When I walked into that room where my life changed, although I’d studied some Freud at university and also when I was in Pakistan, I had little idea what an analysis involved, and there was no one I could ask.

In the lefty house where I lived, I kept Civilisation and Its Discontents under the bed, along with my favourite pornos, Game and Readers’ Wives, though with an E. P. Thompson paperback on top of them. This was because, among the young intelligentsia, class was the paradigm. As a useful concept, it was easier to deal with, and less dangerous than sexuality. The problems of the proletariat were not caused by being born a human being and living in families but by class conflict. Once these were solved by social change, most problems would evaporate. Any difficulties left over could be solved by Maoist group discussions.

The Left could be puritanical: in the heaven of the far future, there would be more than enough fucking, but right now the priority was that everyone pushed for change. Freud was reviled as a white, bourgeois, patriarchal pig, and psychoanalysis was considered to be exhausted as a theory. What woman would admit to, or even accept the idea of, envying our little penises?—though that, of course, was exactly what feminism was. As Adorno wrote, “In Freudian psychoanalysis, nothing is more true than its exaggerations.”

Nonetheless, R. D. Laing—popularly known as “the Two Ronnies,” after the television comedians—was still admired by students, mad behaviour was often idealised, and numerous therapies, a mixture of Vienna and California, were emerging. I knew Lennon and Ono had screamed and rolled around with Janov, and that the great Plastic Ono Band album had been the result. But I didn’t see what any of this could do for me. What of the quietly mad, the ordinary and unphotogenically disconcerted?

Tahir Hussein told me that not knowing anything about technique was the best way to approach analysis. To drive a car you didn’t have to know what was under the bonnet.

“You’re the mechanic of souls?” I said.

He invited me to lie down on the couch and say whatever came into my mind. I did this immediately, determined not to miss the full Freudian experience. His chair was behind my head, but by his breathing I could tell he was leaning towards me, scratching his chin, waiting to hear. “The thing is…” I said.

I began: hallucinations, panic attacks, inexplicable furies, frantic passions and dreams. It seemed only a minute before he said we had to finish. When I was outside, standing on the street knowing I would return in a couple of days, waves of terror tore through me, my body disassembled, exploding. To prevent myself collapsing, I had to hold on to a lamppost. I began to defecate uncontrollably. Shit ran down my legs and into my shoes. I began to weep; then I vomited—vomiting the past. My shirt was covered in sick. My insides were on the outside; everyone could see me. It wasn’t pretty and I had ruined my suit, but something had started. I came to love my analyst more than my father. He gave me more; he saved my life; he made and remade me.

After a few sessions, when I asked him how he thought I would pay for my analysis, he only said, “You will get the money.”

This did concentrate my mind. I noticed that the man who had given me Tahir Hussein’s phone number always studied the racing papers at lunchtime but never bet on horses, even though, as he put it, he believed he could make a lot of money that way. I told him my situation so far with Tahir Hussein and asked again for his help. “Easy,” he said, giving me a tip for the following day. I slung everything I had on the nag, about two hundred pounds, saved to pay my rent, and won over two thousand pounds, which I spent on my treatment. I went three mornings a week. It was serious and intense, the first time I’d taken myself seriously, as though normally what happened to me was not worth noting, and it wasn’t a moment too soon.

My academic friend had told me that one of the virtues of psychoanalysis in England was that it had been developed not only by women but by people of all nationalities, by which he meant European. Unusually for an analyst, Tahir Hussein was a Pakistani Muslim. Tahir had a smart flat at a smart address, in South Kensington. Even as I walked there, I felt rays of hatred emanating from passersby.

Tahir’s place was full of pots and rugs and furniture that had to be polished, paintings that had to be insured and sculpture that had to be plugged in. He was extravagant too. I’d almost expected a quiet guy in a suit and bow tie. But Tahir was something of a show-off, dressed in postwar ethnic gear. He’d wear salwar kameez, a kaftan, hippy trousers, even a fez, and those slippers which curled up at the toe. I’d say, at times, that he looked more like a magician at the end of a pier than a doctor.

Nevertheless, he had the complete exotic-doctor presence and charisma. Dark-skinned, with long, greying hair, he was imperious, handsome, imposing. He must have been aware that he could seem ridiculous. Few would doubt he was arrogant, cruel, alcoholic and more than a little narcissistic. But I guess he reserved the right to be himself, as much himself as he could be. For him, as for the other hip shrinks, it wasn’t the work of analysis to make people respectable conformists but to let them be as mad as they wanted, living out and enjoying their conflicts—even if it meant suffering more—without being self-destructive. I caught on early when he quoted Pascal: “Men are so fundamentally mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

I fell in love with him, as I was supposed to, perhaps before I met him, and fantasised about his private life. I tried to seduce him, begging him to fuck me on the couch, while convinced that this was not something I really wanted; I took him small presents: coffee, pens, postcards, novels.

