Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [54]
Between laughs, I listened, trying to place her accent. South African? Australian? I couldn’t tell. I took a chance and asked if she was Australian. She was.
Jean Gillespie was a psychoanalyst from Sydney. In almost one breath she told me she had studied years ago at the Hampstead Clinic founded by Anna Freud, but that she now practiced in Australia and was thinking of moving to New York although she’d heard it was tough to crack the New York Psychoanalytic Society and anyway she might possibly give up private practice. At the end of her soliloquy, she asked, “Are you an analyst?”
I was tempted to say yes. After all, I had raised two children—a task Freud himself compared to the “impossible” profession of analysis—along with playing housemother to countless narcissistic cats. But I told her the truth instead. “No, but my ex-husband applied to study at the Hampstead Clinic. We actually moved to London, but his plans fell through.”
She asked me what I did. I told her I worked as a newspaper reporter, which in my opinion also qualified me to declare myself, at the very least, a lay analyst. She laughed. It was a loud, booming sound, one that came without warning. It must have alarmed her patients, I thought, when it came at them from behind the couch. Indeed, there was a raw quality about her whole person that ran counter to the image of the analyst as quiet cipher. I found it refreshing. But I wasn’t sure I’d want her to be my therapist.
We spent the next hour or so walking together through the house, paying special attention to Freud’s study and library. The large room was a replica of his consulting room in Vienna, furnished with belongings transplanted from 19 Berggasse, his home for forty-seven years. For the last year of his life he worked here, surrounded by the familiar past. I was reminded of the way my friend Susan had managed to re-create her Washington apartment on a hill in Montmartre, bringing along a bit of the past with her into a new life.
In the study, Jean and I paused to contemplate the famous couch. It was roped off from the rest of the room.
“Probably to discourage any homesick patients from taking a lie-down on it,” Jean said.
“It looks pretty uncomfortable to me,” I said, eyeing the short, heavy-looking couch that roller-coastered down from the head end and was covered with a scratchy-looking Oriental rug. I told Jean of my observation that the decor of an analyst’s office seemed always to be one of two styles: either sleek, leather-and-chrome minimalist with the obligatory Miro print, or a mismatched, just-hauled-up-from-the-beach-cottage look accessorized with a Käthe Kollwitz print.
Jean laughed. “Well, I’m afraid I fall into the second category. What about your analyst?”
“Definitely beach cottage,” I said. “On humid days his office even had a musty seaside smell. Actually, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable with an analyst who had a leather Mies van der Rohe couch.”
“I hear the Mies couch is popular with New York analysts. Which is another good reason not to move to New York.”
Before leaving, Jean and I stopped at the gift shop. “I wonder what Freud would think of being merchandised this way,” I said, browsing through the notecards, posters, mugs, commemorative stamps, and replicas of the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities he so famously collected. Some of them weren’t cheap.
“I suspect he’d be amused and not at all surprised,” Jean said, handing over thirty pounds to the cashier for a pair of nondescript silver earrings. She explained to me the design of the earrings was taken from a doodle by Freud on one of his manuscripts.
When the clerk handed Jean her change and the boxed earrings, she immediately unwrapped them. “The way I look at