Letter: From the author's subconscious

Sir: Angela Lambert describes vividly and convincingly her impressions of Neil Lyndon ('A man and his Great Terror', 22 September), to such an extent that I believe my feelings would be the same if I met him. I am also convinced by her diagnosis of his emotional state. But to dismiss his book No More Sex War (and I write as a feminist) as a symptom of his disease is unfair. Similar attempts to undermine the content of a book are being made to ignore educated and open-minded suggestions made by A. N. Wilson in his book Jesus.

Please let our intuition and expertise in the field of human motivation and behaviour not blind us to the probability that authors too have insight into their own unconscious. And when push comes to shove: so what? Whoever wrote anything (novel, textbook, letter, diary) without a fully functioning subconscious of which they were more or less unaware?

Yours,

CHRIS ORAM RAYSON

Oxford

22 September