The Americans rode to acclaim by enacting such interpersonal paranoias on the historical stage, the complication being that sometimes the enemies we create are indeed out to destroy us, and sometimes our side is worse.

Just as Joe Weisberg would become torn about who the geopolitical villains really are, so will viewers be torn about Philip and Elizabeth. Yes, they’re stealing American secrets, seducing and exploiting the locals, ruthlessly exterminating anyone who gets in their way, but they’re also idealists with hopes and depths.

They love their kids. A friend I had breakfast with the other week, who was midway through watching the series, was agonised about how they could have gone through with one particular assassination (an elderly woman). He fretted about whether the show had finally crossed a line for him, then conceded that the line had already been crossed when Elizabeth murders a sympathetic Black woman whose life she’d already destroyed after fake-befriending her to get information, and the show just assumes you’ll go along with it.

Sometimes going along was tough. I myself argued with both Weisberg and Fields about Elizabeth pimping out her daughter to her KGB handlers. Happily, they’re entirely non-proprietary about their own interpretations of characters and plotlines, including when I queried them (separately) about how monstrous so many of the mothers and mother-surrogates seem. Fields joked that he needed a time-out to call his therapist; Weisberg pushed back a little, saying of the most supremely monstrous mother – Sam’s, the titular patient-kidnapper of The Patient – that although she’s definitely complicit in his crimes, he believed in a mother who couldn’t turn her kid in no matter what. (Or urge him to join the circus, I thought.)

When Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields came up with the idea for The Patient, it was Fields who was initially intrigued by serial killers. Weisberg wasn’t, but they kept talking about it, then figured out that Sam, played by Domhnall Gleeson, was in therapy: he wants to change. Then they had the idea that he kidnaps his therapist, and now it was a show – also a merciless examination of how unfree all us benighted humans are, manacled to our stupid psychologies and impediments, even when not literally manacled in a basement.

“You hope your plot puts your characters into situations that bring things out that are surprising and you’ll see depths you get to plumb, and this was really like that,” Weisberg said. They have a shared ability to excavate a remarkable amount of submerged stuff from their psyches, and transpose it into commercially viable TV. Fields says that sometimes, months later, one of them will say of a plotline or twist, “Oh my God, our subconsciouses did that,” and the other will say, “That wasn’t subconscious on my part, I thought you knew we were doing that.” Then they’ll laugh.

It was therapy that gave Weisberg the ability to write characters with complex mental lives – he wouldn’t have been able to, he says, until realising he had one himself. Which meant coming to terms with how much of a false front he’d put on throughout his life, and how much he’d been hiding from himself. He started thinking that his childhood identification with the repressed Soviet citizenry was a way of externalising his anger about repression in his own family.

Trained from the crib to quash all negative feelings, he couldn’t go to war against his parents, but he could work to destroy a Soviet leadership busy choking off the free expression of its citizenry. Having an enemy, in other words, helped him avoid facing his own dark side.

Not that it’s ever so easy to shelve an obsession. In his intermittently memoirish 2021 book, Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War, Weisberg contends that he (and we) had fundamentally misunderstood the Soviets. The KGB was remarkably incorrupt, the Bolsheviks were the party who’d put a stop to the pogroms, and the Soviets had ended the Holocaust, beating the Nazi army back through Eastern Europe.

Yes, Jews suffered horribly under their rule, but many were also members of other groups that Stalin was purging and brutalising, from intellectuals to party elites. These many reversals and correctings-of-the-record make an odd reading experience, like watching someone in an MMA bout with his own former beliefs and punching himself a lot in the face. This effort to get it right, intellectually and emotionally – to come to terms with history and its crimes, to see around your own blind spots – seems both noble and poignantly impossible.

Blind spots: what to do with them? Weisberg and I had disagreed in a friendly way about therapy. His idea is that you get to a more authentic version of yourself, mine is that you just come up with a better cover story. We’re always staging our personas, trying to get people to buy the latest one. He semi-concurred – our stories about ourselves change over time; we all want things from other people and try to get them. It’s what’s so interesting about Philip and Elizabeth, I said – that they’ve been trained to use that “authentic” part of themselves to manipulate people. That had been his own training, Weisberg reflected: Tell the truth as much as you possibly can, even with the foreigners you’re running as spies.

