Shrink Rap

Did you decide not to interview anyone for psychological reasons?
No. The only time I would have been concerned about talking to somebody for this programme would be if I thought they wanted to do it for the wrong reason or if they were very closed off from their feelings. In therapy it takes quite a lot of work to get them to a stage where they can actually begin to talk about their feelings. Fortunately, everyone that we had was able to do this.

Were you surprised by any of them during the interviews?
Yes and no. I'm never surprised by humanity. I've been a therapist for 12 years, and I don't think I'm ever surprised by anything I hear now. Every now and again, maybe, but it's pretty rare.

What I tried to do is not pay too much attention to, and certainly not believe, the things that I read about them. I did very little background research. I read through a few cuttings or I read their books if they'd written books.

You're very interested in the psychological affects of fame. You've describe fame as a 'trauma'; in what sense?
There's tremendous loss for an individual who comes to public attention. They lose many things that they once thought were constants in their life. And this is a surprise, because our society is created to look at fame as a desirable thing, something that we aspire to.

What happens is that when we get there every relationship in our life changes. We can't rely on any relationship being the same. Maybe we become the person who, in the minds of other family or friends, is too big to bother with them any more. Maybe we become the person that others are going to use, financially or for status, all kinds of ways.

We lose one of our goals, which leaves people floundering. What do we strive for now? Then we lose our privacy, we lose our sense of ourselves, the way we conceptualised ourselves before we became famous.

In what sense?
A sort of a gap develops between the person we feel ourselves to be inside, the true self, and the idealised self that everybody else starts to relate to. That objectified self is not like the true self; it's the famous self, the beautiful self, the funny self, the perfect self that's always made up in public and always 'on'. A gap begins to develop that can be very, very painful, especially as others start relating more to the objectified self than the true self. That creates a lot of psychological problems.