I’ll be back from vacation on the 20th  so until then here’s a final look at psychologists’ (and psychiatrists’) vacation habits as reported by the New York Times:

On July 31, 1967, The New York Times ran an article, on Page 29, headlined “Vacations Begun by Psychiatrists.” It appeared that day among articles with headlines like “Pravda Article Assails Castro” and “Spiraling Rents Worry Officials” (about deep concern among bureaucrats over escalating housing costs in New York, “especially Manhattan”).

The piece about psychiatrists said that “most” of the country’s mental health professionals were embarking on “a month of sunning, swimming and sightseeing” at the start of what stood as their profession’s greatest entitlement, the entirety of August spent on holiday. Was this a crisis or a gift? It was both, really, the article concluded, because while many patients would find themselves anxious and miserable, others would use the period of separation to “discover their personal strengths.”

As one of the 11 or 12 people in New York City who failed to schedule a late-August vacation this year, the author set out to investigate whether the tradition of psychotherapists leaving town for the whole month, which originated with Freud in Vienna, endured. His first call was to the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute on the Upper East Side, where the recorded message declared the organization closed for the season (as it had been in 1967).