Wyn Bramley has had a long and interesting career. It began when she was 17, having left home in the north in 1959 to work in a psychiatric hospital in Essex, which she describes as an old Gothic, monstrous, old-fashioned place.

“I was interested in people and how they ticked and naively thought this might be a nice, sophisticated, psychological route to understanding people,” she said. She soon learnt the hard way how wrong she was.

In the mid-sixties she became senior psychiatric sister at the pioneering Cassel Hospital, near Richmond, where patients and doctors lived in community and drugs were off the agenda (pretty radical stuff for the time). That set her on the road to psychodynamic therapy and a career as a student counsellor in London. She came to Oxford 18 years ago, where she set up a private practice and designed and directed the Master’s programme in psychodynamic studies at Oxford University.

These days, nearing retirement at the age of 66, Wyn offers psychodynamic counselling to individuals and couples at her home in Stonesfield. So what is psychodynamic therapy? “It is derived from psychoanalysis, but not pure classical psychoanalysis,” she explained. “It adds an awful lot from research and clinical experience that’s gone on since the turn of the last century and puts it altogether in a much more conversational style between the therapist and patient.” It generally involves delving into one’s past.

Every so often, Wyn gets the urge to write a book about some aspect of her work. “I don’t see myself as a writer, I’m a clinician primarily, but every decade I somehow feel there’s something I want to put on paper that has brought together all the stuff I’ve been experiencing.” She calls it “getting the itch”, although she is not interested in writing abstruse theory that only other therapists can understand. “I think it’s a shame to waste all that knowledge and experience on a few people,” is how she puts it.

Her latest, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: How Couples Really Work, looks at how internal and external experiences from birth to adolescence shape the style, quality and progress of a committed relationship (gay or straight). Covering the whole gamut of experience, from early union until break-up or death, it is a mixture of theory and judgement, honed from 30 years’ experience in the field, illustrated with various case studies.

Wyn wrote the book because she feels there is scandalously little written on the subject, apart from by professionals for professionals; at a time when there’s enormous concern about keeping families together, because of the effect on the children and the health services. “This is an attempt to reach out to both the public, so they know what to ask for and ask why it isn’t there, and for the professionals to perhaps broaden their training into a new area,” she said.

So what has she enjoyed about her work counselling couples? “It’s seeing it work,” she said, “I’m not saying it works for every couple, although every couple does change to some extent.” With some, their relationship is already so dry and arid that there is no hope, so what she and the couple do is start dismantling the marriage in the most damage-limiting way possible. “That’s rare, but it happens.” She added: “I think it’s fair to say that most people improve their relationship a huge amount or a medium amount or even a little bit and then they go away and work on it. Some of them come back to do more work, some I never see again.”

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered may not have you mentally tuning into the song made famous by Ella Fitzgerald, as it does me every time I catch sight of the title, but if you’re interested in how the dynamics of a marriage work, there is much to fascinate. It suggests, among other things, how much our partner choices may be governed by unconscious impulses from our childhood. I imagine this book will appeal to a wide range of couples, whether in need of therapy or not, as well as professionals.

As for Wyn, although she says this will be her last work-related book, after hearing her reminisce about her first job where electro-convulsive therapy, insulin and cold baths were regularly given as treatments, I wish she’d write her biography. She has seen a lot and knows how to tell a good story.

l Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered is published by Karnac at £18.99