Earlier this month, the Jungian psychotherapist Jane Haynes held a dinner party. Among the 30 or so guests were several former patients whose case studies appear in her new book, Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? The Journal of a Psychotherapist, an unremitting account of sexual shame, social dysfunction, bereavement and attempted suicide - not to mention the author's acid trip with the charismatic Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing.
The book has a cast of characters that novelists would kill for, and some of them found themselves chatting around Haynes's dinner table - among them a woman who tried to kill herself four times. "Throughout the evening she was referred to as Miss Suicide," Haynes recalls, giggling, as we sit in her consulting room in north London. It sounds like quite a party.
In the book, we meet Miss Suicide (as she is referred to throughout) when she rings to cancel an appointment because she has decided to go on holiday. Haynes doesn't believe her: she is convinced the woman is going to try to kill herself again. And so it later proves: Miss Suicide rang off, went to Tesco, bought a bottle of whisky and some paracetamol and checked into a Holiday Inn, where she drank some of the whisky, took some of the pills and pulled a plastic bag over her head. In the book, Haynes transcribes the conversation she had with Miss Suicide later.
Haynes: "I knew that you had put a plastic bag over your head but [laughing] I didn't know it was a Tesco shopping bag!"
"Yes, it was, it was!" replies Miss Suicide. "I hadn't premeditated it. You see, it was to hand and I thought, well, just to make sure."
An hour after Miss Suicide took the pills, a chambermaid came into the room and saved her life. "Had she not seen that Tesco bag," Haynes explains, "she would have assumed my patient was asleep and left her."
But didn't Haynes feel responsible that a patient in her care tried to kill herself? "I was in a terrible conflict. I wanted to leave her the space to do what she had to do, but I had an ethical responsibility." In the book she tells Miss Suicide, honestly if brusquely: "I didn't have a burning desire to save you ... there had already been too many failures for that, and it would have been hubris on my part to think I could become your saviour."
Ten years on and Miss Suicide is now a dinner-party guest, reportedly beautiful, happy and pleased that her story is being recounted. But is what is disclosed between shrink and shrunken really proper material for a book?
"Some colleagues hate it," Haynes concedes. "They think I shouldn't write about my patients at all." But she stresses that only former patients of hers appear in the book ("I think there has to be a reasonable period - at least two years - before one can have [further] contact with a patient") and that all case histories are published with her patients' consent. Indeed, several of the histories are written by the patients themselves, such as one man's bracing and frank account of his internet porn addiction. "The pornography you look for becomes more intense, more hardcore, more misogynistic," writes Harry. "It begins with lingerie ads and ends with gang bangs."
What worries Haynes's peers more than this kind of disclosure, however, is what she reveals of her own psychic history. Haynes addresses the first half of the book to Louis, her analyst of 13 years and a man with whom she experienced what she calls "erotic transference". She describes memories of her own childhood troubles and analysis - but surely analysts are supposed to be a blank slate on to which patients project things. How can future patients, having read about Haynes's often harrowing life, do that?
"I think my patients must be trusted as adults who can make up their minds. Some have told me they won't read the book while they are being treated by me. Also, I don't do analysis any more, where transference is key; only therapy, where forming a relationship is what's important."
Patients who avoid the book will miss the compelling story of how Haynes crawled from the wreckage of her childhood. As a girl, she was abandoned by her mother and raised, albeit briefly, by a father dying of syphilis who ultimately suffered what doctors called "general paralysis of the insane". He was a tyrant whom Haynes compares to Hitler, yet whom she also refers to late in the book as "beloved".
After his death, he became an even more harrowing figure: years later, while doing a doctorate on Jacobean literature, her dreams became filled with horrors such as her father's face being eaten hollow, just as Dr Pangloss's were when Candide meets him, ravaged by syphilis, in Voltaire's novel.
"I knew that by the time my father's disease was identified in 1950, it was too advanced for penicillin. He would not have died featureless, but he did die choking and abandoned, probably in a padded cell." Gamely, she subsequently focused her PhD thesis on venereal disease in Jacobean literature.
Haynes also writes about the killing of her son-in-law 10 years ago, in what may have been a racist attack. Jay Abatan, a 42-year-old who was half Nigerian, was getting into a taxi outside a Brighton nightclub. He was felled with a single unprovoked blow that, as she writes, "flattened his handsome frame to the granite kerb. Despite the expertise of the intensive care unit, Jay never regained consciousness and died one week later in my daughter's arms ... His assailants were white, early-middle-aged family men. Would they have acted in the same way if Jay had been white? I really couldn't say. And the police, post Macpherson, forgot to ask."
There's a world of fury in that ironically italicised "family": Abatan's family was the one devastated by his killing. An inquest into his death was recently postponed but hangs over the family, poised to reopen old wounds. Haynes shows me a photograph of her son-in-law that she keeps in the consulting room, depicting him forever smiling and forever young.
Her book started as an attempt at catharsis and a memorial for her deceased analyst, Louis. Haynes, though, struggled to get it into print. Publishers ran scared of the book because they couldn't see where it would go on bookshop shelves: it's not quite memoir, not quite self-help. "I got a large number of very polite rejection letters," she giggles.
Undaunted, Haynes published the book herself. It became the first self-published book to be shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley award for autobiography last year. It didn't win, but subsequently she had publishers fighting over it. "In the end I'm being published by Constable, because my editor is one of the few publishers who actually read it rather than read about it."
What's most striking about the book, particularly in our publishing climate of showy confession, is how Haynes resists succumbing to the lurid raciness of her material. She even reduces her LSD experience with RD Laing to a footnote - but what a footnote! Laing gave her more than acid, though: "He helped me to get outside my own family narrative, and write a new one," she says.
Having been poised on the brink of a potentially brilliant acting career, Haynes quit after reading Laing's then new book, The Divided Self. It convinced her that acting had become a substitute for establishing an authentic connection with herself. Intriguingly, many of her patients today are actors.
The title of her book comes from a question asked by King Lear when he finds himself wandering naked and crazed on the heath. "And do you know who answers him?" Haynes asks. "It's the Fool, who says: 'Lear's shadow.'" Haynes likes the answer, it fits in with what she thinks a shrink should help a patient to do. "People who come to me want to look at their shadows."
Business for such a service is now booming, she says. "The credit crunch has made so many people flee to me." Except that in many cases, she tells them she may not be the answer to their problems. "Lots of people who have been made redundant or fear it suffer panic attacks. In those circumstances, some other form of therapy - say, cognitive behavioural therapy - may be necessary to deal with the symptoms first, before you decide to talk about the underlying issues. And in some cases, people don't want to explore the underlying issues."
Indeed, Haynes concedes her talking cure can sometimes be counterproductive. "Therapy can be positively harmful - it is like burning through the flesh to the wound. It's quite a decision to enter into that kind of relationship and not for everyone."
Our time is up. A patient has arrived and is changing her baby's nappy in the next room. As Haynes poses on her couch for photos, her mobile rings. "Dooo do do do doo do do doo doo doo doo," it begins. "Don't worry ... be happy." Given what we've just been talking about, this ring tone is unexpected, to put it mildly.
• Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am?: The Journal of a Psychotherapist is published by Constable. To order a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
