A man goes to an analyst and says, “Please, sir, I am desperate, if you cure me I will give you my fortune!” The analyst replies, “I don’t want your fortune, just fifty pounds a session.” The man says, “Why so much?” To which the analyst answers, “At least you know the price.”

My patients are businessmen, hookers, artists, teenagers, magazine editors, actors, PR people, a woman of eighty, a psychiatrist, a car mechanic, a footballer, and three children, amongst others. When I greet a patient at the door and follow them into my room, waiting while they prepare to either sit or lie on the couch—I prefer them to lie down; as Freud said: “I don’t like to be stared at for eight hours a day”—I am eager to hear what they have to say, and keen for it to go well between us.

As a therapist, what sort of knowledge do I have? What I do is old-fashioned, almost quaint, compared to the technological and scientific medicine now available. Though I do no examination and offer no drugs, I am like a traditional doctor in that I treat the whole person rather than only the illness. Indeed, I am the drug, and part of the cure. Not that most people want to be cured. Their illnesses provide them with more satisfaction than they can bear. Patients are unconscious artists of their own misery, and what they call their symptom is, in fact, their life, and they’d better love it!

Some people would rather be shot than speak. All I can do is let the subjects speak for a long time; both of us taking their words seriously, knowing that even when they are speaking the truth they are lying, and that when they speak of someone else they are speaking of themselves.

I ask questions about the family, right back to the grandparents. Where can suffering people turn now for the disorders of desire?

In the end, what qualifies someone for analysis? Ultimately it is the most human thing, the recognition of inexplicable pain and some curiosity about one’s inner life. How could analysis not be difficult? To have lived in a particular way for years, decades even, and then to try to undo it through talking is significant labour. Not that it always works; there is no guarantee, nor should there be. There is always risk.

Alas, to the surprise of many, psychoanalysis doesn’t make people behave better, nor does it make them morally good. It may well make them more of a nuisance, more argumentative, more demanding, more aware of their desire and less likely to accept the dominion of others. In that sense it is subversive and emancipatory. But then there are few people who, when they are old, wish they’d lived a more virtuous life. From what I hear in my room, most people wish they’d sinned more. They also wish they’d taken better care of their teeth.

A smart, well-off, intelligent woman had asked to see me. She sat back neatly on the couch rather than on the edge, as other, more anxious patients tend to, and addressed me as though interviewing me for a job. She told me a little about her situation before saying she had come because her husband was “having difficulties” with his work. Many people see analysts because of work-related problems; it is only later they reveal their emotional and sexual difficulties. However, she did not believe she had contributed anything to her husband’s plight but wanted to “talk it over.” She was, she kept insisting, “normal” or “not abnormal at all.”

Later, on my walk, I wondered why I felt I had to be suspicious of “normality.” The striking thing about the normal is that there is nothing normal about it: normality is the gentrification of ordinary madness—ask any Surrealist. In analysis “the normal child” is often synonymous with the obedient good child, the one who only wants to please the parents and develops what Winnicott called “a false self.” According to Henry, obedience is one of the problems of the world, not the solution, as so many have thought. But couldn’t there be a definition of the normal which didn’t equate it with the ordinary or uninspiring? Or which wasn’t coercive or ridiculously prim?

It was, of course, in the nature of my work to spend time with “nutters,” as Miriam put it, just as medical doctors work with sick bodies. But, as Freud said, and as experience had taught me, my patients were not in a separate category to everyone else. It was those who didn’t seek help who were most likely to be mad or dangerous. I was reminded of a story about Proust at the end of his life, wildly looking through the pages of Remembrance of Things Past in despair as he saw how eccentric, if not abnormal, all his characters were. As though one could make a novel, or indeed a society, out of the dull and merely conventional.

My work with the “normal” woman would be to help turn her into a poet: she’d see what was puzzling but also fascinating in the experience she wanted to dismiss as “normal,” even as she attempted to convince both of us that the “normal” was beyond inquiry.

