Troubled Di drove Charles to therapy’
PRINCE Charles spent 14 years in therapy because of his wife Diana’s emotional instability, a new book shockingly claims.
The Prince of Wales asked a top psychoanalyst to visit Diana after she broke down during their honeymoon – but ended up having regular sessions on the couch himself.
Revelations about the extent of the couple’s psychiatric issues will stun many royal fans.
But a source close to Charles told the Sunday People yesterday that they are longawaited proof of how he battled to help troubled Di and save their marriage.
The source said: “The Prince of Wales tried hard to make things work in his marriage.
“That, to be frank, is more than he was given credit for at the time, or indeed since.”
At the height of the so-called “War of the Waleses” in the 1990s, Charles was portrayed as an uncaring adulterer and Diana as the victim. But in Prince Charles: The Passions And Paradoxes of An Improbable Life, author Sally Bedell Smith says Diana’s demons emerged during their Balmoral honeymoon in 1981. Charles asked his mentor, South African writer Laurence van der Post, for advice and he recommended psychiatrist Dr Alan McGlashan. Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997, saw him only eight times but Charles had therapy until the mid-90s. Friends of the couple reveal in t he book t he “extreme symptoms of Diana’s mental instability”. They included bulimia, selfharm, and suicide attempts. Charles’s cousin Pamela Hicks says Di raged at him and “hit him over the head” when he knelt by his bed to pray. The book reveals other startling facts about Charles – including how he tried to halt the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 “to honour Ramadan.” Charles, 68, and his wife Camilla, 69, continued their six-day tour of Italy yesterday. He watched a military police hostage rescue display and v i s i t ed a Commonwealth war cemetery in Monteccio Precalcino, while she met families of mafia murder victims in Naples.
They showed no reaction to the new revelations about the marriage that Diana once claimed had “three people in it.” But another source told the Sunday People: “There are two sides to everything.
“The prince did genuinely try in his first marriage until it had irretrievably broken down.
“This is a sensitive ensitive subject as the princess’sss’s memory is still cherished ed by many, not least the Prince of Wales’s own sons.
“He went through painful times but is in a happier place ace now and is very happily married.”
The source e said claims Charles les tried to stop thehe Afghanistan war had been “simplified”.