Lorna Martin, a 37-year-old journalist from Glasgow, had intensive psychodynamic therapy for well over a year, and wrote a column about it in Grazia magazine; she has now turned that, with a bit of extra zip in the narrative, into a book called Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

She seemed to me, in the columns and in the book, to embody the concerns of the modern, affluent, mid-30s woman, the woman all magazines and adverts and Sex and the City telly derivatives would have us believe in. Such a woman doesn't have any problems, exactly: she just doesn't have a boyfriend. She is high-functioning enough that she can earn the money to spend her way out of most emotional crises. She has a profound sense that things - life in general - are insufficient. And yet you'd be hard pushed to put your finger on what she doesn't have, apart from a husband and children, and surely that's part of the fun?

The very smallness of these concerns is really rammed home in what Martin describes as the trigger for going into therapy: she was late, and she missed a plane, the third plane she had missed in 10 days. "My own version of this frantic refrain started playing on a loop," she writes. "Come on, come on, please God, come fucking on. I'm late! I'm late! I'm LATE, LATE, LATE, LATE, LATE, LATE. Arrrrrgggghhhh!"

It really makes you realise why people writing misery memoirs have to make stuff up.

I arrange to meet Martin in central London. She misses her plane (she lives in Glasgow) and is late, LATE, LATE. Not much, and I don't mind anyway - I am having a fine old time and a Danish - but it strikes me a) that poor time management is not a terribly good spur to something as deep and expensive as post-Freudian therapy and b) if that truly was the spur, it hasn't worked, has it?

In the flesh, she is a very charming person, skinny and goofy, with a mobile, elastic face. "It wasn't just the lateness," she says. "I was not in a good place, I was really not in a good place. I'd tried everything: I'd tried antidepressants; I'd changed jobs; I'd had boyfriends; I'd drunk; I'd abstained; I'd done yoga. I felt like I had tried everything. When I went into therapy, it was first and foremost because I wanted to sort myself out. It felt like a last resort."

What makes this believable, and not just journalistic blarney, are two details - the first is the phenomenal cost of the exercise, nearly £10,000, for which she took out a bank loan. Let's bear in mind, here, how unfashionable psychodynamic therapy is: long-lasting and involving a lot of talking, obsessed with the patient's past and childhood, it is widely considered to have been superseded by cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and if you look at the talking cures the government will pay for - on the NHS, or in prisons - they are all based on a cognitive model. This is not to say that the government is always right, but it is salutary to note that where a lot of money is handed out, psychoanalysis does not get a look-in. So to take out a bank loan in order to sort out your problems this way seems incredible and naive and so, whatever else she is, she is definitely sincere. And furthermore, this therapy is three times a week, two of the sessions very early in the morning. So I think, too, that attests to a degree of sincerity.

But if she was so sincere, why would she then write about it? Psychoanalysis is an incredibly intimate process, so I would have thought the last thing you could do was to write about it.

"I was going three times a week, and then writing only a 500-word column, so it was like a freckle's worth of reality," she says. In which case, why do it? "You are taking a tiny bit of it for entertainment/journalistic purposes," she concedes. At first, she wrote a one-off article for the Observer; she does not say as much, but I get the impression that she thought she could write quite a superficial piece, without revealing anything, and still get an interesting story out of it. "I'd done that kind of thing before," she says. "I'd written a piece about getting my ovaries scanned." This was to see how many more years of fertility she had, obviously - which, on the face of it, is a lot more intimate than the more nebulous, editable revelations of therapy, but at the same time, therapy is worthless unless it is totally revealing. So presumably writing about it is judged on the same terms, and initially she refused. "I thought, 'What am I doing that for?' The trigger for going into therapy was my behaviour in the relationship that I was in. I didn't write that at first, because I didn't want to admit it at first. I was really struggling with my commitment-phobia."

Commitment-phobia? At the start of the book, Martin is seeing some guy whom in the text she calls Christian but this is not his real name. He is married; she is emphatic that she is not the sort to have an affair with a married man, but he has kind of bewitched her. Then he casts her aside, and starts an affair with a much younger woman from his office, and it is her behaviour in this regard - she wants to tell his wife, she seems to want him publicly shamed in some way - that marks the turning point in the book, jolting her out of all her old patterns as she is forced to confront the fact that sometimes her motives are not all altruistic, sometimes she is not sisterly, sometimes she is not on the moral high ground, sometimes her motivations are as base and angry as anybody else's.

