HEIR RAISING CASH

Harry Selling His Memories of Diana Feels Wrong

The prince who has complained about being commercialized his whole life is now marketing the trauma of his mother’s death.

opinion

Prince Harry has a new product on the market, and it’s his grief for Diana.

That is my verdict after sitting through “Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss,” his pay-to-view 90-minute MasterClass show that went live on Thursday, in which Harry appears alongside the neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor.

We don’t know how much Harry was paid, but his spokesman confirmed he was. But previous MasterClass contributors have received at least six figures, sometimes seven.

The weird vibe starts with the casting. On the one hand, we have O’Connor, a professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry at the University of Arizona, a bona fide expert who has put grieving people through MRI scans and written books (”The Grieving Brain, The Grieving Body”) about what she found.

A lot of her research and insights are fascinating: how adrenaline works in the body during grief, how it changes the architecture of your mind, how it is so difficult when a person really close to you dies because part of your brain can’t quite accept them not being there. She is careful and fascinating.

But every time Harry comes on, the intelligence quotient drops in favor of emotion.

A lot of it is perfectly good advice, the kind you would get from reading a book or attending a support group, but he makes it clear, repeatedly, that he is just repeating what he has picked up in therapy.

Take his meditation on “gears.” Harry starts going on about how you need to find your right gear: His therapist, he says, told him he can’t be stuck in one gear the whole time and needs to find different ones. Then a diagram comes up: gears 1 to 5 = pacing.

It’s the worst kind of half-baked cod analysis: someone who’s been through therapy and thinks they are then entitled to hand advice.

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Then there’s the jar. Harry tells us his therapist gave him a “really good visualization” technique: picture yourself inside an open jar, which blocks out the negativity, so that the good can only come in through the top, and the glass walls keep the bad out.

I mean, what are you talking about? Plus, why can’t the bad come in through the top? It’s so childish, and it’s so arrogant, to think that just because you’ve been through a course of therapy, you are suddenly a therapist, able not just to explain what happened to you but to disseminate advice to the whole world.

Then Harry says you can find identity and energy through service to others. Look, if you’re into volunteering in your local charity shop, brilliant. But when someone has been plunged into terrible, terrible grief, I just don’t think Harry is qualified to tell them to reinvent their life around service to others. That may be his experience.

Compare all that with O’Connor’s useful advice on the three things to say to a grieving person: “Of course you feel this way.” “I’m here.” And: “Right now this is how you’re feeling, but you won’t always feel that way.” Totally. Then it’s back to Harry telling you you’ve got to become more resilient.

Strangest of all is a 13-minute section on psychedelic-assisted therapy. They talk about MDMA. They talk about psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. And suddenly Harry is incredibly engaged. He declares that psychedelic-assisted therapy is now going mainstream (”no longer a fringe idea,” as he puts it), and enthuses about combining conventional therapy with what he calls “modern-day medicines.” There’s even an acronym, REBUS: relaxed beliefs under psychedelics.

O’Connor, cautiously, says that, yes, it’s an interesting field, but there are significant risks, because people can have really bad experiences that set them off the wrong way. She seems quite uncomfortable endorsing it. Harry goes on and on about its wonders.

What gives him the authority? What’s his experience? That he’s gone to some ranch in Topanga Canyon, or wherever, and done an ayahuasca party with a shaman? It’s absolutely crazy.

There are a lot of people in the recovery community who are nervous about the way people talk (as Harry does) about marijuana or ayahuasca being used in a therapeutic sense. I’m not saying I’m against it. I’m really into people doing the research and finding out properly how it can work and how it can help, as O’Connor says. But it is just not appropriate for a prince of the United Kingdom to use his position to advocate for psychedelics in grieving.

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And then there’s the perfume. Who could forget the bit in “Spare” where Harry describes applying Elizabeth Arden cream (which his mother used on her lips) to his frostbitten penis, and how the minute he opened the tube “the smell transported me through time,” until he felt his mother was in the room with him? It was probably the most mocked and laughed-about passage in the whole book. If there was one bit of “Spare” you needed to draw a veil over and never talk about again, it was that bit.

Instead, we get a whole section about how a therapist told him to spray his mother’s favorite perfume, and how “it was like being transported to another time.” It’s exactly the same thing, obviously without the penis jokes. Are you actually off your rocker, Harry?

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But what really sticks in the throat is the many, many clips of Harry as a child with his mother. For someone who has complained about being commercialized his whole life, he is now participating in the commercialization of his mother’s grave. There is absolutely no way around it.

And so many memories are for sale. He tells us he cried at her burial and then not again for nearly two decades. He says he felt like an intermediary for the crowds’ grief. He tells us he thinks of her nearly every night and most mornings. “Everything I do, everything I put my energy towards, I hope my mother will be proud of it,” he says. “There is an element of me carrying my mother in me.” He brings out the Mario Testino photograph and says he looks at it, wondering what she is thinking about what he is doing right now.

It’s a very good question.

This is also someone else’s mother: Prince William’s. I doubt he got any consideration. I doubt he got any request. I doubt he was even informed until it landed.

It’s strange and weird and depressing, and that’s before you get to what it tells us about the future. A Diana documentary is among the possibilities Harry has been discussing for the 30th anniversary of her death next year. This is a very clear warning sign of what’s to come.

I think it’s going to go down unbelievably badly with Prince William. He just wants his mother’s memory to be left to rest in peace. I’d be thinking, it is my mother too. So you’ve done all this work? Fantastic. You’ve come out the other side? Good for you.

So why can’t you just leave it?

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Tom SykesEuropean Editor at Large

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