An economist once told me that more gloves are made in Naples than in any other European city, yet there is no glove-making factory there. Every Neapolitan glove-maker works at home. My psychoanalyst wife, like a Neapolitan glove-maker, also works at home. Her commute is maybe ten steps.

In a city apartment where every nook and cranny must be used for something, and functions are jammed together shank to flank like riders on the subway at rush hour, it is remarkable how much space is set aside for her in-house office. It is a nation within a nation, like the Vatican or Lesotho, a country of talk therapy.

It has, as any old-fashioned cartoon will tell you, an analytic couch: in my wife’s case, a sofa with three pillows, on which you may lie down and rest your head. The point, for those who do that — many patients sit upright — is to look at nothing in particular, in order to attend, not to your interlocutor’s reactions or cues, but to your own thoughts, whether marshaled or coming as they are, business casual. My wife’s chair sits across the room and slightly behind. It is paired with an ottoman and very comfy — necessarily so, since she must sit in it for a 50-minute hour at a time, for perhaps two or three times in a row. Near at hand are spiral notebooks and a telephone (landline, with copper wire: smartphones can play music, show movies, and do math; the only thing they cannot do is convey speech over long distances). Near at hand for patients is a small mid-floor table with a box of tissues.

My wife likes well-decorated walls. The biggest painting over her sofa is a blowup of an Indian miniature that she found hanging in the dressing room of a department store and purchased. It is a lively scene: Some nabob, reclining in a garden, is throwing a party; dancers and musicians are already performing, while outside the walls food is being delivered. Many, many items surround it, flat and 3-D, figurative or decorative. Two refer to her own profession: one, a framed cartoon, of a patient on a couch, speaking a storm cloud, the analyst behind him offering a rainbow; the other, from Brazil, a similar scene, this patient throwing out words (impotência, ódio, morte) and images (dice, liquor, a knife, a woman), the analyst, more realistically perhaps, just trying to take it all in. Psychoanalysis is big in South America, for some reason; when my wife went to Brazil in the ’70s, everyone she met believed simultaneously in the ultra-French theorist of the moment and candomblé, the local spirit religion.

Three items reflect earlier psychological practice: phrenology heads. No one feels for the bump of amativeness anymore, but the theory had this to recommend it: Every head, and everything going on inside it, was individual, different; you had to understand who and what this person was before you could intelligently advise.

The wall opposite the sofa is given over to the bookshelves. The books resting thereon are of three kinds. Books for pleasure: tales of old Japan, biographies of Bach. Books my wife wrote: She gets way more foreign editions than I do, probably because personal problems are everywhere but there isn’t much interest in the American Founding Fathers in Slovakia. Finally, and overwhelmingly, books in the field. One half-shelf is taken up by the Standard Edition, XXIV volumes of the master’s words in somewhat creaky translation, blue book jackets discoloring a bit along the spines, the leftmost volumes canting sideways as the bookend there fails to do its job. And many many more: books once owned by the father of a former boyfriend; books once owned by the long-dead husband of a colleague, herself long dead now, both refugees from Vienna (when he wanted to join an analysts’ string quartet, they already had two violinists, so he was told to learn the viola); recent purchases (the correspondence of master to disciple: Dear Carl, it’s probably not a great idea to sleep with your patient).

Also displayed on the shelves, to match the heads, because they seem to my wife to go along with them, a collection of hands: glove molds; Buddha hands, saints’ hands; a lost-wax cast of a preemie’s hand, smallest patient of the pediatric doctor who gave it to her.

Tucked in a corner is a column of diplomas and certificates. You can’t take a breath in this city, state, or country without earning credentials, and my wife racked them all up. Hanging alongside the window, plants in baskets. All they care about is light, and they will take the most circuitous routes to find it, winding through slats in the blinds, and each other.

And how many come anymore to sit in this nest of knowledge and concern? As with the offices stacked in the towers of midtown and downtown, fewer and fewer. Telecommuting was a fad before the pandemic made it a demand. We can all sit home staring into our laptops. We would do a lot of that in the office anyway. As for human contact, who needs more than rows of heads lined up like targets at a county fair? When they talk like this _____ we text them to unmute; just like real life! It was better than nothing, better than complete isolation, better than communicating by email or snail mail (though that last was good enough for Jane Austen). But still it is horrible, shriveling, demeaning. As for the clients using my wife’s office — her patients — most of them arrive by phone now (she will not Zoom), which isn’t so bad, mimicking as it does the averted gaze of the analytic couch.

But better always to see, to be there, to be in the real presence. The ancient Jews banished graven images. So present-day ones dress the Torah and carry it about like an honored person. We miss the contact the office gave.