Some years ago, I rented an office in a suite that included the office Jacob Arlow used for many years. This was on the ground floor of a residential building in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I had just started psychoanalytic training when I found the office and thought it an amusing coincidence when I learned that Arlow used to practice in the suite, since I assumed I would be reading some of Arlow's work during training. The owner of the suite, herself an analyst, used Arlow's actual office and had been the person who told me who the former occupant had been when I visited the suite originally.
I remained in the suite for the duration of my analytic training and often thought about Arlow having worked in that space. A couple of times when repairs were being made to my office, my suitemate let me use her office, Arlow's old room. There was nothing particularly striking about this room. It was actually smaller than mine. It had a rectangular shape and the dimensions were probably about 20' by 12' with windows on two perpendicular walls, one of which looked out into the building's backyard, as did my own office. The backyard was quite lovely, consisting of a small grassy area and a row of large trees. The top of the Empire State Building could be seen in the distance. The trees in the backyard attracted a variety of birds, not just pigeons, who frequently sang their songs while all of us worked in the suite. My ignorance of fowls showed when I thought I was hearing the sounds of owls. I asked myself, why would owls be perched outside analysts' offices in New York City? Someone eventually enlightened me that they were probably mourning doves (perhaps a more appropriate bird for analysts). I often sat in my chair during breaks between patients and let my gaze drift out into the backyard, followed by my thoughts. I wondered if Arlow allowed himself such brief reveries looking out the window during long days of analytic work.
My landlord also informed me when I moved in that just over the other side of the trees in the backyard was the townhouse where the writer Salman Rushdie lived. It was a grand townhouse and sometimes when I worked late into the evening I could see lights on in the rooms in the back of the building. I wondered if the famous author was in there writing. In addition to Midnight's Children, how about Midnight's Analyst? One day while I was bringing back to my
office a pastrami sandwich for lunch, I walked past Rushdie on the street corner hailing a taxi. Where was he going? This was years after the Iranian government dropped its support of the fatwa issued for The Satanic Verses in 1988, so he certainly could move around more freely. But I still wondered if he feared for his safety—the fatwa actually remained in place—and what it must have been like to live under a death threat.
We all live under a certain kind of fatwa, not imposed by an ayatollah, but by life itself. And how we deal with it, or what we do with this constant internal threat is one aspect that can be extrapolated from Freud's concept of the death instinct. Rushdie recently published a memoir, Joseph Anton, about his experience of living under such a concrete or external death threat. The fatwa did not stop Rushdie from writing, but it did engender much upheaval to his personal life.
Denial is one powerful weapon against the ever-present reality of death. In a darkly humorous example of this, during the years I worked in Arlow's former suite, mail was still delivered to him, five to ten years after he had died in 2004. Much of it was junk mail. But on more than one occasion he received notices for upcoming psychoanalytic lectures and conferences. I thought, “Don't people know he's dead and that they should take him off their mailing lists?” One particular flier addressed to him caught my attention. It was from an institute in the city advertising a conference called “Psychoanalysis and Art: Dialogues in the Creative Process.” Arlow's interest in art and creativity apparently extended beyond the grave. Among the billed speakers were Harold Blum, Rosalind Krauss and Joseph Lichtenberg. I took some measure of comfort in the belief that analysts, alive and dead, still try to communicate with each other in the spirit of sharing ideas and passing on psychoanalytic knowledge.
But aside from the occasional piece of mail, I found myself wondering if there was anything else in the suite that belonged to Arlow. Could any of his belongings or personal effects have been left behind? Would I find something in the closets or the kitchen cabinet? Notes on a case? An unpublished paper? A beloved tchotchke? I felt the urge to poke around in the hope of discovering something of Arlow's, almost as if I were a child again snooping in my parents' bedroom. Though I restrained the impulse to enact this fantasy, I imagined there still might be something of his hidden, or buried, somewhere in the suite.
