Dreaming for Freud Read online

  She steps up the wooden ladder, stretches up, and takes the book down. She puts it on the desk and looks at the Latin inscription on the cover, which she puzzles over. Her Latin is not very good. Eventually she makes it out: Flectere si nequeo superos—If I cannot move heaven—acheronta movebo—I will raise hell. A clever motto for a book. She would like to raise hell. She must write it down in her diary on the title page. She opens the book and sees it is an inscribed copy made out to her father, who has clearly not read it, the pages new and crisp.

  She takes the book to her room, shuts her door, pulls out her own diary, and places them side by side on her desk. She will take some notes. Her father is not likely to miss the doctor’s book, and surely the information she may glean here will increase her arsenal in this battle with these men and women, all the adults who have betrayed her, who have refused to see the reality around them. She sits down in the pale, chintz-covered armchair in the quiet of the late winter afternoon, puts a tasseled gray shawl around her shoulders, and reads.

  The doctor often asks her about her dreams, and she is curious as to what he might do with one if she were to offer him something to keep him happy for a while. Would that please him and perhaps even distract him from his goal of preparing her to accept Herr Z. and his marriage proposal? Perhaps she can get him to concentrate on her dreams while she thinks what to do, how to escape her predicament.

  She turns the pages, taking the voyage he seems to suggest the reader must take with him, though she does not take all the detours. She does not bother much with the first chapters, which she finds boring, a history of what people have said about dreams before the doctor. She does not always understand the complicated twists and turns of the doctor’s mind or bother with some of his intricate reasoning. She becomes interested only when she comes upon his own dreams, where she finds out something about him. Some of the dreams he gives as the dreams of other patients she suspects are his own. She wants to know his secrets, and he certainly seems to share some here! She wants to know everything she can about him, his family, his wife, his children.

  He writes about the death of his father, which has apparently been such an important event in his life. He writes about his longing to go to Rome and his dreams about the city. She likes the parts about his travels to Italy, which he admires and where he has found some of the things in his office. She likes the children’s dreams and particularly the one his own small daughter, deprived of food after an illness, has, calling out in the night a list of desired foods including “stwawbewwies,” which makes her laugh.

  Even more interesting is the more complicated one about an injection and a patient called Irma. It interests her as the doctor seems to feel guilty about something he has done to one of his patients or perhaps to someone else. There is even one where she understands the doctor dreams of embracing his daughter! She understands that the doctor believes that all dreams, even nightmares, are disguised wishes and she finds the part about how they are disguised interesting, like a political writer who has to avoid the censorship of the government. She understands what he means by that because of her brother and the pamphlets he writes.

  It occurs to her that she could take the doctor a dream. Since she has been seeing the doctor, she does indeed dream more, and even the sorts of dreams he likes to interpret, as though her unconscious were trying to provide what he needs. She does not mind dreaming for him, but her dreams seem small, vague things, compared to his, which are often lengthy and detailed with several people and dialogue. She is afraid her dreams would not be good enough. She rarely remembers a complete dream, and when she does it seems sketchy and without the kind of specific detail that she finds in the doctor’s dreams or the dreams of his patients. There is rarely any talking in her dreams; hardly ever any words in her dreams, or if they occur they are written in large letters she can read. Her dreams, like her early memories, are in pictures without much dialogue. She sees them. The only place she makes up dialogue is in her fantasy where the fräulein asks the little boy what he has been doing and if he is a good boy.

  But she could make a dream up for the doctor, she thinks, sitting at her desk and paging through his book, reading here and there. She does not think it would be too difficult to invent one or two to suit him now that she has read some of his own and knows how he interprets them.

  It is not that hard to figure it out: one thing stands in for another, she understands: a flag as an example of the fatherland; but objects in the dreams the doctor reports are almost always symbols of sexual things: a jewel and particularly a jewel box are a woman’s private parts, and anything longer than it is wide, like the pen that lies on her desk by her diary with its oozing ink, is a man’s. A hat is interpreted, making her laugh, as a man’s part, and indeed, thinking of the way her father wears hats she thinks he might be right. Every time a train enters a tunnel or a key a lock it is quite obvious what the doctor would think, that poor frustrated man.

  Also, he considers every strongly expressed opinion actually means the opposite. Of course, he is not entirely wrong about that, either. It is a topsy-turvy world: fire is water; death is life; horror means attraction; hate is love.

