Many years ago, in the space of a few months, I went from highly respected member of the psychoanalytic community to pariah, although that’s not how it’s recorded in the minutes of the committee meeting that decided my fate. Even now, I still evoke pity mixed with wariness. I see it in the over-friendly smiles compensating for less than friendly thoughts, in the curt nods that once would have been fulsome greetings, in the carefully calibrated politeness that’s not so distant as to be rude but not so close as to be intimate. I see it in the hesitancy of training candidates who have heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that there’s some story about Michael Frohlich, but no one knows what it is.

The official account is that certain actions of mine brought the profession into disrepute. I became “unstable.” I “conducted a vendetta against a respected colleague.” I became “obsessed with a matter that was not within our remit.”

That’s their version. This is mine.

In 1985 I was twenty-nine years old and had just been accepted as an analytic candidate. (Note: not “trainee” but “candidate,” as if we were standing for office.) I lived in London, of course. In those days the provinces were an analytic wilderness. You wanted to see an analyst and lived in Aberdeen? Good luck with that. The best you could hope for was to travel to Edinburgh however many times a week to see one of the few lone souls in practice there. It’s not much better now, I’m afraid. As the Americans say, go figure.

An intake of candidates is not like an intake in a school year or a university course, or even your average professional training programme. Even back then, when psychoanalysis was still considered by many as the gold standard of psychological treatments, the British Foundation for Psychoanalysis accepted no more than eight applicants a year.

That year only six of us made the grade. We all met for the first time at a welcome event for new candidates held at the Centre for Psychoanalysis, an unremarkable red brick building in Hampstead that looked as if it should have been one of the many prep schools in the area. As I climbed the steps to the front door, my heart beat wildly. I had arrived late, having travelled from the East End, where I worked as a social worker.

I had pictured the interior as looking like Freud’s consulting room in Vienna, all wood, bookcases, and symbolic artefacts. Instead, I was directed to a seminar room that had much in common with the one we used at work, lit by fluorescent tubes and furnished with black plastic chairs. At one end of the room stood a conference table laden with bottles of wine, paper cups and plates, and budget party food—bowls of crisps and peanuts, platters of brie, cheddar and stilton, mini sausages, French bread. The senior analysts were gathered in groups, chatting with the ease and familiarity of people who felt entitled to be there. Amongst them, I was awed to see the author of The Deconstructed Self, one of the first books on psychoanalysis I had ever bought (a dog-eared and heavily annotated copy sat on my desk).

I helped myself to a glass of indifferent red and hovered by the table, hoping that someone would take pity on me and engage me in conversation. As I took a handful of crisps, I was approached by a tall, olive-skinned man with thick dark hair and a droopy moustache that made him look like a cartoon Mexican. He was a good few years older than me, and I thought he might be a candidate further on in his training, or even one of the younger analysts, until he said in heavily accented English, “Hello, my name is Carlos Ramirez. I think that we will be training together.”

I held out my hand. “Michael Frohlich.”

He shook it with a firm grip. “Michael. Pleased to meet you. Your surname is German, I think?”

“Yes, my father came from Germany.”

“Ah. He was a refugee?”

I was surprised by his forthrightness, being used to the polite circuitousness of English social discourse. “He came on a Kindertransport when he was fourteen,” I said.

Carlos gave me a thoughtful look. “So you are Jewish?”

My back stiffened as I readied myself to defend my origins, even though they had no importance to me. “Technically, yes. But I had a totally secular upbringing.”

“Why was that?”

“Too long a story to go into now.”

I wouldn’t have admitted it to him then, but my upbringing was one of the things I looked forward to exploring during my own training analysis.

He accepted my side-step with a nod. “If we did not have long stories, we would not be here,” he said. His response showed a commendable acceptance of human complexity.

“And you?” I asked. “What drew you to analytic training?”

“That is part of my long story,” he said with a smile. He told me he was a psychiatrist and had only recently moved to London from somewhere in the North of England—Blackpool or Bradford, I forget now. He had come from Buenos Aires two years before that, intending to further his career in neurology.

“What made you change to psychiatry?” I asked.

He gave a wry smile. “It seems that your wonderful country has no shortage of neurologists desperate to make their mark. Psychiatrists, on the other hand, are in short supply.”

“Why not America?”

The military dictatorship in Argentina had collapsed only a few years before, helped by the ill-judged—for Argentina—war in the Falklands, and I thought Britain a brave choice, given the public perception of his country at the time.

“I like rain,” he said, and laughed. He told me he had taken a series of short-term temporary posts, ending up as a junior psychiatrist in one of the big asylums, where he had done well enough to transfer to a prestigious training scheme in London. “It was in the asylum that I found my vocation,” he said. “I enjoyed talking with the long-term patients and found sense in what others perceived as ramblings. I discovered that I had an aptitude for seeing beneath the surface, if I may put it like that, and a kinship with the suffering and the dispossessed. The shorthand for it is empathy, but to me it felt as if they opened a door in my soul that I did not know I had.”

