A mood of cautious optimism should prevail. I congratulate myself on every successful takeoff, but not too enthusiastically because it’s also part of my personal religion that the minute you grow overconfident and really rela x about the flight, the plane crashes instantly.

Never mind the diabolical explanations of air-foil you get in Pan Am’s multilingual information to passengers, I happen to be convinced that only my own concentration (and that of my mother-who always seems to expec t her children to die in a plane crash) keeps this bird aloft. My fingers (and toes) turn to ice, my stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same level as the temperature in my fingers, my nipples stand up and salute the inside of my bra (or in this case, dress-since I’m not wearing a bra), and for one screaming minute my heart and the engines correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics are not the flimsy superstitions which, in my heart of hearts, I kno w they are. He ought to know the symptoms by now since he’s held my hand on lots of other flights. My husband grabbed my hand therapeutically at the moment of takeoff. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks’ ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier.

There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong