Chloe Diski is a writer and psychodynamic psychotherapist in London.
What does the perfect psychoanalytic consulting room look like? Should it resemble the compact, underground rooms of the London Clinic at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, where the minds of patient and analyst are brought close together and perhaps, at times, exist as one grey matter? Or should more space be added?
A few months ago, I began to think about where I wanted to spend my working...
There is a box file marked ‘Jenny Diski (Simmonds) School and other early’ next to my desk. It’s been sitting here for a couple of years, and, just as in childhood when I would flick through the contents to fill an hour on an empty Sunday, I’ve left it largely untouched. On those Sundays the thing that drew my attention was an onion-thin letter, worn with rereading, in which Doris Lessing offers my mum a room, and an alternative existence.
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