After he said this he looked apologetic, as if worried he had come across as pretentious, but he had described exactly what I felt with my clients when work was going well.

I asked him if he knew anyone else in the room.

He shook his head. “Only Mrs. Lipkin. I’ve been seeing her for a few months, and she’s agreed to take me on for my training analysis.”

I looked at the small, unprepossessing, middle-aged woman on the other side of the room, trying to balance a glass and plate while eating. Freda Lipkin was akin to psychoanalytic royalty, having been analysed by Ernest Jones, who had been analysed by Freud himself. I had heard rumours that she took only the most promising candidates.

“And you?” Carlos asked. “Who will you see?”

“I’m not sure.”

I’d had a consultation with Harold Frobisher a couple of months before, but I was terrified that whoever I saw would uncover such appalling psychic flaws in me that there would be no choice but to eject me from training.

At this point, one of the senior analysts came over and put an end to our conversation. But those few minutes had confirmed that whatever journey I was about to undertake in the coming years, I would be doing it in good company.

Harold Frobisher did take me on, but my first session with him established my unsuitability for the path I had chosen, at least in my eyes. He consulted from home, a terraced house in West Hampstead similar to my own childhood home in Brondesbury, only grander. I arrived there on a wet Monday evening, my head full of the day’s work. There were two doorbells, and although he had instructed me to ring the lower one, I conveniently “forgot” and rang the other one.

I heard footsteps hurrying to the door. When it opened, I was met by a flustered, middle-aged woman in an apron. For a moment I thought she might be a housekeeper, but on seeing me she said, “Oh, you must be here for Harold,” and shut the door in my face.

Uncertain what to make of this—did he rent a room from the owner of the house?—I pressed the correct bell. The door clicked, and I pushed it open. This time I saw Harold standing in a doorway at the far end of the hall. He looked cross, or so I thought. He said nothing as I made my way towards him, and remained silent as he moved to allow me to enter the room.

At the back was a deep bay window, framed by sun-faded crimson velvet curtains held back by braided gold rope. On the left, pushed against the wall, was the inevitable couch, a button-back chaise longue upholstered in cord velvet the colour of dark chocolate. Behind the couch stood a wing-back armchair and a footstool. In the bay stood two smaller armchairs at right angles to one another. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls, save for the one next to the couch. I stole a glance at the nearest titles. All were works on psychoanalysis.

As I hovered on the threshold, I became aware of Harold standing beside me. He barely came up to my shoulder. He had stringy grey hair swept back from his forehead, exuberant sideburns that looked left over from the 1970s, a prominent nose, and a receding chin. He wore a purple V-necked tank top over a shirt and tie, and checked trousers. Altogether, he reminded me of an ageing garden gnome.

“Should I lie on the couch?” I asked.

He gave me a sketchy smile, lips tightening and eyes closing briefly. “That’s the general idea,” he said.

I took off my sopping coat and looked for somewhere to put it. He pointed to a coat stand in the corner that I hadn’t noticed. As I lay on the couch, I felt as though I were about to be operated on without an anaesthetic. I clasped my hands across my stomach, crossed my ankles, then uncrossed them, worrying whether I should have taken my shoes off in case I left mud on the couch.

Behind me, I heard the armchair creak as Harold sat down. My scalp tingled at his proximity. I knew I was supposed to say whatever came into my mind uncensored, but as a hundred thoughts had already collided and disintegrated, I didn’t know where to start.

As I recall it, I lay silent for most of that first session, but I also remember telling him a convoluted story about my journey from work. After a time, the sessions run into one another. All I know is that he said very little and all I could think about was the woman in the apron, who, I suddenly realised, could have been his wife.

When he called time, literally by saying the word, I slid off the couch, put on my coat, and waited for him to dismiss me. When he didn’t speak, I said, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

He sat silently, hands folded on his lap. The session was over. At least he hadn’t told me never to come back.

I soon grew used to pressing the lower bell, hearing the door click open, and walking to the half-open door at the far end of the hallway. Sometimes I would hear sounds from another part of the house: a door opening or closing, a distant voice, occasionally a telephone ringing, and once, to my deep embarrassment, a toilet flushing. But as soon as the door of the consulting room closed behind me and I was settled on the couch (after that first session, I invariably found Harold already seated when I entered the room), the work would begin. I learnt to talk about the first thing that came into my head—my day at work, relationships, memories, dreams—and gradually he became nothing more than an ethereal presence who spoke only when necessary.