Everyone he talked to at the agency said, about the people they were most manipulating, that their feelings for them were entirely genuine. They loved and cared about them.

But what about all the less palatable motives, the things you don’t say to your colleagues? Rewatching the Americans pilot, I was struck by the degree to which revenge figures in numerous plotlines and vignettes; The Patient too is fundamentally about Sam’s need for revenge. Is that a big theme for you? I asked Weisberg.

“Not consciously,” he said after a pause. It was probably more that violence and terror were big things for him, that from a young age his isolation, sadness, loneliness, mixed with comic books and American culture generally, all funnelled into a very violence-centered fantasy life. “And when there’s a lot of violence, you’re going to have vengeance plots, it’s going to be a part of how you tell those stories.”

“So revenge is just the occasion for violence?”

“I think that’s right,” he said. “Though I can’t rule out that in five years I’ll realise how vengeful I am.”

Weisberg remains convinced that every American’s ideas about Russia are psychological projections, although given recent events – the Ukraine invasion, the blatant assassinations and poisonings of Putin’s critics – he wonders if he’d seen the potential for rapprochement too optimistically. But he’s also over his former optimism about America as a beacon of hope for the world.

Having once thought, “We don’t invade, take over and colonise – we liberate,” the realisation that he’d gotten it so wrong on Iraq (he was pro-invasion) was a painful turning point. He looks back now on those fantasies of fighting and nation-building and wonders what the fuck he was thinking.

The US shoulders some not insignificant portion of responsibility for the Ukraine war, he also now says, given NATO’s expansion toward Russia’s borders: “Any nation would feel threatened and fight back. Certainly we would have.” This was startling to hear from an ex-cold warrior, but being susceptible to extreme political swings could also be, I was coming to understand, the putty of great creative bravura.

We’d been talking during the writers’ strike, so Weisberg and Fields weren’t working on anything together at the moment. Weisberg was using the downtime to work on a novel. When I asked if he was cultivating any new obsessions for his next act, he said there was something he kept pitching but had so far gone nowhere. The backpacks.

He wouldn’t say more about the idea but agreed to walk me through his collection, pointing out the pockets on one, the mesh on another, the special sunglasses holder. “Look at that material and the colour scheme!” He reeled off the manufacturers of various zippers and buckles. “Just try that zipper pull,” he enthused, zipping a zipper back and forth. I agreed it was a very smooth pull.

I asked how many backpacks he had in total. He said he didn’t want to answer that, but also he didn’t know. I tried surreptitiously counting them but gave up after discovering a second layer underneath the first, along with a bunch of smaller ones. “Don’t you lose stuff in all these pockets?” I asked. “I don’t really use them,” he replied. “I just like having them. I want to feel that I could use them.”

I did my best impersonation of a shrink: “That’s quite suggestive.”

“Yes, it’s odd,” said Weisberg. “What does it suggest to you? Is it obvious what it suggests?”

“Well … like ‘baggage’?” I was thinking of those mental health fascists on dating sites who demand “No baggage” of potential mates. Yet here was someone who loves his baggage and its many secret compartments (even when empty) and plumbs them for a living, I thought enviously, wondering if I should try to love mine more.

“So that’s it for the backpacks?” I said.

“Well, that’s as much as I’m going to show you,” he replied.

Later I asked Weisberg whether he still needed enemies or if therapy had cured him of all that. He said he’d never thought he had enemies in real life (this seemed like a 180!), then rethought the question: “There’s a lot of passion. And a lot of hatred. And, of course, a lot of judgment. And a lot of effort to destroy.” I could have said “Destroy what?” but left it there, thinking that, as with his riveting onscreen alter egos, people are most profusely themselves when their cover stories are a little glitchy.

• A Wired report