Many years ago, my friend C and I riffled through her husband’s files.  “I married a doctor, not a psychiatrist,” she said. He had switched to psychiatry during his residency, and she’d never gotten over it.

We spent a morning happily reading his patients’ records. “Listen to this: “Electra (40) w. new boyfriend (60) at Chicago Playboy Club.”

This struck me as hilarious on several levels. “Electra at the Playboy Club! What was she doing there?”

“Gloria Steinem was a bunny there.”

C loved her husband, but she did hate his job. It made me a bit squeamish, too. He thought he knew everything about women. He had a fit because C and I loved Cathy cartoons. 

“They’re sexist!”

When men analyze women’s comic books… Poor Cathy Guisewite!

Several years ago C and I joined a book club. Two of the members were psychodocs. C pointed them out to me with a grimace. They loved to read, but their psychoanalytic criticism was out of control and often inappropriate – especially when applied to Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road, an Oprah book.

It was a master class in post-Freudian pharmaceutical analysis.  The only woman in Greek myth who didn’t have a complex seemed to be Clytemnestra.  (Okay, that’s hyperbole.) But Binchy’s heroines had no complexes, to my knowledge. Except that Ria’s husband left her – what complex was that?

Anyway, I quite like some psychiatrists.  One of them, a friend of mine, gave me a Prozac clock.

Pharmaceutical salesmen used to give little gifts like that to doctors.

Query:  Is it appropriate for a doc to give a friend an old souvenir from a Prozac salesman?

Of course he gave me the clock! He was going to throw it out anyway.

I have shown the clock to many friends, and everyone covets one. You can buy them on eBay, but none are as cute as my obsolete blue alarm clock.