The limits of intimacy: psychotherapist Elisabeth Hanscombe spent eleven years in psychoanalysis, conducted by another woman. She recalls the challenges, consolations and frustrations of the experience.(Memoir)

I STILL write her letters, long letters, full of news. I tell her about my family, my children, their ups and downs, and sometimes I tell her about myself, But it's not the same any more. I still refer to her as my analyst and address her formally but the analysis is over, except in my head. It ended the last time I lay down on her couch, closed my eyes and traced the details of my life, inside and out.

I had first rung Mrs Milanova in March 1986. 'I'm thinking of having an analysis,' I said on her answer machine. 'At some stage, maybe.' I hesitated. 'I wonder whether we might meet to talk about it? Mrs Milanova rang back within an hour to tell me she had a space the next day and to give me instructions on how I might find her. 'You walk up the front path. It's quite steep,' she said. 'Take care not to slip if it's raining. I'll be in a room at the top of the path on your right. The house is to your left.'

I knew she'd come from Europe. I knew she'd worked at the Tavistock Clinic in London. I'd heard she was a Kleinian. In those days I didn't know that to be a Kleinian was to be frightfully rigid, following in the footsteps of Melanie Klein to a fault. A Kleinian would be okay, I thought then. I knew I didn't want to see a Freudian, someone who might follow in the footsteps of Freud to a fault. I'd seen a male counsellor at university when I was nineteen, for a few weeks; I'd been in group therapy for eighteen months with a male analyst in my mid-twenties; and I'd spent the last six and a half years with a male psychotherapist. This time I wanted to see a woman and I wanted to go the whole way and have an analysis.

I couldn't miss the house. It was a double-storey weatherboard in pale green and white, set high on a hill. A verandah jutted out from the second floor, overlooking the masses of tea-tree below. The garden was well hidden from the street. It was the beginning of autumn and the agapanthus had gone to seed. The sloping lawns on either side of the cobbled path were lush despite the hot summer we'd had that year. I felt dizzy walking up the hill, with a familiar surge of …