I spent seven years in analysis with him, roughly fourteen hundred fifty-minute sessions. In the course of that time, I learnt that I was more driven by unconscious forces than I realised, and that choices I had thought rational and relationships I had thought sound were not always what they seemed. I went through a phase of “being held up at work,” arriving consistently five to ten minutes late at least twice a week, until Harold pointed out that I was the one holding up the work of the analysis. More than once I “forgot” that he was away and turned up on his doorstep, leaning on the lower doorbell until I realised my “mistake.” There were patches when nothing much seemed to happen and I would wonder if it was all a waste of time, only for Harold to pinpoint the underlying cause of the impasse with forensic accuracy.

Two years later, I was allowed to see my first patient. As I sat hidden behind the couch, I felt like a child dumped at the wheel of a powerful car and told to drive at top speed round a Formula One racing track. Only an idiot wouldn’t be scared. That feeling didn’t leave me for years, and I spent many an anguished supervision session gabbling about my work, terrified of being revealed as a fraud, an incompetent, or even the psychological equivalent of an axe murderer, inflicting such grievous blows on my patients’ psyches that they would end up taking their own lives because of my ineptitude. Just as bad were the times when I felt I had achieved a modicum of mastery with some clever interpretation, only to have it dashed to pieces on the rocks of supervision. It takes a certain pig-headedness and a largely misplaced faith in one’s own potential to train as a psychoanalyst.

But at least I wasn’t doing it on my own. Throughout those years, Carlos became  my confidant, the wise father I never had. Did I talk about Carlos in my analysis? Not truthfully, that’s for sure. Our friendship was the one thing I censored. I didn’t want it ruined by having its underbelly dissected on the couch. Looking back, I don’t know how I managed to avoid bringing it up.

Carlos rented a room in a house in Vauxhall. He never invited me there because his landlady didn’t like him to bring back guests, or so he said. As for women, he mentioned no one apart from an artist who drifted in and out of his life.

One night, after too many drinks in a wine bar somewhere in Soho, he told me that he had been married before, so he was no longer interested in anything serious.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We drifted apart. Those were difficult times.”

I had noticed how little Carlos talked about life under the dictatorship, and I was reluctant to probe, for fear that my curiosity would seem indecent. I had the impression that he had suffered, and I didn’t want to cause him further pain. I would have left it at that, but he added, “She became depressed after losing our first child. When she was five months pregnant, the car she was driving was hit by another vehicle. She moved back to her parents’ house and would have nothing to do with me, as if she blamed me for the loss. A few months after that, I heard that a senior naval officer had been visiting the house, and soon after that she asked for a divorce. Once it was finalised, she married him.”

We sat in silence as the drinkers around us shrieked and music blared. Back then, Soho was much seedier than it is now, but this was the first of a new breed of bar, done up in blue and silver, with gleaming stainless-steel tables and sleek plastic chairs that moulded themselves to your body without providing any comfort.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

He shrugged. “I doubt it would have lasted anyway. Our outlooks were too different. She wanted me for the social status of being married to a doctor with a growing reputation, and I wanted her because everyone wanted her. She was that kind of person.” He took a sip of wine. “I’d like to say that she’s run to fat  after having five children in quick succession, but it wouldn’t be true. She still features in the odd glossy magazine, with her third husband and their perfect daughter.”

“She divorced again?”

“It became inconvenient to be married to a naval officer,” he said with a sad smile, expecting me to understand the implications.

After such a personal confession, I felt I ought to reciprocate, so I took him to meet my father. We turned up unannounced one Saturday afternoon, and as we stood on the doorstep in front of the peeling green door, I had an impulse to bolt. Before I could give in to it, I heard the rasp of keys being turned and my father’s querulous voice calling out, “Just a minute.”

My father still lived in the house where I had grown up. Since my mother’s death nine years before, the fruits of his increasingly obsessive labour had escaped the confines of the tiny room he called “the study,” and now precariously stacked piles of papers cluttered every surface. I seldom visited, and when I did I told him little about my life and never stayed long. He had always made plain his disapproval of my career choices. Social workers were “wishy-washy do-gooders,” and therapists of any hue were “mind-meddlers.”

When he saw us on the doorstep he seemed bewildered, and for a moment I wondered if he didn’t know who I was. Then, with typical truculence, he said, “I wasn’t expecting you.” He looked Carlos up and down as if he suspected him of being my lover.

“This is my friend Carlos Ramirez. We were in the neighbourhood, so we thought we’d look in.”

My father stepped to one side, and we entered the narrow, stale-smelling hallway with its faded wallpaper and tarnished mirror.

“It’s good to meet you, Mr Frohlich,” said Carlos. “Michael has told me so much about you.”

My father said nothing. He made his way back towards the kitchen without inviting us to follow him, though we did anyway.

