On the couch

FASTER, faster, until it hurts.

Feel pain if you want it to work for real," screamed Jeffrey Archer at my sluggardly 12-year-old carcass.

The year was 1965, the place a prep school in Kent. Archer had been brought in to improve our fitness.

He was immensely enthusiastic, almost childishly so, and well- liked enough by those of us in the school choir to be happy to sing at his wedding in Oxford in 1966. I am still grateful for tricks he passed on to make me a zippier soccer player.

But what strikes me as significant now is his idea that pain was the measure of success. While all too true when it comes to fitness training, it is less so in a career. Archer's tragedy is that he has run away from the pain of facing the truth about himself.

To the psychologist, the key questions about Archer are: why has he repeatedly sabotaged his own political career? Having done so, why does he not get out of the public eye? I believe I can offer some plausible answers.

It was 22 years before my second meeting with Archer. That was for a weekly psychological TV interview called Room 113 that I did as part of a "yoof" programme (Network 7 on Channel 4, 1987-88). It took place soon after Archer had won the libel case which, although exonerating him from consorting with a prostitute, had cost him the vice-chairmanship of the Conservative Party. It was the second time he had snatched disaster from the jaws of success, the first having been when he was almost bankrupted and felt he had to resign as an MP.

On hearing the news that the prostitute Monica Coghlan had talked to a tabloid, he told me he felt depressed but immediately began writing a play as an "exorcism - you just carry on, Oliver, that is what you do. You just carry on". He agreed that throwing himself into hard work was his way of avoiding intolerable emotions.

Pressed to explain why he kept slipping up, he revealed an emotional illiteracy. "I was a bloody fool," he said. Why? "Because I was naive."

Why, Why? "Because I am. Most enthusiasts are."

Pressed further, he blamed his naivety for his not realising that there are "evil people out there and you have to face that fact". But he had no insight into why he kept sabotaging his career. Without this, was there not every likelihood of it happening again? "Well, we'll meet in 20 years' time and I hope you will be proved wrong."

With Archer now facing prosecution for perjury and perverting the course of justice, I have been proved all too right - and it is easy to see why.

When things go wrong, Archer simply ignores the emotional truth, the message behind the events.

A man with this psychology cannot learn. He simply perseveres in making the same mistakes again and again. But what would he discover if he dared to look deeper?

There was one revealing clue in the interview. When asked about the tendency for his political career to go pear-shaped, he described a scene in a play called Lulu in which all the characters have just lost everything. All but one is devastated but, said Archer, "the wealthiest one of the lot looks straight at the audience and says, 'Wonderful. Now I can start again'. And I think there is a little bit of that in me."

During his description of the wealthy man's delight at being impoverished, Archer was more animated and alive than at any other point in the interview.

It was regaled with absolute glee. I believe that this is the key to his periodic humiliations: they are one of the few moments in his life when something real happens.

Archer is probably what psychologists call an "as if" personality. They lack a stable sense of identity, living their lives as Walter Mitty characters. They actually feel more real when acting a part, pretending to be Jeffrey Archer the Great Novelist or politician or playwright rather than the person within.

They have a heightened sense of reality when pretending and feel detached, lacklustre and bored when they are not - that may be why Archer cannot bear to sit at home and think through why he keeps messing his life up. It would be too painful to live without pretence for long, so instead, each time he messes up, he creates a literary fiction based on himself.

He began writing a play immediately after the Coghlan story broke and he did so when his recent mayoral ambitions collapsed. In the case of this latest play, he even intends to act a role in it. Interestingly, the characters in these plays (and in his novels) are mostly themselves con men and As Ifs.

Since his life is an act, it makes perfect sense for Archer to enact a part in a play which will doubtless be full of phoney characters who get away with their crimes. But in the real world there is a terrible price to pay for all this falsehood: a feeling of fraudulence. I suspect that this is the key that unlocks the contradictions of Archer's personality.

ON THE one hand, it may be that his feeling of fraudulence becomes so overwhelming that he longs to be exposed. Living an unreal, pretend life is an empty, lonely experience. There is no real (a word which Archer uses again and again) contact between you and others because all you are offering is a false self, a mask.

There is a desperate longing for something real to happen and being unmasked is one way.

At the same time, there is often a huge desire to play games and to sustain the fraud - to get away with it, as so many of Archer's fictional literary characters do.

This contains a furious, malicious revenge on people who live first-person lives.

For the As If, this may take the form of proving to the world that their bizarre, fantastical version of reality is true. Just like Jonathan Aitken wielding his papier-mache Sword of Truth, in bringing the court case against the tabloid which exposed him, Archer was taking an extraordinary risk since it now appears very likely that he was lying. It is sometimes argued that men like Archer have a genetic propensity to be risk-takers and sensation-seekers (both of which are also common in adulterers).

The air of unreality at the trial was huge. A "fragrant" wife and a loving, dutiful husband were portrayed, yet most of Fleet Street knew perfectly well that he had had at least one mistress and that it was very possible he had used a prostitute.

That made it all the more satisfying to Archer to turn reality on its head by getting a verdict which supported his strange personality's untrue version of reality. Of course, all of us are playful and engage in pretence, it is a vital sign of emotional richness. Children love to make believe that they are someone else. We often feel at our most alive when telling stories and putting on funny voices.

By identifying with fictional characters in films and novels we can experience our emotions more intensely than in reality. I split up with a girlfriend once and shed no tears about it until months later when watching the parting at the end of the film Casablanca - a fiction was more real than the actuality of what happened.

But there is a world of difference between this and the As If's unreality and, interestingly, public life is packed with it. I have interviewed dozens of As If politicians, TV presenters and business entrepreneurs.

In my Room 113 show, Tony Blackburn told me: "I only feel myself when I am pretending to be Tony Blackburn the disc jockey. I live for the daily two hours of broadcasting. You can forget the rest. I wish my whole life could be a live radio show."

Of course, imposturous, fraudulent people have always been with us but modern life especially enables such people to flourish.

Television loves them, and for many careers being good on TV is now vital.

People from low social classes can rise to the very top today but, having arrived there, they may feel estranged from their cultural roots. While Posh Spice and David Beckham have been impressively and commendably true to theirs with their "over the top" wedding arrangements - many politicians find themselves adopting the postures of a different class.

It may be no accident that Archer was able to befriend both Margaret Thatcher and John Major, who were admirers of his con men- packed books. Like him, both were self-made, from modest backgrounds and found the Old Etonian tendency of their party unfamiliar. But, above all, they may have been in sympathy with the feeling of fraudulence, of having to be an actor. Major's parting analogy outside Downing Street was dramaturgical, almost as hammy and cliched as a character from one of Archer's books: "When the curtain falls, it's time to get off the stage."

But it is best to live your life as yourself. It is not a rehearsal or a dramatic fiction. Experiencing the selves you are impersonating is not a prescription for enjoying your real self. Archer was a wonderful PE teacher.

Perhaps his life would have been a much happier, more authentic one if he had stuck to that.

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.