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Of all the reasons for beginning an analysis, not wanting to talk must rank among the most unlikely. In New York around 1915, the recently baptized ‘talking cure’ had become a hot topic of conversation, as the writer Floyd Dell remembers: ‘Everyone at that time who knew about psychoanalysis was a sort of missionary on the subject, and nobody could be around Greenwich Village without learning a lot about it’ (p. 47).1 If the young discipline of psychoanalysis had dramatically raised the stakes of talking, it had also evolved a certain wariness about its own conversations: the where and how and how long of their elaboration; the authority of the analyst's speech (and his silence); and a sense that talking might, in some cases, be a refusal of living. It is in terms of living - as opposed to talking - that Mabel Dodge (later Mabel Luhan), doyenne of the New York early modernist avant-garde, described the motivation behind her analysis with Abraham Arden Brill: ‘I didn't want to talk, now, I wanted to live’ (p. 51, citing Luhan, 1936, original emphasis).2 A.A. Brill, known widely as the first practising psychoanalyst in the United States, first spoke publicly about Freudian theory at Luhan's salon at 23 Fifth Avenue in 1915; a year later she would request an analysis - her second - with him. Luhan's concerns about talking were to some extent shared by Brill, whom she paraphrases in a memoir of the period: “‘That's enough,” he would interrupt. “You are not here for conversation’” (p. 158).3