To be honest, I found this rather old-fashioned: I did not know that people existed who still thought that it was unfeminine to be angry. I did not know that there were women out there who thought it was the "other woman's" responsibility to keep marriages together, who thought that all women should be linked together in some collective rampart against the desires of roving husbands. It all seems so incredibly 1950s. "Well, I'm Scottish, of Irish Catholic extraction," she says. "There's a lot of shame involved in having an affair with a married man."

Amazingly, the reaction to the book in Scotland has been almost the exact opposite of my amoral shrugging: some people have accused Martin of writing the whole book in order to out the married man. An editor of hers from a previous job (Martin is currently Scotland editor for the Observer), having been refused an interview, threatened that she would "find out what it was like to be at the wrong end of a tabloid sting". This editor seriously intended to stake her out or work on one of her friends to find out the true identity of Christian.

In the book he is a lawyer; in reality, he isn't. Even so, Glasgow is abuzz with rumours about his possible identity. I don't want to sound too Guardian about all this, but I cannot help thinking that if it was a guy writing about his therapeutic journey, the reviewing community would not fixate like this on the task of finding out the true identity of the married woman he is not-exactly shagging until halfway through.

Anyway, back to this anger: this is a really big thing with psychotherapy, that you have to own your emotions, accept them with courage, rather than pretend you are not experiencing them. "I think the culture teaches us that anger is bad, that envy is bad. But you learn it, you learn it at school, the experience is all about being accepted, pleasing the teacher, doing well," says Martin. "Some people rebel against that, but I didn't. I wanted to please. I don't think I would ever have thought, 'I can't be angry because that's ugly.' It wasn't such a conscious thing. I just thought, 'What a waste of energy. I get angry about important things, I get angry about poverty, things like that. I'm definitely not angry about my relationships.'"

Which reminds me of my original objection - this kind of therapy is such a rich person's game. Not just because it costs a lot of money, which of course it does, but more importantly, because its solutions are so internalised. Let's say you do find a way to own your anger, and accept frustration as part of life; imagine you do ascend to a state of unprecedented sagacity. A lot of the foundations for depression are circumstantial - if you live in poverty, you will feel undervalued by society, and with some justification. You will have low self-esteem. If you are watching your children struggle against exactly the same social and educational iniquities that you struggled with, if you live in miserable conditions, you will be miserable. No relentless positive self-talk is going to change that. You could be given free psychodynamic therapy for a decade, and it would not make any difference, and this is what irks me: that when people peddle this kind of talking cure as a solution, it is a lot like touting a new pair of shoes as a solution to depression. In Sex and the City, that is a solution. When your debt is already bigger than your salary, it is not glamorous at all.

Martin is not smug or annoying about this kind of thing. "Well, we have these conversations quite a lot with my brother-in-law, who works at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and his whole clientele are very, very poor. They're never going to be able to take out an £8,000 bank loan to get themselves sorted out. I don't know. In my own family, I have to be careful what I say, but I have relatives who I think, there but for the grace of God, you know ... prostitutes, things like that.

"A lot of people have said, 'You just think everyone should have therapy.' No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that it worked for me. Some people don't have good experiences, there are some crap therapists out there, but it worked for me. I was really not managing. I was 35-years old, behaving like an adolescent."

Even so far as I understand it, this is not an answer - there is something a bit shifty about it, a bit "Well, I'm not from money, so I'm exempt from the charge of privilege"; a bit of a "It's not for everyone" disclaimer. But then, at the same time, there isn't an answer. What am I even expecting from her? Marxist psychodynamic therapy?

Sod it, back to the love life. Needless to say, things do not work out with Christian, and our attentions are turned to David, a highly eligible young doctor of her circle. I don't want to spoil the Bridget Jonesey, will-they-won't-they note - which I thought arrived rather unexpectedly in what was previously a more ruminative, less romantic, look at love. Suffice it to say, she does some more amazingly daft things in her dealings with David, which are diverting enough and very funny. But what lifts this book, and this process and this whole enterprise, out of real-life chick-lit and into something more interesting is the fact that the important relationships are not with the men at all, either of them, but nor is there any ersatz fist-waving at the end for the joys of a single life. The core relationships are with her parents and with her sister, especially with her sister, who is, by coincidence, a psychotherapist herself, though mainly practising CBT.

