Inside the Office of Dr. Ina Pelletier

Unn’s Saga is really two intertwined stories. One is the account of Unn the Deep-Minded, told in her own words. Who does she tell it to? A therapist!

Ina Pelletier, PhD, is contemplating hanging it up. Still, she keeps her private practice going in a small New Mexico town.  She keeps her life quite private and socializes little. Only her best friend, Lety, shares her big-city sophisticated background and knows her secrets. Ina holds on to her hurt over her divorce, and she has a tense, troubled relationship with her son.

Ina’s life is upended when her young patient, R, comes back from a trip behaving strangely. She speaks in tongues—or so it first seems-- and appears to have seriously self harmed! And then R reveals another identity, an Other. Is this Other real or a delusion? How can Ina help this troubled young woman? How can she keep her own ethics in such a strange situation?

I was a therapist for many years, and I also trained and supervised others. All therapists feel anxious about at times in the face of a client’s behaviors . We deal with some of the messiest and saddest dilemmas people face, and we have to hold on to our cool while we help someone work it out. And we don’t always succeed.

Ina wants to help R, but R pushes back on her therapist much of the time. This happens in real life too. Is R much helped by her therapist? It’s a question the reader might decide. Ina makes another therapy contract with Unn. Onn the one hand, it’s sound practice not to challenge a delusion but to understand it’s meaning for the patient. On the other hand, if Unn is real, has she betrayed her commitment to R? Certainly, she is more drawn to Unn than she is to R.

Ina wants to keep R’s confidentiality. She is not much helped in this by her consultant, Dr. Snorri Grimmson, who wants to get to know R and this Other, Unn. Nor is it easy to keep boundaries in a small town where everyone knows each other’s business. And then, wait till you see who R starts to date!

Yes, Ina is on the ropes with this case. We therapists have all been there—although maybe not in such a novel way.  I ‘ve tried to portray Ina’s struggles with honesty about the profession of psychotherapy. It’s an imperfect field and not all problems are solved by therapy. For certain, it’s not the therapist who really has the answers. We are not a priesthood, nor gurus, nor paid mollycoddlers. (Okay, there are some out there who believe that one of those things is their role.) We are only human, as Ina discovers.

I should add, no real clients were harmed in the making of this story. That is to say, all Ina’s patients, especially, R, are products of my imagination. And I am not Ina Pelletier.