Border Crossing: Raising Ethical Questions about Care Through the Failure of the Psychologist

This article focuses on how Pat Barker explores the ethical stance of her main character, Tom, a psychologist, who is as confused by the conundrum of the distinction between facts and truths as the readers who are tempted to read the story of Border Crossing as a thriller revisiting a real-life case may be. This enables me to show that instead of simply criticizing the way mental health experts are used in the British judiciary system, Barker’s novel suggests that failure to critically engage with one’s practice defeats alleged scientifically-based methods. Tom’s motivations are debatable from the point of view of the therapist’s ethics, and ultimately no longer oriented by Danny, his patient. The novel’s tension mainly stems from a therapeutic situation that unsettles all ethical principles: Tom is chosen for what Danny thinks was Tom’s role in his being sentenced, almost forced to account for the report he then wrote. I wish to argue that by questioning the guarantee of trial expertise and diagnoses, especially in the biopolitical context of the promotion of DSM as more ‘scientific’ than other methods, Barker challenges the association of care and cure that has somehow become central to literary analyses of mental health: she shows that caring for/ about a patient may have nothing to do with their cure, encouraging a reflection on mental health therapists’ ethics, in particular their well-meaning objectives. As this is a question that has been central in defining the breach between psychoanalysis and psychiatry, especially in the teaching of Lacan, this will be the main framework for the definition of the ethics of the cure in this article.