A psychoanalyst stalking her patient's family becomes an occasion to trace plot back to a sheet of instructions pinned backstage, and to argue that clinical formulation is the novel's habit practised on clients, best given up in favour of listening without knowing where on earth you are going. Or, more notes on psychotherapy.

I went to see Private Life, the film with Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil. Part of the plot involves Lilian Steiner, the character played by Foster, wondering what one of her clients actually meant in a session not long before the woman's death; and when I say actually I'm pointing in a way that the film also does to the unreliability of any record. Recently I also read Ben Lerner's Transcription, which makes a few of the same moves in a very different way. If you do this job, this psychoanalytic version of it in particular, I recommend both. Fair warning: I give away a good deal of the film in what follows.

Most of us take notes. Some of us record our sessions. None of this really helps with what counts most, at least to me. That is whatever someone's breath is carrying, words or no words, at any moment of appreciation: listening to someone, feeling their presence in their movements, watching them. The last of these might be more important, you'd think, if you work on Zoom a lot. I do, but I don't think so. The tenuous nature of the Zoom relationship is everything, if you let it be. Presence in a room is much easier on us all, but not necessarily best for the work.

Anyway, I digress. But digressions are so crucial to us being alive. We skip here and there instinctively depending on where we believe we are heading, not only as speakers or writers but as listeners, as readers. We have in mind, often without realising it, a kind of plot of where we believe we are heading, and this coerces us into all manner of intellectual gymnastics.

So, when Lilian Steiner listens to a recording of a session, and then when she looks at her notes of that session, her opinion of what is going on changes dramatically. Fortunately, my own changes of opinion have not led me to go stalking my clients' family members, believing they may be murderers. I have not accused my son of being, in another life, a Nazi sympathiser in the 1940s who arrested my lover and rendered our current situation unspeakably painful. No. Lilian does, but I have only, perhaps, those joys to come.

These kinds of thing may be the most baroque magnifications of a psychoanalyst's mistaken assumptions, self-justifying of course, and maybe a good way for someone to teach about counter-transference, listening and what 'doing something' to your clients might actually look like; they are also, and this is what made me love the film, a most drastic examination of plot.

Plot. For some reason the 1990s saw two surprising things occur, rather like twists in a novel. First of all many young writers found jobs as creative writing lecturers. Simultaneously a science of fiction writing appeared, based loosely it seemed on Aristotle's thoughts about what makes a perfect whole: a beginning, a middle and an end. A teleological drive, then, from one through the next to the last, with all that this involved in terms of cliff-hangers, showing not teleologicalling, and so on. I found this something of a shock, living as I was on the edge of it; since my idea of writing was rather looser than that. Even the novels people called thrillers or blockbusters that I enjoyed seemed to bounce around less determinedly than the new art of writing dictated. More in the way Stephen King's The Shining is written clashes with what a creative writing model of successful narrative demands than agrees with it. Ghosts and madness are very hard to hem into an 'Aristotelian' frame, carrying with them all that sense of something of the past.

Plot, the synopsis of which is something any writer will be told they need to come up with if they are to have their writing commercially published, is a funny thing. I am, as it happens, writing one myself at the moment. Imagine a time before the novel. Plott (as it was sometimes spelled) referred to what was written on a sheet of paper and pinned up backstage of a theatre production. It reflected what needed to be blocked out for a play: all of the movement, the dynamics, that performers would act out of an evening. It signified challenges for the actors and stage crew, and somehow it survived the transition from play to novel as a series of instructions for understanding the progress of what goes on, but without any real thing involved. Plot, in a novel, became a self-enclosed imaginary space that fought with the imagination rather than rain, mud, acoustics, lighting issues, noisy audiences and so on. Instead of a drunken crowd the writer of a novel had to contend with a reader's distracted mind.

Minds, if we return to my first thoughts here, are given to wilfully plough on to their own ends. Give me something to think about and I am already predicting what to do with it without knowing, only feeling something that will take me there without me realising what I have done (until, for example, someone like Lilian Steiner finds herself hypnotising a child after impulsively deciding to ransack his home in search of a session recording and recognises she may have acted a little unwisely). If there is a point to this piece, which is of course straining at the un-Aristotelian, as I generally do to the bafflement of many, it is to say don't blame Aristotle.

Look instead at something you could call transmission, the odd effects of what happens when something passes between one and another, like Ian Curtis on a record singing, shouting about dancing to the radio. Aristotle didn't write about plot. He did seem to write about a self-enclosed space, mythos in his Greek, which translated into Latin for most of the medieval period as fabula; and then, in English, became plot. Plot after the movement from drama to novel that I mentioned; and there's a thing I wrote, Another Approach to History Taking, where I mention Walter Benjamin's objection to novelistic psychologising: the interior movements one might describe as movements of the mind. I was getting at something serious, I hope, rather than simply (as I have been told) difficult. The movements of minds attuned to the character of the novel, which seems to have now infiltrated every form of representation, leaves an awful lot of room for each of us to end up creeping around wondering about our clients' motives. We generally call this kind of thing formulation, aetiology, or something of that sort.

If we simply listen, however, and follow what we hear without diving into our sense of meaning, what might that enable a client to do? Find their way, which is what they will inevitably do, as Freud seemed to believe and Shapiro made explicit in her AIP (Adaptive Information Processing) model, which is cranky and crude. Whatever we believe we are doing in relation to what we are experiencing, we are more likely doing something in relation to all the prior instances of events in our lives that seem similar to the context we imagine we are in. But let's say that I am wary of sophistication these days. It seems to mean doing some very strange things to fit in. Sophistication, of course, is a form of productivity. Hence botox; hence influencers, more accurately the sorry victims of their own policing of desire.