Home > Work > Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why
1 " So what do they do with their hands? Curiously, the most popular image of the listening psychoanalyst ascribes a notepad to them. When the New York department store Macy’s staged a window display of a psychoanalyst’s office in the 1950s, complete with patient on the couch, the analyst was depicted taking notes. Yet at that time this was by no means a habitual practice, and Edmund Bergler would swiftly publish an article about the myth of the note-taking analyst. Freud had advised against it, and in fact, a survey of analytic literature up to the present day shows that the single most common recorded practice for the listening psychoanalyst is not note-taking but knitting. "
― Darian Leader , Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why