When it came to the important things, listening and interpretation, he was there, on the spot. He wasn’t one of those analysts who terrify you with their silence, sphinxes identified with their own stillness. Once he asked if I thought he talked too much, but I said no. I loved the exchange. He said that silence is a powerful tool but that it could re-create the inaccessible parent and “frantic child” scenario. So when he had something to say, he said it. Discussing Freudian theory was always considered a resistance, I knew that. But resist I would; the theory began to fascinate me.

Every time I saw him, I felt I’d moved forward in understanding; even as I rejoined the street, I’d be asking myself new questions. Gossip had it that Tahir had had affairs with his patients; apparently he’d talked on the phone while seeing them, and even went to the opera with them. But he was nothing but focused with me. Occasionally, if I asked him what he was doing that night, he would speak of his friendships with painters, dancers, poets, knowing I liked to identify with him, that this was something I wanted for myself.

After sessions he’d watch me looking at his catalogues, at his poetry books. “Take them,” he’d say. “Take anything you need.” He knew I wanted to extend my mind, having by now a thirst for intellectual matters. When I said I wanted to understand Freud and analysis, he encouraged me to read Proust, Marx, Emerson, Keats, Dostoevsky, Whitman and Blake.

He said that in most of Shakespeare’s plays there was at least one mad person, and in their madness they not only told you who they were, but they spoke important truths. He said that analysis was part of literary culture, but that literature was bigger than psychoanalysis, and swallowed it as a whale devoured a minnow. What great artist hasn’t been aware of the unconscious, which was not discovered by Freud but only mapped by him?

Also, he’d say: My profession is not, and should not be considered, a straight science. It was impossible for Freud to say that he cured people by poetry. Yet observe the important figures and see how like poets they are, with their speculative jumps and metaphors: Jung, Ferenczi, Klein, Balint, Lacan, each singing his own developmental story, particular passion and aesthetic. Their differing views don’t cancel each other out but exist side by side, like the works of Titian and Rembrandt.

Of course, at the beginning of the analysis, there was something we both had to overcome, something sombre I had to talk about. But I wanted to know him a little, to know I could trust him, and myself, before I laid what I called my “son of night” murder story on him.

His virtue, I discovered, was that he could speak deeply to me, that he seemed to understand me. He talked to the part of me that was like a baby. It was like being addressed by a kind father who could see all your fears and fantasies, and was entirely committed to your welfare. How did he have such knowledge of me? Where did it come from? I wanted to be like him, to have such an impressive effect on another human being. I still do.

I always thought of myself as a speedy person, uptight, impatient, getting anxious easily. With him I could let myself relax. What was I in love with? The quality of the silence between us. Sometimes fear makes no sound, I thought, as we sat there, combing through it all, Mother, Father, Sister, Ajita, Mustaq, Wolf, Valentin. Him leaning towards me, with just a side light on, during those dismal, wet London mornings, as people rushed to work. But this was a good, loving silence, minutes long, supporting peace between people, not the sort of silence that made you unruly with anxiety.

“Was it a noisy house you grew up in?” he asked. “But yes,” I said. When I did turn and look at him, he inevitably had a look of amusement on his face. Not that he found human suffering entertaining, even when it was self-inflicted, as he knew it mostly was. He was showing me he knew it went on. “Illness is lack of inspiration,” he’d say.

Before I began analysis, I’d had a dream which had disturbed me for days. It was like a Surrealist painting. I was standing alone in an empty room with my arms by my sides and scores of wasps in my hair, making a tremendous noise. Although I was standing by a door, a man with a head full of wasps cannot either move or much consider his emotional geography.

The “wasps,” of course, were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, among other things, and once we began to discuss it, the image opened up numerous possibilities. Analysis didn’t “cure” my mind, then, of its furies and darkness, but it brought these effects into play, making them real questions for me, worth bothering with and part of my lived life, rather than something I hoped would just go away. For Tahir, the wasps represented something. If I could find meaning there, I could increase my engagement with myself, and with the world. The wasps were asking useful questions, ones worth pursuing. Despite the tremendous grief of depression, Tahir spoke of the “value” and “opportunity” of the illness.

So it was, I found, that analysis creates interest, and makes life. I never left a session with nothing to think about. I’d sit in a café and make pages of notes, continuing to free-associate and work on my dreams.

