 She also experienced traumatic flashback when watching the film "Mine Own Executioner", in which the hero is shot-down by anti-aircraft fire while flying a Spitfire.In 1948, Cowell separated from her wife and, suffering from depression, she sought out a leading Freudian psychiatrist of the time, but was unsatisfied by the help he offered.Sessions with a second Freudian psychiatrist, described in her biography only as a Scottish man with a less orthodox approach to his profession, gradually revealed, in her own words, that her "unconscious mind was predominantly female" and "feminine side of my nature, which all my life I had known of and severely repressed, was very much more fundamental and deep-rooted than I had supposed."