Spectator competition winners: George Smiley and James Bond in the psychiatrist’s chair

In Competition No. 3297, you were invited to provide a psychiatrist’s report on a well-known literary character.

The germ of this challenge was an interview with Olivia Colman, who played Miss Havisham in a recent adaptation of Great Expectations, in which the actress said of her character: ‘It’s terrible what happens to Miss Havisham… If only she’d had a therapist or a really good friend to chat to, she might be in a much better place.’ Only John O’Byrne chose to put ‘Ms H’ on the psychiatrist’s couch, though. Far more popular subjects were Bertie Wooster, Holden Caulfield and – star of the show – Winnie-the-Pooh.

David Silverman, Martin Williams, Joe Houlihan, Charlotte Marshall, Joshua Price and Nigel Johnson-Hill earn honourable mentions. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each.

Like Freud’s cause célèbre R, who believed a rat had penetrated his anus, civil servant G suffers the paranoid delusion of a mole working in the circus. G acquired this Zwangsneurose from a dead father-figure known only as ‘Control’. I was shown photographs of a glamorous ‘Lady A’ whom G fantasises is his wife, presently living in Immingham. When I suggested G’s musophobia was caused by his myopic inability to perform in the ring with this lithe Humberside ‘trapeze artist’, he told me there was no longer a mole in the circus, as it had been exterminated by a schoolteacher in a caravan. G now seeks the Moscow-based ringmaster ‘Karla’, whom he believes has stolen a gold cigarette lighter (an ‘old flame’) inscribed ‘To G with all my love A’. My patient’s increasingly florid archetypisscher mythos is that only his soft body can stem British post-imperial decline.

Nick MacKinnon/George Smiley

A.M., a Caucasian male of advanced years, precise age not known, was referred to me pending sentencing for persistent anti-social behaviour outside St Swithin’s. This included the violation of the personal space of a gentleman en route to the marriage of a close relation.