Sometimes the therapist's attachment is so strong that it goes as Orbach somewhat

Sometimes the therapist's attachment is so strong that it goes, as Orbach somewhat dauntingly puts it, "far beyond empathy", so that she can feel herself becoming fat, flighty or frightened.There is a kind of spontaneous wisdom in all this that may perhaps flow from the written invention of the situations rather than reflecting reality It sounds almost too good to be true. In any event, it must require - in addition to the weight of experience which Orbach stresses - an enormous strength of mind and personality. Which, given the mushrooming of self- styled counselling and psychotherapy services over recent years, shows how hard it must be for the unsuspecting patient to find the right therapy and therapist.Susie Orbach doesn't seem quite as worried as I am by this. "It must," she suggests, "be speaking to something in the culture. Am I concerned about regulation and training of therapists? Yes.

It means we need more dissemination of information in the public sphere rather than less."Talk of "the public sphere" prompts me to ask whether she felt moved to intervene, even with a private word in an editor's ear, to correct or impose a more accurate perspective upon some of the sensational stuff written about her best-known client (or patient, or analysand) after the Princess's death "It has been a very difficult episode," she admits. "I can't even answer your question because to do so would, I think, be a breach of ethics. One is always protective towards anybody one has seen and one is not in a position to do anything except to keep one's mouth shut."It is not only the rich or famous who seek Orbach's help. She tailors her fees to her clients, she says, and when I ask if that means that she sometimes will see a patient for nothing, she answers: "Of course." The sorting-out, getting-to-the-heart-of-things nature of her role is possibly a legacy from her parents. Her father was a campaigning, left-wing MP (he died in 1979, on the day Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister) and her mother was an American who became an English teacher after giving up the idea of being a lawyer. Susie grew up in Chalk Farm, just down the road from her Belsize Park home and consulting room In a sense, she has returned to her roots. And, unlike the cliche of the screwed-up therapist, she seems to have her own life sorted out.

She certainly believes in what she does: "Therapy is one of the great intellectual disciplines of the 20th century, both culturally and clinically important. What happens in the therapeutic space is pretty profound and so of course it enriches my life." And while she accepts we can get a bit over-analytical in our culture, "we need to be thinking more, not less. Otherwise," she asks, "how are we to account for a century of industrialised killing?"`The Impossibility of Sex' is published on Thursday by Allen Lane, pounds 17.99. W hen Neville Lawrence came to Britain from Jamaica in 1960, at the age of 18, he had bright, Dick Whittington-like expectations: "From what I read and heard, it was the Mother Country and the streets were paved with gold." He couldn't have guessed those streets would one day be paved with his son's blood.

Neville Lawrence might have been less euphoric about the Mother Country had he heard what had happened, just the year before, to Kelso Cochrane, a black Antiguan-born carpenter, stabbed to death in West London in May 1959 by six white youths (the killers were never identified). He might have been more fearful had he read about the 1958 race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill. And he must have felt a chill when the Tory candidate Peter Griffiths won Smethwick for the Tories, in the 1964 General Election, with the slogan "If you want a nigger neighbour vote Labour". But Neville Lawrence was quiet, stolid and hard-working, and not easily weaned from optimism. He continued to believe in British decency - as did his wife, Doreen, tougher-minded than him but no less of an assimilator. By the time their oldest son Stephen was 18, they'd seen enough of life in the borough of Greenwich - "the race murder capital of Britain" - to have become wary: Rolan Adams, a black 15-year-old stabbed to death by white youths in Thamesmead in 1991, was someone Stephen knew. But like many other black families, the Lawrences were law-abiding, church-going and self-improving (and their son a model student). They didn't feel themselves to be at risk from racist thugs.Even after Stephen was stabbed to death in April 1993, Neville and Doreen Lawrence tried to go on believing in the Mother Country.