me that his Wednesday afternoons were filled with nothing, followed by an exhaustive, detailed list of every possible and imaginable sado-masochistic practice, the clubs specialising in said practices, secret addresses and women’s first names passed from hand to hand, invariably preceded by the dominatrix’s classification number. For Guichard, ‘nothing’ meant bondage and a whipping from Mistress Caroline in a smartly appointed studio flat in the 6th arrondissement. Not for one second did he think that this particular definition of ‘nothing’ might be of relevance to our work together. The most perverted individuals are often the most naïve.

‘I sleep, and I wish I could sleep for ever.’

‘Do you have suicidal thoughts?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I don’t want to kill myself.’

Often, my patients lie. But she’s telling me the truth – or I’d like to think she is. If I heard, tomorrow, that she had killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates, I would be genuinely surprised.

‘What else, apart from sleep?’ I ask.

‘I write in my diary.’

‘Do you like writing?’

‘Yes.’

‘And apart from writing?’

‘I go for walks.’

‘Where do you walk?’

‘In my apartment… I watch the people opposite. In the north wing.’

‘You watch your neighbours?’

‘Yes. Force of professional habit. I feel as if I’m an eye.’

She has internalised a form of perversion: voyeurism, rendered harmless through the practice of her profession. But Nathalia cannot be a perverted voyeur because she is a photographer by trade. For her, the act of seeing is a continuation of her work. True voyeurs are never professionally involved with image-making. They are genuine, passionate amateurs, bankrupting themselves with expensive telephoto lenses, infrared and night vision binoculars. They hide in their cars, playing ‘I spy’, in the Bois de Boulogne or other open spaces. Sometimes, they will visit saunas or naturist beaches, and leave all their pseudo-military paraphernalia in the boot of their car. They are gentle, sensitive, shy creatures, albeit capable of capturing the most sordid scenes on their retinas. They’re easily identified: they cannot be touched. They recoil from physical contact like an oyster from a drizzle of lemon juice. I know this. I never shake their hand. They are grateful for that.

‘An eye that looks but sees nothing?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many floors are there?’

‘Five.’

‘And what do you see on those five floors?’

‘Stories. Lives. Life.’

Detached from life, but not from the act of looking. Nathalia hides behind her own eyes. Huddled behind the crystal of her lenses like an animal curled in a ball, hibernating in her lacrimal fluid. A foetus in its sac, going back to her first beginnings. She is proving to be a more difficult subject than I had imagined at first. Melancholic depression due to a loss of a professional framework is quite common. It happens with artists, of which she is one, and with executives suffering the consequences of a corporate restructuring beyond their control. As a rule, I try to help melancholics rediscover their interest in life by finding them an activity, however trivial. It’s always a step in the right direction. I might ask an executive who’s been made redundant to give me their analysis of the financial markets. I’m careful to situate the small task I ask of them – but which may require a superhuman effort on their part – in their particular field of competence. With Nathalia, this is something of a challenge: she doesn’t take photographs any more and she hardly ever goes out.

‘Nathalia, I’d like to ask you to do something for me.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like to suggest an activity.’

‘I don’t want to take photographs,’ she says straight away.

‘That’s not what I was thinking.’

The silence settles around us once again. All I can see is her glossy black hair and her delicate hands resting on her skirt. We’ll get nowhere like this. Talking has its limits. ‘One must find a way to deviate,’ said Malevinsky – my mentor and master. Deviation from the spoken word means finding an alternative confessional form. The written word. ‘The written word is thought, it has been thought, and thought may be expressed in the mouth or from the nib of a fountain pen. It has existence; our body – the mouth, or the hand guiding a pen – serves merely as a vector for that other, invisible body of thought, and it is this that concerns us.’ Malevinsky again. We write in solitude and in silence, and Nathalia seems quite accustomed to both states. I try an approach:

‘You say you watch the occupants of the five floors of the north wing of your building. I’m going to make a suggestion: a change of strategy for our sessions. We’re going to communicate differently, you and I. Here’s what I suggest: you will bring a short, written piece each time, about life on one floor of the building. A true story, or one you’ve made up, it doesn’t matter which. And we’ll go from floor to floor, starting at the ground floor, then the first, second, third… Up to the fifth floor. Do you think you can do that?’

‘And at the fifth floor, we stop?’

‘By the fifth floor, we’ll have made a great deal of progress,’ I tell her.

‘You think I’m going to tell you about myself, through these stories?’

She has understood the exercise perfectly, but she seems on her guard. It’s my job to bring down those last defences, the sentinels of clear consciousness who believe they are protecting the Self when, in reality, they are stifling it.

‘I...