Unlike the “normal” woman, I have never stopped being amazed by the nature and variety of human pleasure, the most difficult problem of all. I am visited by a foot fetishist and compulsive masturbator who was about to lose his job, so much time did he spend in the toilet; a couple of men who dress as women; a powerful businessman who risked everything in order to secretly watch women through windows; a girl terrified of cats; a patient who had a breakdown on being informed for the first time, at the age of thirty, that her mother had always had a glass eye; the promiscuous, the frigid, the panicked, the vertiginous; abusers and the abused, cutters, starvers, vomiters, the trapped and the too free, the exhausted and the overactive and those committed for life to their own foolishness. I hear from all of them. I am an autobiographer’s assistant, midwife to my patients’ fantasies, reopening their wounds, setting free their voices, making an erotics of speaking, unmasking their truths as illusions. Analysis makes the familiar strange, and makes us wonder where dreams end and reality begins, if, indeed, reality ever does begin.

I saw my first analyst, a Pakistani called Tahir Hussein, a few months after I’d left university and things had gone more than just weird with Ajita. I have to say—I was in great need.

Ajita and I had gone our separate ways without considering that we would never see each other again. We hadn’t fallen out; our love had never become exhausted but had been violently interrupted.

How I missed her adoration of me, her kisses, praise and encouragement, and the way she said “thank you, thank you” when she came. Of all my women, she was the most memorably tender, vulnerable and uninhibited, like a Goya-esque Spanish beauty, her dark hair covering her face as she worked on my penis. She called me her pretty boy and said she loved my voice, loved what she called the “timber” of it.

For months I had waited for her, thinking one day she’d turn up. I’d see her on the street, in departing trains, in dreams and in nightmares; I’d walk into a bar and there she’d be, waiting. I heard her calling me, her sweet Indian lilt in my ear, from when I woke up until bedtime.

At last, however, I got the real message, which was, after all, clear enough: she wasn’t interested. She’d told me she loved me, but, in the end, she didn’t want me. Her father was dead, the relationship was dead. Ajita was gone. I didn’t want to get over it, but I would have to. By now she’d be with another man, married perhaps. I was already her history and, I supposed, was more or less forgotten.

In my early twenties, I had left Mother too, having known for a while it was time to get away from the house and the neighbourhood. If the suburbs were the gentle solution to the question of how to live, I was out of there.

Through a university acquaintance, someone I’d directed in a female production of Waiting for Godot, I had found a room in a house shared by a group of white, middle-class politicos. They were carpenters, teachers, social workers, feminists and radical lawyers, two of whom later became MPs, keen Blairites, often on TV defending the Iraq war. They had set up several similar houses in streets nearby.

However, I wasn’t able to move straight into the room I wanted. There were other applicants, and these politicos were democrats, from time to time. I was to be interviewed, though I knew the lefties would offer me the room as soon as I asked whether there were any black people in the house. The guilt shuddered through them like a bout of food poisoning and I was in, despite my pale skin and the queue of whites outside.

It wasn’t exactly a commune; people had their own rooms, and the cooking and chores weren’t shared, though some tasks were. There were a lot of meetings and mad talk, cycling and recycling. New posters—“Protest and Survive!” or a picture of a monkey being experimented on—along with leaflets advertising meetings appeared in the hall every day, along with piles of wood for “reuse.”

Often we cycled to the woods, with wine and dope in our baskets. One time the others couldn’t wait to get their clothes off and jump in some filthy pond. Generally I was uptight, but this time I joined them.

Most weekends were taken up with some kind of antinuclear protest. During the week there were Labour Party branch meetings held in draughty halls on run-down estates. If I went, it was because everyone else went; I wanted to know what was going on. It was serious work. The old guard, the working-class stalwarts who smoked pipes and spoke interminably in difficult accents—and had many personal memories of Harold Wilson—along with the eccentrics, the codgers, the plain crazies and those who had nowhere else to go in the evenings, were being replaced by the people I knew.

