What’s in a Chair?

A ’08 NYT article looks at therapists’ home offices, good, bad, and ugly.

ANN LOFTIN could write a textbook on the nuances of modern psychotherapeutic methods — and the personality types of their practitioners — based on the home office décor of the therapists who have treated her. There was the strict Freudian whose couch was covered in plastic and who barely spoke, though every once in a while a phrase like “mother’s milk” might have slipped out. Another’s office featured phallic African statuary and pictures of a young wife, who was herself always audible somewhere in the background. A licensed clinical social worker had lots of comfy, overstuffed furniture and encouraged patients to sit anywhere (sessions ended in long hugs that suggested much countertransference). Her last analyst, with whom she spent a fruitful decade, did not see patients in his home, but in an office building, and his room there held nothing more than two nondescript leather chairs, a bookcase lined with medical texts and a table holding a box of tissues.

Or, skip the article, and head straight to these photos of therapist chairs, “Initial Intake,” by Saul Robbins.