Maxine Mei-Fung [Ki Price Studio]

LISTENING to a song in a back yard at Angel, Islington, was a turning point for Maxine Mei-Fung Chung, author of What Women Want.

The song was Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most, played to her for the first time by her late mother-in-law, “godmother of hip” Fran Landesman, who wrote the lyrics.

As she listened Maxine thought about leaving her career in journalism to concentrate on working full-time as a psychotherapist.

She made the leap, and her new book, drawing on her 15 years’ experience as a psychotherapist, examines women’s needs and desires through the moving stories of seven women patients.

Was that song in an Angel back yard the catalyst for Maxine’s decision to change career?

“Perhaps not the catalyst but a reminder that desire is an action, and I desired more knowledge and less office politics,” Maxine, who lives in Bloomsbury, told Review.

She was keen to explore founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud’s question: What does a woman want?

“After 30 years of enquiry he believed he was no closer to understanding or answering his own question”, she said. “Women are not a mystery. And neither are our wants and needs. But there is complexity attached to our desire, and this was the premise for the book.”

She writes: “When we listen through ears attuned to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class and age, we can hear women and how they claim their wanting.”

The book’s seven women, identities disguised, who all agreed to be included, reflect this diversity.

“Terri”, due to marry a man, is attracted to women; lawyer “Tia” is the daughter of a black mother and white father; “Ruth” is a supermarket worker; model “Kitty” is 23; “Agatha” is 67, “Marianna” is a singer, “Beverly” a bereaved mother.

No “blank-faced therapist,” Maxine overturns the popular view of the psychotherapist as neutral, silent and “somewhat distant”.

She believes in a “collaborative journeying together” of psychotherapist and patient, and the book traces the journeys with great insight and sensitivity.

Tia is keen to work with a therapist of colour, and Maxine is the daughter of a white, British working-class mother and a Chinese “patriarchal” father.

“So you’re an outsider, too,” says Tia, who altered her appearance through cosmetic surgery in a bid to fit in with the white people surrounding her and win her father’s love.

She regrets transforming her face and wants to move on, “to heal the part of me that was scared to be black,” to make a “home” of her body. “To feel and know I belong.”

Beverly, distraught after her son commits suicide, insists that the therapist she sees must be a mother, and Maxine has a son, now 18.

The song Maxine heard in the Angel back yard also means a lot to Marianna, who sang it the night she met her partner.

Longing for a baby, Marianna thought she needed a man, a partner or husband, for a family to feel complete. But in time that belief changes and she becomes the single mother of a daughter.

“Like Marianna, I also raised my only child alone,” Maxine writes. Like Marianna, she too feels unconditional love for her child.

Maxine indicates desires may be suppressed or forbidden by conditioning and control of women.

Her conversations with her patients are interspersed with fragments of their lives presented like vivid film scenes.

The women’s stories evoke anger on their behalf, as well as empathy. Ruth suffered her policeman stepfather’s chilling cruelty. Plagued by eating disorders, she wants a healing body, free of rage and fear.

Kitty takes ice baths to numb her crippling anxiety. Aged 11, she was sent to boarding school while her parents took her brother with them to Asia. She feels unloved, “less than” and wants her family to “see” her for who she is.

Terri, called “disgusting” when her abusive mother finds her in bed with a woman, wants her mother’s unconditional love, and to reclaim her sexuality.

Retired nurse Agatha has finally found a man she’s in love with and wants a life with him, but her son disapproves.

There are no “neat conclusions” or “plain triumphs”, writes Maxine, who supervises and offers training therapy to students at The Bowlby Centre, Highbury Fields, and has a clinic in Holborn.

Psychotherapy is “about encouraging ways to think more clearly, to open up understanding and enquiry that may have enduring value for people long after the therapy is ended,” she writes.

She hopes readers will recognise in themselves some of the “universal struggles” within the stories. Few could fail to do so.

• What Women Want: Conversations on Desire, Power, Love and Growth. By Maxine Mei-Fung Chung, Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99