These were young, smart lawyers, housing officers, radicals from provincial universities. A few of these “activists” were actually Trots or Commies, clinging to respectability and the possibility of real power; others were channelling their ambition into conventional political careers. The idea was to move the Party to the left by integrating radical elements that had emerged during the mid-70s: gays, blacks, feminists. Michael Foot was elected leader of the Party, followed by Neil Kinnock. The Party was beginning to modernise but still wasn’t electable. To become that, it was the left politics which had to go. How we all despised Thatcher, but she led the way.

I was amazed by the bitterness, viciousness and cruelty of small-time politics. Even here idealism was, as it always is, an excuse for quite extreme aggression. I leafleted local estates, and “knocked up” during local elections. Sometimes we were invited into the flats. I’d never seen such places before in the city, and I can tell you, it was an education.

In the house I didn’t say much to anyone, staying in my room and reading. Usually there were political visitors. These were the days before the working class were considered to be consumerist trash in cheap clothes with writing on them, when they still retained the dignity of doing essential but unpleasant work.

Striking miners were popular with the gays; the Greenham women, in London for fundraisers, were favoured by the lesbians, though, apparently, they had to be bathed first; for the rest of us there were the Nicaraguans. (Several of our circle went to Managua to help out; I considered it myself but heard it involved a lot of digging.) I liked the company, liked knowing there were people around. It was the first time I’d had a place of my own, somewhere I had to pay for.

Miriam and I had returned, not long before, from our “roots” visit to Father in Pakistan, hating each other, hating everything. Not only did I not know what I was going to do, I was in bad mental trouble. I was beginning to realise that I’d thought, after the Ajita catastrophe, that the Pakistan trip would be a turning point. If I couldn’t find Ajita there—how could I?—I would at least find my father, along with a sense of direction, some strength and my best self. What Miriam and I did in fact return with would take years to absorb.

I should have guessed I’d end up messing about with books. I found a monotonous but easy job in the British Library, where I was a sort of earthworm with arms, fetching books for readers from the miles of book-stacked tunnels under Bloomsbury. I spent my day in the intestines of the gloomy building, surrounded by rotting printed paper, emerging occasionally into the light and space of the magnificent Reading Room in the British Museum. “I am a mole and I live in a hole!” I sang, or droned, as I worked.

My eyes, and those of my fellow workers, had become used to only low artificial light. We book-miners despised the readers, their self-importance, leisure and flirtatiousness with one another. Didn’t they realise this was a library? Though we might be peculiar, freakish even—we were the footnotes to the body of their text—didn’t they ever think of what we did for them, how we kept them supplied? Bent-backed, I liked shoving along a trolley in the depths of the earth, in what Keats called “dark passages.” Some of the people I worked with had laboured in the valley of books for thirty years, stifled and safe, nesting in forests of tomes. There was no better place to be buried alive.

One of the scholars working in the Reading Room—on Coleridge’s Notebooks and the poet’s love of The Arabian Nights—I had known at university. He had taught friends of mine. He walked on sticks, and his body was shrunken and misshapen, as much by the steroids he took as by the illness. Often we’d have lunch in cafés in Bloomsbury, and one time he complimented me on my long, luxuriant hair. I said I wasn’t growing it for reasons of fashion but because I couldn’t sit in a barber’s chair, couldn’t let myself be touched.

“Even by a woman?”

“Well…yes—especially by a woman.”

“You don’t have a girlfriend?” he asked.

“I did. But she went away and she’s not coming back. I thought she would. But it looks like she really isn’t.”

“I’m sure women like you. If I looked like you, I wouldn’t be sitting in the library all day. I sit down because I can’t walk properly. My broken body is going to hell.”

“Libraries are sexual places,” I said. “It’s the quiet, the whispering. You readers don’t see us watching you, but we know what’s going on. We notice who leaves the building with who, and we gossip about it. Still, tell me what you would be doing instead.”