I had already studied The Interpretation of Dreams and Civilisation and Its Discontents, but now I began to read up on how Freud first began to listen to the words and stories of the mentally distressed, something that had never been done before. He found that if he concentrated on their self-accounts, the trail inevitably led back to their pleasure.

For Freud, as for any other poet, words, the patient’s spoken words and those of the analyst, were magic; they brought about change. I was gripped. Fortunately, working in the museum, I had access to all the books I wanted. If a reader requested a particular volume I was working on, I could say it had been lost. I’d sit on the floor in a faraway tunnel in the library and read; then I’d conceal the book until I returned. I reread Freud’s “book of dreams” as a guide to the night, making going to bed the day’s most worthwhile experience.

I adored the practice of two intelligent people sitting together for hours, days, weeks, maybe years, sifting through the minutiae of experience for significant dross, peering into the furthest corner of a dream for a coded truth. The concentration, the intensity: analysis was not a moment too soon for me. What compelled me was the depth of the everyday, how much there was in the most meaningless gesture or word. It was where a person’s history met the common world. Like a novelist, this way I could make meaning and take interest from the mundane, from the stories I liked to hear.

It seemed to me that Tahir and I had both been talking a lot, working on a deep excavation. Miriam’s understandable hatred of me as a child; her howling, psychotic violence and her attempt to keep Mother away from me, for herself; the feeling I had of being alone, having been abandoned by both parents, Kafka’s wounded beetle hiding under the bed.

But one day, after a long silence, Tahir said, “Do you have something to tell me?”

That was it! I believed he was implying that he knew I was leaving out the most important thing.

I had lost my capacity for happiness. The truth was I had murdered a man. Not in fantasy, as so many have, but in reality, and not long ago. In the end I could only measure Tahir Hussein in terms of that: whether I could trust him, or whether I would go to jail. I had told no one my secret, though often I was tempted, in one of the putrid pubs I went to most nights after work, to unburden myself to some soak who’d forget my story by morning. But I was smart enough to know it wouldn’t help me with my loss.

The murdered man wouldn’t let me go that easily. He clung to me, his fingernails in my flesh. I would wake up staring into the flickering fright of his doomed eyes. The past rode on my back like a devil, poking me, covering my eyes and ears for its sport as I puffed along, continuously reminding me of its existence. The world is as it is: it’s our fantasies which terrify; they are the Thing.

My mind had begun to feel like an alien object within my skull: I wanted to pluck it out and throw it from a bridge. Books couldn’t help me; nor could drugs or alcohol. I couldn’t free my mind by working on my mind with my mind. I thought: light the touch paper and see. Will it blow up my life or ignite a depth charge in my frozen history? Could I rely on another person?

Finally, I was forced to do the right thing. I would throw myself on his mercy and take the consequences. One morning, after making up my mind, I told Tahir Hussein the truth. How would the analysis ever work if I repressed such a momentous event? So Tahir heard about the physical symptoms, the shaking and paranoia. He heard about the dreams of the dying eyes staring at me. He heard about Wolf, Valentin, Ajita. He heard about the death.

“What do you think?” I asked.

He said, simply, straightaway, that some people deserve a whack on the head. I’d done the world a service, offing this pig who was bad beyond belief. It didn’t stop me being a human being. It was only a “little” murder. He didn’t seem to think I was going to make a habit of it, or go professional.

What a relief it was to have my secret safely hidden in the open! Tahir was worried about my temptation to confess and then be caught, my need to be punished, as well as the temptation to have everyone know me. To conceal is to reveal. Most murderers, he said, actively lead the police to the scene of the crime, so preoccupied are they with their victims. Raskolnikov not only returns to the crime scene, but wishes to rent a room in the “house of murder.”

Tahir was the only person I told. I was desperate at the time, and now Tahir is dead, along with the secret which will never be uncovered, the secret which had been turning my soul septic, until I couldn’t proceed alone. After Tahir, with my two other analysts, I kept it to myself. It wouldn’t reflect well on my career prospects.

I had said to Tahir, a year after I’d started seeing him, that his profession was one I fancied for myself. How come? I was aware, from an early age, when I met people on the street with Mother, that I wanted to hear their gossip. This was the route, I saw later, to the deepest things about them. Not necessarily to their secrets, though this was part of it, but to what had formed and haunted them within the organisation of the family.

Soon, however, the everyday conversations that characterised life in the suburbs were not enough. I wanted the serious stuff, the “depths.” I’d come to Nietzsche and Freud through Schopenhauer, whose two-volume The World as Will and Idea had so entertained me at university. There I copied out the following passage: “The sexual passion is the kernel of the will to live. Indeed, one might say man is concrete sexual desire; for his origin is an act of copulation and his wish of wishes is an act of copulation, and this tendency alone perpetuates and holds together his whole phenomenal existence. Sexual passion is the most perfect manifestation of the will to live.”

