City apartment buildings of a certain vintage have offices for doctors and other helping professionals that open directly onto the sidewalk, so there is no need to go through lobbies crowded with doormen, delivery men, and tenants fussing with grocery carts, dogs, and mail. This office belongs to a psychoanalyst; perhaps unsurprisingly it is on the West Side (where one block has so many psychoanalysts that it is known as the Mental Block), though shrinks in fact practice throughout the city.
There are a few obvious differences between the waiting rooms of doctors and those of psychoanalysts. Doctors employ schools of receptionists and secretaries to deal with patients, insurers, and the latest requirements of Uncle Sam. Shrinks work alone. The offices of doctors are crowded with fellow sufferers, coming and going, or mostly, like you, just sitting. Even when two or more psychoanalysts share a suite, the interval of the 50-minute hour, so long as their customers are staggered, means that they rarely see one another. Some doctors’ offices pipe in Muzak; the waiting rooms of psychoanalysts, never. (My wife had an older colleague, born and raised in Vienna, whose psychoanalyst husband, a violinist, was told by his mentor, a senior psychoanalyst, that he must learn the viola so that he and his colleagues, who already included two violinists and a cellist, could form a string quartet — but that is a different matter.) The reading material in the typical doctor’s office is picked for distraction and grazing: fashion mags, Vanity Fair, Time, and of course People. (I keep track of the stars of Hollywood via my visits to the doctor.) The offerings in the offices of shrinks, if there are any, tend to be more austere. My first psychoanalyst took The New Leader (that was a trip down memory lane — like a conservative subscribing to The Freeman). The waiting room of my second psychoanalyst had an aging copy of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
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