“Having it off, of course,” he said. “As it is, the only people who touch me are prostitutes, something you don’t need. I’m sure there are women who would pay you.” He talked about himself and his own problems for a while. Then he said, “Do you have any other symptoms?”

“Symptoms?”

“States of mind which prevent you leading a relatively rewarding life.”

I explained that I had begun to stop still in the street, unable to move at all, either backwards or forwards. Recently I had stood in the same place for an hour—suspended, paralysed, dead—reading and rereading an advertisement, unable to get to work on time. If I was actually in motion, I found myself yelling at people in my mind. I wanted to fight them, wanted to get beaten up.

Mostly my mad stuff was inside me, but I would shove people on the bus; someone punched me in a pub. I wasn’t far from becoming one of those lunatics who mutter and shout at themselves at bus stops. I had to leave work early in order to lock myself in my room because I believed, and didn’t believe, that when I was outside others could hear my thoughts, that my head was transparent like a goldfish bowl.

In the evening, as you do, I’d catch glimpses of rats, birds and alligators from the corner of my eye. In my dreams, bears would dance with me, buggering me from behind. Live chickens would be stuffed down the back of my shirt.

I found one day, soon after beginning the job, that I was unable to walk; a spinal disc was perforated. I had an operation, shared a hospital ward with the limbless, and learned to walk again. Living even at the most basic level was becoming more arduous.

The oddest thing was, I felt my experiences were not taking place in the world but beyond it, in a void. There were no words for my suffering. Like the undead, the internal voices of hatred would knock on my door forever, seeking an impossible peace. If I was so ill, and getting worse, as I believed I was, how would I ever lead a useful life?

My friend said, “From our talks, I am aware that the art you like is modernism, the exploration of extreme mind states, of neurosis and psychosis. I, too, have spent my life with such books, but reading Kafka or Bruno Schulz can only take you so far. You will find in books characters who are like you. But you will never find yourself in a book unless you write it yourself. It is the wrong place to search. To switch metaphors, you can’t get out of a locked room without the right key.”

“What or where is the key?” I almost shouted. “Have you got it in your pocket? Open the door!”

He said the key might be this fellow Tahir Hussein.

The next day he obtained Hussein’s phone number for me, adding that he was much talked about. I said a lot of people were talking about me, but I was paranoid. I had no idea who was talking about Tahir Hussein. It was probably a small literary metropolitan elite, all of whom had been at university together. That was how it worked in England. But I was sane enough to realise that, without help, I would fall into a black hole. For weeks I didn’t call this man, continuing to believe I could survive alone and that my illness would disappear magically.

Another day: the morning, before work at the library. I am standing on the street. People are bent forward; they look like tables, running. Everyone had purpose, somewhere to go. When they arrived, they would have plenty to say to each other. Didn’t I, too, have plans? But—I almost said I had forgotten what they were. No. It was not that I had mislaid my plans in a far part of my mind. The future no longer had any force over me. I was too dizzy, with wild surges of mad feeling. My wish was to faint, to become unconscious. You cannot will a faint, I know that, any more than you can will a dream, a laugh or a fart. How I wanted some release from this suffering, to which even death seemed preferable. I wasn’t driven towards suicide. I wanted only to be rid of this swirling whirring.

At that moment I saw ahead of me a red London phone booth, with a gap or trench open before it, into which I waded. I came up in the booth; I was surprised to find it working; surprised to find I had change; surprised to find it ringing and answered by Tahir himself. I was particularly surprised to be invited to see him.

He had said he would take me on. I could see him the next day. He gave me his address and said simply, “Come tomorrow morning at eight and we will begin.”

If I’d had to wait more than a week, I wouldn’t have turned up. Waiting was another of my phobias. Surely I would die before the appointment? Also, I knew therapy would be expensive, exhausting most of my small income. But I couldn’t see what else to do, and having nothing didn’t hurt me; it was what I was worth.

But would I ever tell him the truth?