I had seen myself as someone who was always about to become an artist, a writer, movie director, photographer, or even (fallback position) an academic. I had written books, songs, poetry, but they never seemed to be the meaning I sought. Not that you could make a living writing haikus. I had always been impressed by people who knew a lot. The one thing Mother and I did do together was watch quiz shows on TV. University Challenge was our favourite, and she’d say, “You should know all this. These people aren’t as bright as you, and look at their clothes!”

None of the careers I’d considered excited me. Yet, unconsciously, something had been stirring within. Being with Dad in Pakistan, catastrophic and depressing as it had been in many ways, had instilled something like a public-school ethos in me. The sense of the family, of its history and achievement—my uncles had been journalists, sportsmen, army generals, doctors—along with the expectation of effortless success had, I was discovering now, been both exhilarating and intimidating. I wasn’t only a “Paki.” Suddenly, unlike Miriam, I had a name and a place, as well as the responsibility which went with it.

I began to see that not only was I intelligent, but that I had to find a way to use my mind. This was something to do with “family honour,” an idea which formerly I’d have found absurd. It was Tahir who brought everything together for me. It took me a long time to bring it up with him; I was afraid he’d think I wanted to take his place.

But at last I did. “What do you think?” I said. “Could I do it?”

“You’ll be as excellent as any of us,” he said.

During the first year of my work with Tahir, I saw little of Mother and Miriam. I went to some trouble to avoid them. Both their arguments and their intimacy, without a father, I saw now, to desire them both in different ways, and to keep them apart, made me overwrought.

But when Miriam said we should go there for Christmas lunch, I wasn’t able to disagree. Anyway, I wanted to see Miriam’s first child, a cute baby provided by a cabdriver whose fare, one night, she’d been unable to afford. By now she was living at the top of a council block with the child and another on the way, her only adult company being a violent man. She was stoned most of the time, with interludes on a psychiatric ward. Later she moved to the outskirts of London, arguing that she couldn’t be high up, as the voices yelled “Jump, jump!” “But never quite loudly enough,” Mum remarked.

Over dessert they asked me if I was intending to remain at the library, perhaps becoming an exhibit. I said “not indefinitely”; I knew now what I wanted to do. I would become an analyst, a shrink, a head doctor. I floated this with as much seriousness as I could gather, but I had to bat away numerous irritating remarks. “He needs a head doctor,” Miriam muttered. Mother: “You’re the one who needs it.” Miriam: “Actually, Mother, if you bothered to look within, you’d see it was you.” Mother: “You look inside yourself, dear.” Miriam: “After all, you made us…” On and on.

When this tailed off, I continued. While the Devil’s Dictionary definition of a doctor is “One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well,” the word doctor, as Josephine could have told you, inevitably went down well with most people. As I spoke, explaining the training, the theory, the practice, the income, the interest, the words, to my surprise, did seem to have authority. They were surprised, I guessed, partly by my determination and engagement. I knew they thought of me—I thought it myself—as passive and repressed, without much will or desire.

But now, rather than feeling only partly present, as I did before—my life as an interruption to them—I seemed to have some weight. I was able to be their equal and, to my dismay, it seemed to diminish them, render them a little pathetic even, as though I had been reducing my own stature all my life, to keep Mum and Miriam big. Unlike either of them, I seemed to know what I was about, where I was going. My crime was my spur. I would spend my life paying off that early debt. I was happy to do it.

“You will be doing good then?” Miriam said.

“Maybe a little.”

“That’s nice.” She wasn’t being sarcastic. Her other selves were almost always hidden beneath her aggression, her general stroppiness, which was a good, accurate word to describe her. “You can help me, then, can’t you?”

They were looking at me almost pleadingly. “You both know,” I said, “no doctor can treat a member of his own family.”

A year into my training, when I was beginning to work with juveniles, we heard that Father had died. After leaving Pakistan, Miriam and I didn’t see him again. Did we mourn him? I’d have wanted him to know I’d found a vocation. Whether he’d have appreciated it, I doubted. However, I was strong enough by then to have ridden his disapproval. I was on my own, but I knew, at last, what I was doing.

That night, after I left the house, walking the familiar streets from which I thought I’d never escape, a boy semi-defeated by something he didn’t understand, I was in a hurry to get back to my complete edition of Freud, the patients I would start seeing, the conferences I’d attend, the books I’d write. I wanted to be useful, to have done something.

Even then, at a moment of such hope, when the future was something I wanted, I would hear the dead man’s words echoing in my ears: “What do you want of me?”