We keep no studio and no premises, and never have. The practice exists in hotel rooms and private addresses across central Amsterdam, and nowhere else at all.
A practice is usually described by its address. Ours has none to offer. Every hour we work happens in a room that belongs to whoever booked it — a narrow double on the third floor of a canal house, a soundproofed room out towards the ring, a borrowed apartment with the key left in a box by the door. What we keep is not a place. It is a way of arriving at one.
A therapist walks in carrying a small bag, the way a guest returning from dinner walks in. She does not stop to ask anything, does not say your name in a lift with other people in it, and does not stand in a corridor comparing door numbers. You put the room number in your message and she goes to it. That is the entire protocol, and in years of working this way it has never needed to be longer.
Discretion, in a building full of strangers, is not a promise printed on a page. It is what a bag looks like, how quickly a message is answered at three in the morning, whether a therapist is the sort of person who can cross a marble lobby without appearing to have arrived. We pay attention to all three, because they are the only ones that matter once you are standing behind your own door.
Forty-five therapists are on the roster, and the number moves slowly because a hotel room asks something specific of a person. She has to settle a space that is not hers inside a few minutes — linens down, the ceiling light traded for the lamp by the bed, oil warmed, the bag out of sight — and then be entirely unhurried for the rest of the time she is there. Some people find that easy. Most do not, which is why the roster is forty-five and not four hundred.
Someone is awake at every hour of every day, and the night is not an exception we make grudgingly. A good share of our week sits between eleven at night and four in the morning, because that is when a body still running on another continent's clock finally admits it is not going to sleep. Three in the morning is an ordinary working hour here and is priced as one.
We cover central Amsterdam and the districts inside the ring, which is where the hotels are and where twenty to thirty minutes is a realistic figure rather than a hopeful one. The airport hotel cluster at Schiphol is served by arrangement, with the travel time agreed before anything is confirmed. Beyond that we do not go, and we would rather say so plainly than take a booking we cannot reach in time.
Tonight
Name the room, the hour and how long you would like her there. The reply comes back in about ten minutes with who is free.