Did The Treatement work? Did the treatment work?

More questions than answers in last night's book-group discussion of Daniel Menaker's The Treatment - notably, universal acclaim for the character of Morales and for the smart, sarcastic humor throughout the dialogues between him and Singer - that alone was enough to make The Treatment worth reading, and yet, there was a disappointment as well - we were sorry to see Menaker move gradually farther away from his starting premise - perhaps to illustrate Singer's gradual gaining of emotional independence? - and moving the story into a pretty standard action-melodrama. Could he have centered the whole novel on the Singer-Morales dialectic? I for one wish he had dared to do that - risky, difficult, sure, but we all agreed that he gave up his best material - it was as if he started with a few great short stories about man and his shrink and then got a little lost as he tried to expand that material into a novel. With 2 analysts and 1 therapist in the group, we did discuss whether the treatment (as opposed to The Treatment) was successful, but reached no universal conclusion: We concurred that Morales was a strict Freudian of a type that, even in his day (the 1970s) was becoming rare if not extinct - treating mainly or exclusively the very wealthy - but still wondered if he was over the line in his insistence that Singer discuss everything with him before acting. This strategy, not so helpful in a long-term analysis acc. to LR, may have been Morales's attempt to control his patient - which also may explain the last chapter, in which we see Morales down at the heels, possibly engaged in ethical lapses, and taking off on a strange, egomaniac rant against Singer: which leads me to my view, that Menaker would have us believe that Morales was a fraud, that Singer got better, took action, on his own and not because of the help that Morales tried to bring to him, whereas I would say that Singer didn't actually get better - he got lucky, in love, fortune, career. On the other hand, we don't exactly know what led Singer to analysis in the first place - paralysis in love and career, it would seem, and anger at his father - and all those things were worked out by the end: again, because of Morales, or because of the exigencies of a comic novel?