The kitchen was in its usual state of disarray, with papers on every surface and unwashed dishes in the sink. My mother had kept the house in order, but she would not have been surprised to see that, left his own devices, my father let things slip. He was a man to whom nothing mattered except his “work.”

“Am I supposed to offer you tea?” he asked.

“Only if you want to,” I replied.

He pointed to the kettle. “Help yourself. You know how it works.”

I glanced at Carlos, who raised his hands to show that he didn’t want anything.

“So how are you?” I asked my father.

“Busy,” he said, adding a few more plates to the pile in the sink.

I looked at a bundle of letters next to the bread bin, a stainless-steel relic from the ’60s. The topmost envelope had a German postmark. I picked it up. “Still writing your letters?”

Carlos watched my father with a curious intensity, as if he were studying the behaviour of an unfamiliar species.

“You Italian or Spanish?” my father asked without ceremony.

“Argentinian.”

My father scrutinised him. “Any German blood?” I knew he was thinking about the Nazis who had made South America their home after the war.

“None that I know of.”

My father began filling the sink with water.

Carlos spoke to his back. “Michael tells me that you devote your time to seeking out people who committed crimes against humanity during the war, in order to hold them to account for their actions.”

“Crimes against humanity? Is that what he calls it?” He swilled a few plates around without washing them and stacked them on the draining board.

“An admirable undertaking,” said Carlos.

I was ashamed of myself for bringing him here. It felt like taking a visitor to Bedlam in centuries gone by. But Carlos remained resolutely charming, asking my father thoughtful questions about his “work.” By the end of our short visit, in which we never left the kitchen, I could see that my father thought he had found an ally simply because Carlos showed an interest in his letter-writing, even though he had expressed no opinion.

As we stepped back into the fresh spring air, Carlos placed an arm round my shoulder. “Thank you for bringing me,” he said.

After that, paradoxically, we confided in each other less, as if we had tested one another with our most painful personal secrets and, in so doing, had forged an unbreakable bond of trust.

Carlos went back to Buenos Aires in 1990, soon after completing his analytic training—a decision that took us all by surprise. We had assumed he would set up practice in London like the rest of us, but he was adamant. “It is time for me to go home,” he announced.

When I asked him why, he gave me the thoughtful smile that always made me feel he saw more in my question than I did.

“I have had enough of rain,” he said.

Set in London and Buenos Aires in 2009-10, THE SILENCE OF FRIENDS tells the story of a respected psychoanalyst who discovers that an Argentine friend and colleague committed atrocities during the Argentinian military junta in the 1970s. The revelation stirs up powerful professional vested interests that end up destroying his career.

This novel has been incubating for many years. I’ve always been fascinated by power and its abuses, and I wanted to write something that explored these themes. As a mental health professional and writer, the world of psychoanalysis, with its squabbles, scandals, and rivalries, seemed the perfect milieu. I made many false starts on the novel, knowing who my characters were but not their stories. It all coalesced when I came across a true story of a Brazilian psychoanalyst who was ostracised for whistleblowing on a colleague who had turned a blind eye to his trainee’s connections with the Brazilian dictatorship.

The Brazilian trainee became Carlos Ramirez, an Argentinian who trains as a psychoanalyst in the 1980s alongside Michael Frohlich, the novel’s protagonist and reluctant whistleblower. Soon other characters found their places: Seamus Walker, a bluff Irishman, is the President of the (fictitious) British Foundation for Psychoanalysis and a critical friend to Michael; Gregor Hindmarch, a former clergyman who retrained as a psychoanalyst, is the Chair of the Ethics Committee who seizes the opportunity to discredit Michael; Anton Liebowitz, a “playboy” psychoanalyst, is a close friend who doesn’t want to get involved; Sulah Kasparian, a social-work lecturer and Michael’s wife, is his loyal supporter, though with reservations; Sofia Frohlich is Michael’s oldest daughter, who pushes him into investigating Carlos; Jurgen Springmeyer is a German human-rights lawyer working in Buenos Aires, who discloses damning evidence to Michael that is dismissed out of hand by the psychoanalytic establishment; and Freda Lipkin is Carlos’s first analyst, who holds his secret for over thirty years until she divulges it, out of guilt, to Michael and then commits suicide. Hovering over Michael throughout the story is the spectre of his father, a Kindertransport child whose entire family was murdered in the Holocaust, a man who scarred his children’s lives with his obsessive quest for vengeance.

I follow Michael along his journey from urbane professional with a dispassionate view of world events (unlike his father) to impassioned advocate for justice, despite the toll it takes on his health, his work, and his family. In the end he is vindicated: Carlos is tried and found guilty. Michael is quietly reinstated, but he receives no apology for the grave damage to his reputation.