Mandrake
Transforming otter therapist time.
Mandrake is from the Jungian, "left hand side" of psychology, not from the mainstream Freudian school at all, but from the movement which, even though it borrows from psychology itself for its own purposes, has been labeled the "anti-psychiatry" movement for convenience's sake.
For a long time, Mandrake the otter lived most of his life based on what he was worried that other people would think of him. He spent his teen years and early adulthood trying to force himself to repress his sexuality and to make himself act straight around people so as not to make waves, going so far as convincing even himself that he really was. Alcohol always made him feel sick, but whenever he was in social situations, he'd still force himself to drink. On one hand, because everyone around him was drinking and offering him drinks which made him feel that other people would like him better for swimming with the current than against it, and on the other, because drink was the only way he could dull his social anxiety enough to feel comfortable when he had to be interacting with people.
Once after he'd drank so much he passed out on a hard floor and split his head open, during the weeks he had to spend in the hospital he had to be dragged to, he decided to make some changes. He came out to himself and to everyone in his life, he quit drinking, and he decided to learn Jungian psychology so he could devote himself to helping others on their own paths to individuation, to freedom from social conditioning.
He began to study martial arts, partly in case psychotic patients attacked him and partly to get closer to a sense of inner peace from them. He eventually came up with Drunken Aikido, a flexible, wobbling, flowing style intended as a metaphor for his psychological method. He never gets directly in the way of his patients' impulses, but gets out of their way and redirects their momentum somewhere where it won't do them or others any more harm than he can avoid to, like rivers redirected where they irrigate rather than flood. He uses no blocking, only parrying, and no holds, only throws, because blocks and holds stop people where they are rather than sending them on their way. He never seems to exert more than the exactly measured amount of effort to reach his goal, and often looks like he's just about to lose his balance before regaining it at the last split-second. Balance between holding on and letting go.
He teaches that actions' consequences have to be taken into account with the example of ripples on a pond, and about projection and introspection using a water surface as a mirror. He doesn't practice the "trust fall" but teaches his patients the trust breakfall instead - if they know how to break their own falls, they won't have to rely on there being someone behind them to catch them, but they'll be able to trust themselves and by extension their own judgment.
Mandrake teaches that the fact that you couldn't afford to share some emotions with just anyone doesn't mean that those emotions aren't worth feeling to begin with, and not to internalize having to do so as meaning that, but to think of them as precious water that should be drank instead of spilled on the floor, like secrets shared with friends rather than intel given to enemies. He understands that social interaction involves a lot of "diplomacy as theatre", with individuals having a culture of One from which they can have to be careful to avoid diplomatic incidents, and that having to keep things under the surface to survive doesn't make someone a hypocrite, anymore than it makes a fish one to need to be underwater to be able to breathe. He helps patients develop an effective persona that they can present to the world to meet their needs in it, but not at the cost of implying that the aspects of themselves beneath it are less deserving of their own respect. Sometimes you need to keep a smile on your face in public, but that's just what makes having a shoulder to cry on in private so crucial to counter that obligation with, to open the floodgates before the dam bursts. He offers ritual washing and bathing procedures to help patients feel that they can wash away the social indignities they had to bear.
Mandrake's office has a couch that looks like a sponge, which he sometimes jokes helps absorb patients' negative emotions when they spill them on it if he can tell the context won't make it come across as callous of him to do so. When his patients seem crippled by inhibitions, he climbs on his unicycle balancing a fishbowl on his head while holding an umbrella open over it, thus demonstrating his Serious Psycho-emotional Disinhibition Technique. He believes that so-called chemical balance is a poor replacement for real emotional balance between respecting one's own needs and other people's needs. When I feel up to it, he teaches me balance by having me carry a water glass on my head while walking on a tightrope under a windy rainstorm over an agitated ocean. It's important to him to acknowledge the full challenge presented by social interaction and not to imply that it's supposed to be easy for people to do, so that repeated failures in the social realm not be taken as implying any more inadequacy than inability to overcome difficult physical challenges, and so that social successes be fully acknowledged as being just as impressive as physical successes.
After having achieved a certain level of success through his practice himself, Mandrake had enough put aside to build a whole seaside complex dedicated to his method. Eventually he stopped caring what people thought to the extent of throwing himself fully into mad science as a result of it. He gained the ability to divide like a cell, like drops of water coming apart that can be put back together as part of the same body of water afterward. After having filled every office in the complex with clones of himself, all carrying his own training and experiences in their minds, he realized that keeping his body just the way it was was no longer necessary, because there were so many other templates for it. He started experimenting on himself, and developed the ability to melt into a liquid that can slip right through cracks before retaking his original shape.
He stopped focusing as much on the persona aspect of the psyche, and turned to diving deep into the depths of his patients' Shadows to help them reintegrate the darker facets of their personalities that society had pushed all the way down into the Abyss where the bony fluorescent invertebrates dwell, along with shipwrecks full of abandoned treasure. He learned how to sprout tentacles from his back, to turn his otter tail into a shark tail, to sprout shark fins on his head and back, and to pull them all back in at a moment's notice if the situation called for it. His eyes start to shine with a red light in them sometimes, if only for a moment, flickering right back out along with his extra appendages being pulled back in, so quickly that people who glimpse them sometimes wonder whether they imagined them or not.
He experimented with creating hybrids of different animal species not found in any classical mythology, or with unexpected numbers of limbs and sensory input and output organs in odd places. He actually cares quite a bit about their quality of life, and rather than condemn them to having to adapt to a world that's not made for them, he's endeavored to push ergonomics forward as far as he can so that even with their unusual shapes and sizes, they can still feel as though their environment is adapted to their own specific needs. He developed a mind-link with them so that they can feel the enjoyment he feels and so that he can feel the pain they feel, so that he'll have a direct interest in making sure they're well. While he has no respect for the "Angel Season 5" kind of deal with the devil that people can be forced to make, he also thinks of his hybrids as an example that in some way, every problematic diplomatic situation starts out seeming like two creatures that simply don't belong together because it's never been done, and that every kind of attempt at diplomacy depends on being willing to find a way to get them together in a way that does violence to neither.
The transformations he made to himself are intended to work as a metaphor for the personal transformations that he hopes he can help his patients go through as a result of the therapeutic process themselves. After all, all medicine is by definition as 'unnatural' as an aberration is, because the natural result of serious wounds or disease is death, medicine an act of resistance against it, and therapy being a similar process of healing the mind and emotions, if a personality must become something 'unnatural' so that the individual's mind and emotions can survive, so be it. On a macro social level, to be a conservative is to believe that things can't or shouldn't change, whereas to be a progressive is to believe that things can and should change, and society will never be granted the latter belief if the individual is not.