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Wellbeing and fitness
The myth of rich people’s problems
Leading psychoanalyst Susie Orbach talks about the need to achieve
In one episode of In Therapy, psychoanalyst Susie Orbach’s 2016 radio programme based on staged conversations recorded in Orbach’s real-life consulting room, Helen, an upper-middle-class lawyer in her late twenties, comes up against an uncomfortable problem. Voiced by actress Vanessa Kirby, Helen tells Susie that she’s been unfaithful to her boyfriend with an older partner at another law firm. Her revelation opens up a conversation about whether her high-flying life is fulfilling her.
“She’s outwardly extremely confident, but insecure inside. She’s followed the path of doing well and it’s left her bereft,” Orbach tells the listener. In another episode we meet Charles, an advertising executive whose company is going through “the humiliation” of being taken over by a young media start-up. Feeling he is no longer in “the club”, he finds himself smoking again after 10 years of abstinence.
These profiles — carefully constructed by Orbach and the theatre director Ian Rickson — articulate some of the experiences of the privileged metropolitan archetypes Orbach has observed in her five decades of practice, during which she has pioneered a feminist approach to psychoanalysis, founded the Women’s Therapy Centre and written several acclaimed books. From her early years training in New York to 40 years in the London analytic community, including several as Princess Diana’s analyst, she has gained a certain insight into the minds of the rich, although she emphasises that her practice is not just “of wealthy people”, saying, “I don’t think any therapist worth their salt is interested in just serving one group of people.”
At 75, Orbach is still working full time and squeezes me into her schedule one Tuesday lunchtime. We meet at her Belsize Park home in north London, a black modernist structure with floor-to-ceiling windows that contains her bright, book-lined consulting room, from which she runs her practice. She is assertive and animated, holding eye contact intently while we speak, which occasionally has the effect of making me feel as if I’m in analysis (“What do you want me to say?” she asks in response to one question).
Talking therapies have cemented their place in health culture recently. Between 2014 and 2019, the number of people in therapy in the UK rose by 5 per cent, according to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), while the pandemic has further heightened demand. And for the growing ranks of the very wealthy, it’s become increasingly standard to see a therapist as part of the entourage of people who look after you.
Yet, while the very rich may seem to have different concerns from the rest of us — the kind of warped relationships and obsessions with inheritance and legacy depicted in the TV series Succession — in Orbach’s experience there’s no such thing as “rich people’s problems”. Whatever the person’s class or ethnic background, she says, “the preoccupations, as they come to therapy, aren’t that different”.
However, she continues, in the same way that money has “a lot of meaning” on any level, it has “a huge impact on people who spend their days moving millions around”. Having supervised plenty of analysts with hedge fund managers as clients, Orbach has witnessed how “they’re human beings who are messed up, but probably more messed up, financially, than anybody else. A couple of the cases that I’ve supervised — these are the ones who are brought to me for supervision, so they’re troublesome — there is a craziness about money or thinking [you] don’t have enough money when you get to a certain point and you simply do have enough money.”
What is the day-to-day “impact” of moving millions around, I ask her when we speak again, on the phone this time, the following Monday morning. “I think what there is is a form of disavowed anxiety,” she says, which can then manifest as addiction, guilt or omnipotence. “If you are compulsively doing something, if you’re repetitively doing something — looking at the screen . . . or making deals all the time — what that does is allow you to focus on the deal rather than the complication it’s causing inside of you.”
In some cases, repetition overturns the need to face the inevitable emotional fallout from this kind of high-risk work — of making decisions based on speculation (and making bad decisions) and bearing enormous pressure. “It’s not that you’re addicted per se, but it’s a way of not thinking about what you’ve done.”
Her job is to figure out what’s caught up in that compulsion to succeed and achieve: “What is the insecurity? What is the function of feeling needy all the time? Why do I need to hurt myself with feeling inadequate when I actually am perfectly capable?” she continues. “It might come psychologically from feeling quite emotionally empty or deprived, or in need. There comes a point at which the money doesn’t solve that problem: the loss of what they didn’t get is not solved by money in the present. However, if they were able to accomplish an interesting job or make enough of their life, that itself is just the form of nourishment that can transform that sense of neediness.”
To hang on to that compulsion is, Orbach says, to continue to believe “I’m not good enough, I’m always going to not have enough”. Helen, for instance, is a phenomenon among young women that Orbach has observed over the years: highly successful, settled, but feeling she “doesn’t exist for herself”, as Orbach put it in an interview with the writer Lisa Appignanesi. “There’s no way for her to be nourished by her accomplishments.”
She is careful to situate this archetype within its social context: Helen comes from “a generation where the mothers hadn’t had a chance to fulfil their ambitions”, and so they projected this disappointment on to their daughters, giving them the drive to succeed but not the tolerance for exploration and experimentation.
Here the figure of Princess Diana comes briefly into focus, as a privileged young woman who came to Orbach following years of being unable to exist for herself. It was Orbach who was credited with enabling Diana to speak out, and with such openness, in a BBC interview in 1995. Orbach waves away the assumption that Diana came to see her for her expertise in eating disorders: “Well, you could say that but, you know, that might not be accurate,” she says smilingly.
I’m curious about how Orbach deals with one particular point of conflict: part of the work that’s done in the consulting room is looking at and unpicking any instincts we have towards excess. How does that process coexist with working with clients who are always striving for more? “It’s funny, because I’m thinking about somebody that I see who is really interested in some of those questions — ‘I want to be in this position, but I actually don’t need to be, I don’t need it to go any further.’ So they settled that peace for themselves.”
In other words, it’s OK, Orbach believes, for people to take therapy as far as they want to and then stop. “What’s wrong with being able to feel like ‘I’ve understood these things, I’ve got a new way of standing on my feet that isn’t about undoing and redoing, but it’s a sort of expanding?’”
She is emphatic about the rewards awaiting those who undertake this work — most importantly, “much greater access to the ordinary emotions of living”. The alternative, as she’s witnessed it, is to remain stuck in a loop — feeling deprived or needy, in the cases we’re talking about — and become a “Johnny-one-note” as she puts it, defined for themselves and others by that single impulse.
“As a therapist, I’m really interested in not just the chords . . . but also the notes in the chords,” she says enthusiastically, “and how many different flavours a feeling can have. I think the thing . . . [therapy] shares things with novelists, musicians and artists is that you’re always trying to find a way to expand the flavour in something. It’s about the delight of living when you have more notes.”
Baya Simons is an FT editor and writer
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I’m a therapist to the super-rich: they are as miserable as Succession makes out
