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. He is certainly suffering from acute logorrhea; a degree of akathisia accompanies his more involved flights of fantasy. He is extremely distractible, and his written statements are curiously archaic. A.M. presents as being of a nautical persuasion: his clothing is certainly salt-stained, but the character of his narrative seems unreliable. He seems to have been rather in the doldrums lately and has experienced delusions of ‘slimy things’ (he is rather obsessed with slime). His main complaint is that he has offended against the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, in respect of diomedea albatrus. His requests for punishment have an allegorical and religious character. I recommend chlorpromazine.

Bill Greenwell/The Ancient Mariner

The patient would not see me unaccompanied by his General Practitioner, a man employed principally to validate by contrast his delusions of intellectual and musical genius. Clearly schizophrenic, the patient constantly fabricates connections between unrelated if observable phenomena; the shortness of my cigar stub and disrepair of my marriage an instance. Taking a family history revealed a rivalry with an older brother notable for far superior intelligence and a suite of his own psychiatric conditions including extreme fatigue, social isolation and a compulsive eating disorder. The patient subsists at the margins of the law, combining the observational and performative skills of the mentalist with an autodidact’s enthusiasm for the deployment of arcane data, retailing outré theories to credulous individuals sometimes including the police. The prognosis? Uncontrolled mania if not immediately sectioned to an asylum where calmatives can be administered hourly. A countersigning colleague, Professor Moriarty, is in fulsome concurrence.

Adrian Fry/Sherlock Holmes

The patient seemed, throughout our consultation, halfway between a soporific state and raving mania, a logorrhoeic, multilingual burble seeming to swirl about as much as from him, overcomplicating his multiple personality disorder. The manifestation of these personalities was imprecise, as if the patient were dipping randomly into a dressing-up box of ill-remembered childhood heroes and villains, switching between identities, at times, within the space of a single sentence. One minute he seemed to be disgraced politician Charles Parnell, the next Finnegan, a folkloric giant. Scraping away the patient’s many nonsensical delusions – he imagines himself wed to a watercourse of some accomplishment as a belletrist – I sought the real man, a provincial publican with bickering sons and a daughter for whom he harbours the incestuous desire usual in a case study of this kind. I prescribed bromide and strong coffee, further consultations likely only to encourage repetition of the performance.

Russell Chamberlain/HCE

If ever there was a mind you could not unlock, it must be JB’s. His powers of resistance and denial are exceptional, as though he has been practising pretence and duplicity for years. Outwardly, he is a mature sophisticate with epicurean tastes and wide international experience. His confidence is unabashed, as is his oddball, narcissistic sense of humour (he proclaimed that he would be ‘neither shaken nor stirred’ by my diagnosis). The referral included scant personal detail. I understand that he is in government service and a widower but little else, so I ask the usual analyst’s question: what is he hiding? My concern is that he is concealing a pathological secret by both a frozen affect and sensual debauchery, i.e. a high-functioning psychopath. I have to call it an educated guess but I believe that he has killed at least once and may kill again.

Basil Ransome-Davies/James Bond

No. 3300: Brunch with Byron

Anthony Brode wrote ‘Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins’.You are invitedto describe in verse of up to 16 lines a meal of your choice – elevenses, high tea, Nando’s– with a well-known poet, living or dead (please specify). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 17 May.