Danny seems to be what people call a borderline personality -- would you call it that?

There's no diagnosis for Danny in the book, so I don't think I should supply one now, really. But certainly he has problems with the fluidity of his identity. This is a very wet book. There's the river, there's the pond, there's the causeway at the end, the water is always slopping over onto the land -- that happened naturally, I didn't plan it in a schematic way -- and Danny is always sort of seeping out of himself, looking for someone else to enter into.

It's hard to imagine that aspect of someone's personality changing.

That won't change for Danny. It doesn't change, no. And what's worrying about it is that it has this facility for something which looks extraordinarily like empathy, but which is actually not empathy. It can be quite an attractive quality, because of the degree of perception and focusing on the other person, and the sense of mingling and sympathy. I read something about techniques of therapy once which said that the most dangerous thing a therapist can say, and it should never be said, is "I know how you feel." That's not only not empathy, it's projecting your own personality and feelings into the other person, and then recognizing them.

How should a therapist express empathy?

The good phrase is some version of tell me how you feel -- how did it feel?

What are your plans for your next book? Will you stay with psychologists and their patients?

No. I've got three ideas at the moment, but I'm not sure which will win out. I'm getting quite interested in bioethics. I think it's one of the most fruitful and difficult areas for contemporary society -- the way in which scientists are racing ahead. You can't blame the scientists, because I think they are trying to explain and inviting debate, and inviting informed public policy, because they don't want to be Frankenstein. And perhaps the rest of us are rather letting them down. Because most of the opinions expressed on matters of bioethics are simply prejudice.

Which areas of bioethics are you most interested in?

Genetics and reproductive science. I think that's where we're going to see the most questions asked in the next few years.

Such as whether it's ethical to choose or eliminate particular traits in your children?

Yes, or in animals. Or in crops, for that matter. I've been thinking about the way the rape of a woman is always used as a metaphor for the rape of a country, or the landscape, or the fertility of the land. As a woman I profoundly object to that. It always makes it seem as though the woman herself is not of sufficient importance -- she has to be a metaphor before she becomes significant. And yet I can see the importance of looking at our own fertility and the fertility of the natural world not as metaphors for one another, but simply to recognize their actual objective identity. And we are manipulating both of these things more and more. Scientists are doing the best they can to make ethical decisions in a vacuum, without any informed public opinion.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"