He haunts me still.

I watched only the highlights of Chretien’s testimony on the news the other day, because I knew I could not tolerate more than that. I couldn’t read the text of his remarks. I couldn’t watch the entire cross-examination.

I cannot even generate a coherent response, in the way Jerry Aldini or Let it Bleed or Babbling Brooks have ably done. I feel like a psychiatrist, who finds himself reacting emotionally to his patient’s reflections rather than intellectually.

In psychiatry the reaction is called counter-transference. In transference a patient may feel an intense emotion towards the psychiatrist, such as a feeling of love a patient can feel towards the doctor who might be the first person in her life to listen and care. The existence of transference is one of the many reasons why it is totally inappropriate, not to mention actionable, for a psychiatrist to engage in “personal relations” with a patient: for the patient, any emotional attachment to the doctor may be a part of her illness rather than a “real” emotion, and it is perverse for the psychiatrist to capitalize on this emotion. In a counter-transference reaction, it is the psychiatrist who experiences the emotion, such as love towards a patient who is needy and dependent, or hate towards a patient who is irritating and destructive. Awareness of counter-transference is important for a psychiatrist who wants to provide empathetic care, and can actually be valuable from a diagnostic standpoint: one psychiatrist told me a few years ago, only half-joking I think, that when you get really really mad a patient, that patient usually has “Borderline Personality Disorder”.

I digress.

I had such an intense counter-transference reaction to seeing Chretien testify that I was cursing at the television screen. If I were a psychiatrist, and Chretien a patient of mine, I would have had to take a very deep breath and fix a warm smile on my face with a staple gun. His insouciance, his impenetrable lack of insight, his grating false charm… I was and am enraged.

Any number of media talking heads have made the point that Chretien’s bravura performance illustrates why we miss him so much. Not me. For me, as the Man Himself would say, it meant something quite different. For the sake of my own mental health, I am intensely grateful that he is gone.

He still makes me sick.