At 8:20 on Thursday morning I found my seat, the middle of the row over the wing of the plane, sat down, and switched on my Kindle. I was reading The Examined Life, Stephen Grosz’s account of his experiences as a psychoanalyst, and I had reached the last section, ‘Leaving’, in which Grosz has taken on a new patient, a young man, who has just been diagnosed with HIV. The young man is beginning to spend all of his psychoanalysis sessions in deep, still, heavy silence, sometimes even falling asleep. I was at the part where Grosz is describing the different kinds of silences that patients sometimes bring to him – silences of refusal, discomfort, repression – when a tiny, withered woman with a huge puffy black bag over her…
