There’s compulsive little Dr Raymond Schrift who is hailing a blond stewardess (named ‘Nanci’) as if she were a taxi. There’s kindly, rotund Dr Arthur Feet, Jr., who was the third (and last) analyst of my friend Pia. There’s Dr Thomas Frommer, the harshly Teutonic expert on Anorexi a Nervosa, who was my husband’s first analyst. There’s a big-breasted mama-analyst named Rose Schwamm-Lipkin with whom I recently had a consultation about whether or not I should leave my current analyst (who isn’t, mercifully, in evidence). New Yorker that I am, I would never trust a pilot with a New York accent.Īs soon as the seat-belt sign goes off and people begin moving about the cabin, I glance around nervously to see who’s on board. Thank God for his crew cut and middle- America diction. So I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot (a reassuringly midwestern voice named Donnelly) fly the 250 passenger motherfucker. This may well be where we go screaming down in thousands of flaming pieces. Right here over Jamaica Bay where the plane banks and turns and the ‘No Smoking’ sign goes off.

This is, in fact, the most perilous patch of air. OK, I tell myself, we see m to be off the ground and into the clouds but the danger isn’t past. But actually my mood is better described as cautious pessimism. A mood of cautious optimism should prevail. I congratulate myself on every successful takeoff, but not too enthusiastically because it’s also part of my personal religion that the minute you grow overconfident and really rela x about the flight, the plane crashes instantly. Never mind the diabolical explanations of air-foil you get in Pan Am’s multilingual information to passengers, I happen to be convinced that only my own concentration (and that of my mother-who always seems to expec t her children to die in a plane crash) keeps this bird aloft. My fingers (and toes) turn to ice, my stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same level as the temperature in my fingers, my nipples stand up and salute the inside of my bra (or in this case, dress-since I’m not wearing a bra), and for one screaming minute my heart and the engines correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics are not the flimsy superstitions which, in my heart of hearts, I kno w they are. He ought to know the symptoms by now since he’s held my hand on lots of other flights. My husband grabbed my hand therapeutically at the moment of takeoff. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks’ ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier. There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.

Fear of flying erica