When she initially started writing about her therapy, she called her parents and her sister to tell them. She implies this was as a courtesy, though it is complicated, because she knew her parents would not mind. ("My dad said, 'Talk to your mum.' My mum was like, 'Oh pet, what's wrong? You need to get yourself a man.'") And, conversely, she knew her sister would mind, but she was going to do it anyway. "She was not happy. She said, 'Don't tell me one thing. You shouldn't be writing about this.' I think she was worried about me, and I think she didn't want me to write anything that would hurt other people in the family."

Martin glosses over her sibling relationship in the book - the author makes herself sound like a sometimes loveable but essentially vain idiot, in the face of her sister's beatific wisdom, and that cannot be even close to the truth of it. But it is a problematic relationship. In therapy, Martin finally admits that she is consumed with jealousy for her sister and her son - "King Lewis"; it is she, not the author, who has made their parents happy and proud by giving them their first grandchild. Her sister, older than her, has the husband and the child which Martin, replete with everything else, lacks.

But there is an interesting and believable truth in the fact that it is these core relationships - along with satellite friendships - that really occupy the author, her therapy and the book. In our culture, the status of romance is bloated to the degree that we do not even want to forge bonds with people, because it makes you a spent force. "Well, yes, there's something a bit Sex and the City, in the sense of wanting Mr Right and really not wanting him, because that would mean the end of the journey," says Martin.

"I think that is a huge issue for people. A little bit of me perhaps thought that I was invincible, that I wasn't getting old, this adolescent behaviour wrapped up in an adult's body. I think it is weird. We go around life, we don't dwell on the fact that we're all going to die, but we are. It is that avoidance ... it's a fear of where we're all heading and how we cope with that. For me, it was all about keeping my options open, but for what? The expectations I had from life were unrealistic, but I don't know where they came from. I don't think it was from my parents, I think it's societal. And I'm not saying that everyone should lower their expectations and just settle for what's in front of them. But ..."

I think that is what she is saying! It is such an unfashionable thing to say: lower your expectations, accept what is in front of you. But I think maybe that is the answer that a rigorous questioning of the way we all live throws up. Maybe these talking cures can at least cure the urge to solve problems with accessories and to keep on questing after a lifestyle that does not exist.

Their lives in your hands: the history of therapy memoirs

Tim Lott: The Scent of Dried Roses (1997)
Novelist Tim Lott did not start with fiction. His first foray into print was this searingly honest memoir of his nervous breakdown, his mother's suicide, and his subsequent discovery of a family history of serious mental illness. A therapy memoir before the fashion.

Kathryn Flett: The Heart-Shaped Bullet (1999)
In an Observer column, Flett traced the collapse of her marriage, dipping her pen "into a convenient jar of vitriol". In this resulting confessional tome she disclosed her torturous struggles with an array of therapies, including a spell as an in-patient at a private clinic. Anna Pasternak's Daisy Dooley Does Divorce (2007) followed the trend.

Sally Brampton: Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (2008)
This year's bestselling therapy memoir is by the founding editor of Elle. She details her dark years of depression, alcoholism, recovery and relapse - including two suicide attempts. She eschews many formalised therapies in favour of "small steps" for fellow sufferers. Hailed by readers on Amazon as "harrowing and brilliant".

Stephanie Merritt: The Devil Within: A Memoir of Depression (to be published in May)
Here the Observer's former deputy literary editor will explore her lifelong struggles with depression, and the various treatments and therapies she has endured. "These pitches in mood were something I didn't speak about to anyone, because I was afraid of two things - either that it was nothing serious and I would be told to pull myself together, or that it was serious and I would be told that, yes, I was a mental case."

And the backlash ...

Frank Furedi: Therapy Culture (2003)
The sociology professor's savage counter-blast to therapy memoirs and the society that sustains them. "Therapy is much more a means of survival than an instrument through which enlightenment can be gained," Furedi writes. "Individuals are not so much cured as placed in a state of recovery. Therapy today, like the wider culture of which it is a part, teaches people to know their place. All that it offers in return are the dubious blessings of affirmation and recognition."
Joel Rickett

· Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Life, Love and Talking It Through, by Lorna Martin, is published by John Murray on April 3 (rrp £14.99). To order a copy for £13.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.