And now, this is the place I feel least safe.” There could not have been a more traumatic place for the attack, says Dr Seheult. It was like attacking a writer in her study or a housewife in her kitchen.The knife itself haunts Seles. As she talks about it, she holds her hands nine inches apart and the edges of her fingers describe the curve of the blade in the air. “That’s the place where I’d have no worries, whatever was going on in my private life or in school I felt comfortable. People think, ‘If I sit up all night, I’ll get so tired that I won’t be able to dream.’ But when the trauma has been great you can’t escape it.”And no trauma can be greater than one that goes to the heart of your being.

“The one place I felt safe was a tennis court – and that was taken away from me,” Seles told the US magazine. “During the day you repress this stuff, but when you sleep, your defences are down and all these deep fears come out in dreams Switching the biological clock is classic. “It’s incredibly distressing and can be very debilitating,” says Dr Seheult. Victims of the King’s Cross fire and Herald of Free Enterprise sinking suffered in precisely the same way.

I saw shadows in every corner.”These are the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Dr Carol Seheult, a clinical psychologist who advises the British Olympic Association and the England squads in a wide range of sports. She could not, she told Sports Illustrated, the US magazine, in a remarkable interview last week, forget the sound of her own voice, howling as the knife came down “My scream is what stayed with me a long time,” she said “It was eating me alive. I’d go out on the court, I could be playing great tennis, and it would all start coming back I pretty much moved to daylight sleeping times I couldn’t sleep at night. A lot of nights when I woke up, I’d think, he’s right there where I was sleeping.”Often her dreams were vivid replays of the attack She would wake shivering. As stabbings go, it was relatively minor – a cut, two inches deep, just below the left shoulder blade. But the psychological scar it left went much deeper.”For a long time, I didn’t trust anyone to even move behind me,” she says “So, looking back, I didn’t go to a lot of places In my mind, I’d see his face I’d see a lot of hatred in his face.