On 13 March 1988, the Observer settled on the chaise longue to explore why psychoanalysis had become ‘the third favourite conversation at London dinner parties (after house prices and schools)’. Therapy was the preserve of the ‘middle middles’ according to psychotherapist John Rowan. ‘It’s the halfway successes that have this feeling. The total successes haven’t the time; the total failures haven’t the money.’
A fascinatingly frank succession of analysands explained how therapy had changed their lives. ‘Had I known how awful therapy was I’d never have had the courage to do it,’ said Jenny Gayler, who had felt ‘so dreadful, so unhappy and so… wrong’, despite her happy marriage. Sessions were intense: ‘When you’re deep into a feeling there’s no eye contact. She has a gas fire, which I now know intimately,’ she explained. But although some ended in tears, others conjured ‘weightless joy’.
Malcom Hurst described himself as the ‘archetypal Scottish male… the unwritten law was, “Thou shalt not express feelings.”’ Therapy had taught him accountability and the need for self-love; he had ended up splitting from his wife. ‘I have been through dark times and may even go through more. But I can feel myself getting stronger and each time I confront my pain I grow a bit.’ Mary Pipes, manager of the London Lighthouse HIV centre, had been ‘unhappy for five years’. Her ‘eclectic’ therapy (‘Jungian, Kleinian, using humanistic Gestalt and bodywork techniques’) had reawakened painful childhood memories, but she accepted that, ‘You need to be able to feel what it felt like at those significant moments.’
No one was more committed than Gary Compton, who had spent nine years in Jungian analysis four times a week, for which he got up at 6.40am (‘It’s a joke, really, it’s like being back at school.’) His analyst, he said, talked ‘Just enough… If she went on about her cat, I’d be very pissed off when I’m paying £20 an hour.’ Was it working? ‘I don’t feel as much of a victim of life… only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays!’