ABOUT ME
FROM STEWARDESS TO PSYCHOANALYST
It was on a night flight from New York to Paris in the spring of 1969 that my destiny became clear to me. I was 26 years old at the time, and as a Pan Am stewardess* it was my custom to spend the long hours between services on these flights by seeking out and getting to know the most interesting passengers I could find. This flight was no different, and I shared the hours over the Atlantic sitting on a rear jump seat talking the night away with a particularly captivating man who happened to be a psychoanalyst.
PanAm Training Class, 1965. Dr. Helen Davey is 5th from the right.
He revealed to me that he lived and worked in Manhattan – I remember thinking how he even resembled Freud with his beard – who told me all about his life, his practice, and how he worked with patients. I was mesmerized. He was describing the life and career I wanted when I stopped traveling the world.
We talked for hours and before we landed in Paris he gave me his business card, encouraging me to call him. In the years since, I’ve looked endlessly in my treasure trove of memorabilia to find it, but without luck. It’s such a shame, because I’ve always wanted him to know how inspiring he has been.
Although my aptitude tests in college indicated that I should, without question, go into the field of psychology, I felt a strong need to travel and explore the world first. My father, who died when I was eight, had been one of the most well traveled people in the world in his day and, as a child, I had gone to sleep each night with visions of the foreign lands he’d describe in his glorious bedtime stories. Psychology could wait; I was consumed with the desire to see the world he had seen.
Dr. Davey dreaming of the world, age 4.
Jim Davey on the first ever safari by car from Capetown to Cairo, 1928.
After graduation from college in 1965, I found a job as a stewardess for Pan American World Airways. It was an opportunity that I could not have improved upon even in my most grandiose childhood fantasies. As a result, it was twenty years before I could feel that it was time to leave my beloved Pan Am family, and venture into the unfamiliar world of psychology and psychoanalysis.
But as it turned out, the delay to work with people therapeutically wasn’t such a delay after all.
Apart from interpersonal adventures, we were certainly having our fair share of outward adventures. At the time, Pan Am was the unofficial flag carrier of the United States and our experiences ranged from the indescribably glamorous and joyful to the extremely dangerous and traumatic. (I have written many blogs about these adventures which are available on this website.) We flew into war zones, evacuated Americans from “hot spots” all over the world, and endured ever-present terrorist threats beginning in the late 1960’s. Perhaps because our lives were impacted by such a wide range of dramatic situations, Pan Am employees were an extremely close-knit group, to the extent that, to this day, we consider ourselves to be “family.”
As I had hoped, it provided a life of adventure and exploration until 1986 when, with much trepidation and sorrow, I decided that it was time for me to turn to my next career, a turn which would involve the transition from a life lived all around the world to one that stayed in a single place on the ground.
The truth is, the day I turned in my ID and walked away from the Pan Am hangar, I was terrified. I no longer knew how to live a “normal” life. How was I supposed to go to bed at the same time every night and stay in one time zone? I was surrendering my passport to the world and to my Pan Am family, who – though we met in exotic places all over the world – I rarely saw regularly at home. Moreover, I knew no one in the field of psychology other than my analyst, whom I’d been seeing for 1 ½ years. And then there were the financial considerations. I needed to sell my house in order to commit to many years of school, and to find a way to develop a practice.
Although I wasn’t the only one experiencing loss. At around the same time as I left, Pan Am was going through horrendous times, losing its prestige as the world’s most glamorous airline. (I’ve written extensively in my blogs about this, as well.) During these years, I completed my Master’s program, developed a busy practice specializing in treating airline personnel, and began my Ph.D. program in psychoanalysis. I didn’t forget my Pan Am family members, many of whom were beginning to suffer terribly. So I started giving seminars throughout the Pan Am system called “Fear of Not Flying” for those who were thinking of leaving but afraid to do so.
Eventually things got so bad that it became evident that Pan Am might not survive. I was in touch with many employees who were suffering deep and debilitating trauma. I desperately wanted to help, so I decided to do my dissertation for my Ph.D. in psychoanalysis on the trauma these people were going through. My dissertation is titled “A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Fall of Pan American World Airways,” and took me many years to complete. (A shortened version of it is available on this website listed under “dissertation.”)
My interest in the subject of trauma intensified, and I began studying the subject with Dr. Robert Stolorow, an expert in the field. Eventually, when I told him that I felt his excellent book, Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections, was difficult for the lay public to read, he suggested that I write something too. So I set about writing an autobiographical book review of Bob’s book and titled it “Counting My People,” as a primer for readers to read along with his book.
I continued to write, publishing pieces on The Huffington Post and Psychology Today, over 50 pieces in total.
My practice flourished and I widened my patient base to include people from all walks of life suffering from – among other things – depression, anxiety, trauma, grief and loss, life transitions, and career burnout. In my practice now I work with many creative people involved in the entertainment industry, as well as couples, teenagers, and children. I greatly enjoy working with patients from other countries, and couples with cross-cultural issues because my years with Pan Am taught me many lessons about other cultures and traditions. I also love to encourage people to go into my field because I find it so rewarding.
As I settle down in my chair with a new patient, I imagine fastening my imaginary seat belt, knowing I’m about to take off on a fascinating journey into his or her inner world – one just as interesting to me as those adventures I used to take to the farthest reaches of the outer world. With luck and hard work, I’ll hopefully help such patients discover parts of themselves that they never knew were there.
My latest project is a book I’ve been thinking about for many years. It’s a compilation of the best stories I know, combining the history of my two “families” – the Davey’s and Pan Am – and exploring the “soul” of their two great companies of the 20th Century. It’s a journey populated by colorful characters, one that demonstrates how the feelings of loyalty, pride, and “family” first developed and continue to this day. A dramatic and poignant story from start to finish, it’s a way for me to share insights drawn from my many years in psychoanalysis.
In my first month of flying, I noticed an elderly woman sitting in a window seat in a row all by herself, softly crying into a handkerchief. I just knew that her husband had died and that he’d always held her hand for take-off. I quickly arranged for another crew member to sit in my jump seat, then slipped into the seat beside her, taking her hand in mine.
Sure enough, I’d been right, and the look of relief on her lovely face emboldened me to take chances with my intuition during my entire tenure at Pan Am.
During those twenty years I had a delicious opportunity to practice expanding my knowledge of human behavior, thanks to the captive passengers flying with me in a metal tube thousands of miles above the earth. Feeling at times like a nurse in a psychiatric ward, I was endlessly fascinated by the personal drama that unfolded as we journeyed around the world.
One of the many tasks I was charged with as a stewardess, among which was to manage and never show my own distress, became something not unlike therapy. My “office” was a jump seat—back then we could invite passengers to sit with us there—and my “patients” were anybody who was going through a trauma and willing to talk to me. I wasn’t the only one. In fact, most crew members know that jump seats are the best place for “jump seat therapy,” embedded as flights are in an atmosphere eerily out of place and time, and thus conducive to truth-telling.
Signal Tree. Cared for by The Davey Tree Expert Company.
* The title “stewardess” was used up until the 1970’s during the most glamorous years of the Golden Age of Air Travel. With the advent of the giant 747 and the hiring of many more males, the more gender neutral term “flight attendant” came to be used. In part, this was in hopes that passengers would understand that the job had many more responsibilities than just those of a glamorous “flying waitress.” I was hired in 1965.
