Oh, no. That is SO wrong!

I'm reading the Sunday paper this morning and I'm all like, wha-a-at??

It seems that transcripts of some of Carson McCullers' sessions with her therapist are being released to researchers, and everybody's all excited about how this will give them more insight into her life and art. Well, not everybody. I'm certainly not.

I'll give the therapist a pass on terminating the therapy relationship so they could have a personal relationship. This was the '50s, after all, and things were different then. In fact, they were so different that she might actually have been a bit ahead of her time in that regard. Most people back then didn't bother terminating one relationship before beginning another. I remember when I was just a young sprat of a therapist reading about one famous, leading psychologist who was therapist to a young woman, then her professor (presumably he mentored her into grad school), then her clinical supervisor -- and then her husband! Not sure when, exactly, they became lovers, but good grief. That's like a perfect trifecta of "dual" relationships.

But McCullers' therapist/partner lived until 2013. By which time it should have been glaringly obvious to her that those transcripts should have been destroyed -- back in the 60s, not to put too fine a point on it.

And the university that inherited and is releasing them bears some responsibility here, too, even though the actual custodians are likely academics in literature, not psychiatrists. They should have quietly destroyed them as soon as they realized what they had.