Donald Stevenson

Not So Innocent Donald Stevenson

The story begins to unfold in a psychoanalysts office as three different patients, in the course of their analyses, refer independently to a murder/suicide that shook the city a few years earlier. Soon after, a similar tragedy takes place a few blocks from the analysts office. The similarities are so amazing that the police reopen the investigation of the first tragedy, now believed to be a double murder, and patients become suspects. The treating analyst, dubbed by one of the patients as Frank Voyeur, narrates the story in retrospect to his son, Jack, a college student with growing skepticism of psychoanalysis. With the analysts wife as moderator, the dialogue between father and son recounts the complex details of the criminal investigation and the unexpected solution during the trial, as well as fragments of the three analyses, which end up mobilizing Jacks unresolved antagonism with his father. The experience turns into a journey of self-discovery for Jack. As for the three patients, the unfolding psychoanalytic process in each case sheds light on the story behind the story: human behavior itself.