During this period, I attended an informative lecture given by Michelle Press discussing Arlow's classic 1969 paper “Unconscious Fantasies and Disturbances of Conscious Experience.” It was held at the New York Psychoanalytic Society, Arlow's institute, where he served as president in the 1960s. I was struck in this paper by Arlow's examination of the ubiquity and significance of unconscious fantasy. A dramatic example of this occurred with my office playing a major role. Shortly after I graduated from training, I was still treating in analysis one of my former control cases, a woman with a serious alcohol problem. One day when I was not working she showed up at my suite intoxicated and tried to break into my office so she could “sleep it off” on my couch. She damaged my office door but was unable to enter the room. She proceeded to lie down on the chairs in the waiting room. My suitemate insisted several times that she needed to leave and my patient eventually departed only after my colleague threatened to call the police. She wanted to be in my space, on my couch, in my room, even if I wasn't there. We came to later understand that in her regressed state she wanted to return to the safe “holding environment” of my office and in her unconscious fantasy be close to me.
Arlow died several years before I started working in his former “space.” The idea of space, physical and psychic, and who occupies it, like Rushdie's living space, Arlow's former work space, or my new work space, came to take on new meanings, conscious and unconscious, for me. I don't know what Arlow's office looked like when he worked in it. I imagine it was full of books, journals, some art work—what most analysts have in their offices. But Arlow made important contributions to the field of psychoanalysis while sitting in that office. It occurred to me he probably had written some of his best papers right next door to me. I could imagine him sitting in there working out thoughts and ideas in his mind or listening to patients in his analytic way, as I was learning how to do in my own analytic way as well. Of course, this is my fantasy. And fantasy was a major area of interest for Arlow. So it has been for Rushdie, too. In fact, much of the material deemed so offensive to Muslims in Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was “dream visions” and narrative informed by magic realism, which were largely responsible for his being issued the fatwa. One artist's creative fantasy is another reader's unacceptable blasphemy. Did Arlow and Rushdie know they lived and worked across the backyard from each other? Did they ever see each other in the neighborhood? Did they read each other?
So I fantasized about Arlow working in his office. I wonder how many analysts know who occupied their offices before them. Generations of analysts have worked in the same rooms. The anthropological history of such work spaces stimulates further fantasies and associations. My own associations to offices, or rooms, as depicted in famous titles of art and literature, include Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (Arlow's office?); James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room; Truman Capote's evocative title, Other Voices, Other Rooms; one of my favorite Van Gogh paintings, Bedroom in Arles (how did he live and work in that room?); or the benefit of having, in E. M. Forster's words, A Room with a View, and in
Woolf's words, A Room of One's Own. And, of course, Freud's consulting room at Berggasse 19, in Vienna, perhaps the most famous office in history. If not, certainly one of the most discussed and photographed work spaces in any discipline in any era. Edmund Engleman's Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud's Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 documents in images one person's quarters like no other attempt I know. There have been more recent efforts to write about and photograph contemporary analysts' offices, including Mark Gerald's 2011 paper, “The Psychoanalytic Office: Past, Present, and Future,” and Sebastian Zimmermann's 2014 book Fifty Shrinks, which shows the interiors of 50 therapists' and analysts' offices around the world.
Then I think about all the offices I have worked in both in my practice and also in hospitals and clinics over the years. How much time I've spent in these little rooms, sitting with another person, listening, talking, looking, thinking. We spend so much of our working, and waking, life in the relatively small confines of rooms of our own with a view outward and hopefully inward. With our books, papers, art work, objects internal and external, mementos mori, pads and pens. The enclosed space is contrasted with the infinite regions of the minds we attempt to explore of our patients and ourselves.
T. S. Eliot wrote at the end of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea.” I sometimes feel this is an apt metaphor—another Arlow interest—for our experience in our offices with our patients day in and day out, hour after hour, depth upon depth. “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
It is some small consolation to suspect that, like Arlow, we all may well continue to receive mail long after we're gone.