The Swetky Agency

Submission Synopsis

Therapy

by Gerald Schoenewolf

Length:
60,000

Genre:
Psychological Drama
Thriller

Sentence:
A beginning therapist's life turns upside down when he meets his first patient, a young woman with four personalities.

Blurb:
When Bill is assigned his first patient by the institute he is attending, he finds that she is both suicidal and a multiple personality. She is more than he can handle and he ends up trying to heal and love her at the same time.

Synopsis:
“Do you talk?” a young woman asks her new male therapist. She says her last therapist wouldn’t talk. The therapist, Bill, is a young man who has just begun his training as a therapist. The patient, Jeanie, a beautiful ex-ballerina, turns out to be not only suicidal but also to have four personalities. His supervisor at the training institute recommends that he refer the patient to someone more experienced, but the young man stubbornly insists he has what it takes to work with her. His own therapist, Eve, is quite concerned about him. As her personalities reveal themselves, Bill becomes more involved with Jeanie. In his supervision sessions, his older supervisor questions whether Bill is developing a “countertransference” toward the patient. Bill lies and says he is perfectly fine.

His girlfriend, Millie, is meanwhile becomes jealous of this patient. Bill succeeds in integrating two of Jeanie’s personalities, but then becomes alarmed by her relationship with her sexually abusive father. He decides to drive her to her Pennsylvania home to help her get some important tape recordings. At the house he gets into a scuffle with her father. One thing leads to another and they end up in bed. The next day he tells his girlfriend and his supervisor that he’s in love with Jeanie. His girlfriend slaps him. His supervisor threatens to kick him out of the institute.

Bill walks out of the institute in a fit of temper and then quits therapy. Jeanie then begins to deteriorate and reverts to her former habit of cutting herself. In a final twist, one of her personalities, Martha, accuses Bill of rape and kicks him out of her apartment. She returns to her abusive father and he ends up in the arms of his therapist, Eve. The story concludes with her calling yet another therapist.

Bio: Dr. Schoenewolf is a licensed psychoanalyst who has been writing for films for 10 years and has completed seventeen screenplays. He recently won the WriteMovies.com Winter 2005 screenwriting contest for his play Freud in Love. Before writing screenplays he wrote and directed stage plays in New York and Copenhagen. He has also published 14 books on psychology and a handful of short fiction in Esquire, Tranatlantic Review, North American Review, Prism International, Minetta Review and Cimarron Review. He is listed in the International Who’s Who of Authors. Therapy is his second film.

Endorsements: Colleagues in the therapy field would endorse it.

Film: THERAPY has already been made into a film, and recently was selected for the New Filmmkers Series in NY.

Additional: THERAPY is a novelization of the author's earlier nonfiction case history, JENNIFER AND HER SELVES. It was brought out in mass paperback by Dell in 1993 and sold out its 100,000 printing.