  Leafing through the book before her, she cannot help feeling both admiration and a kind of sympathy for its author. She finds that the voice in the book is both credible and persuasive. He writes remarkably well, she must admit. Obviously the doctor struggles just as she does to find the meaning of things. She understands from this book that he has several children—perhaps too many, and a wife who may not be much more giving than her own mother, a pale, reserved woman, she gathers from a dream, who would prefer not to be penetrated from behind.

  Naturally, the poor women do not want to have trains in their tunnels, if it means producing yet another child, which might either kill them or cause them to contract some horrible sexual disease, and will at least cause them to become even more overworked. Like someone deprived of food who can think of nothing else, the doctor thinks about sexual things all the time, perhaps, because he lacks them, she imagines.

  She realizes that she feels two completely contradictory things: she is in a rage with him, but at the same time the thought of leaving him makes her feel almost physically ill. She realizes that talking to him every day, telling him so much of her story, she has grown dependent on him, attached to him, if only as a means to leave her own house, her own parents, to have someone who is entirely at her disposal for an hour. Despite herself and despite his sometimes infuriating responses, she would like to please him by giving him some support for his theories, or as her French fräulein would say: “de l’eau pour son moulin.” He is obviously trying so very hard to earn a living as best he can. An ambitious man, an intellectual parvenu, he would like to be a professor, she understands from his text. He listens and observes very carefully. He notices things other people either ignore or deny, like gestures. He once said something wonderful about her fingers chattering. He is certainly right about the hypocrisy and humbug of most people in Viennese society, including her own family. She likes his desire to see clearly into the human heart and mind, to delve for the truth, and she has become aware of things she did not know in the process of talking to him. She likes his ability to cut through the cant and hypocrisy of the people who surround her.

  She finds him remarkably clever and even convincing in certain ways. He follows his outrageous ideas quite courageously to their logical conclusions, though she does not think his observations are always correct or could possibly cure her. Certainly he is not afraid of what people will say and think! He is a brave man, unlike her father or even her brother, who so often lie and take the easy way out.

  The doctor thinks her constant cough comes from her identification with Frau Z., whom he imagines performs fellatio on her father. What a ghastly and embarrassing thought! He doesn’t know that her fantasies about Frau Z. are really of stroking her private parts and putting her tongue in
there, which might provide much more pleasure than her father does! The very thought makes her start to cough.

  She will try to come up with a dream that will please him and distract him at least for a while. She looks around her room with its pale walls, the bed pushed against the wall, the bowl of dried flowers on the desk, the little pink lamp with its tassels by the bed. How much she has suffered and hoped in silence between these walls. She will try and imitate the dreams from his book. She will use the compression, displacement, and condensation he speaks of; she will intensify the ideas. She takes out her pen and copies the inscription in his book into her diary. Then she tries out a few dreams in its pages, attempting to make them sound just like the ones in the dream book, writing them in a voice that resembles the doctor’s and using exact details and conversation, which she doesn’t usually hear or anyway remember in her own dreams, but which seem to come up frequently in the doctor’s dreams and those of his patients, he reports. She imagines how he would interpret them and decides on two which she likes particularly. She decides to start with one, which is short and simple, and see his reaction and if she gets away with her ruse. Then she will take him a second one which is longer and rather more complicated.

  XVII

  * * *

  THE FIRST DREAM

  SHE BRINGS THE DOCTOR THE first one. She is rather proud of it, though she is a little nervous that he might deduce her duplicity. She has kept this first one quite short and fairly simple and used bits and pieces of dreams she has really dreamed. She has added a line of dialogue and the images she knows the doctor will recognize. She has provided all the necessary elements: her father, her mother, her brother, a fire, and, of course, a jewel box which needs to be saved from the fire. The doctor, she has remarked, seems particularly interested in boxes of one kind or another, and she knows how he will interpret this one.

  “I have a dream for you,” she says in a clear voice.

  “Ah, excellent! Tell me what you dreamed,” he responds.

  There is a fire in the house. Father stands before my bed and awakens me. I dress myself quickly. Mama still wants to save her jewelry box, but Papa says, “I do not want my children and me to burn up because of your jewelry box.” We hurry down, and as soon as I am outside I wake up.

  “That’s it?’ he asks, and she nods.

  “And when did you dream this?” he asks.

  For a moment she is taken aback by the question, but she knows he likes to interpret numbers, and seems indeed to give them considerable significance, so she quickly says she has dreamed this three times, which doesn’t quite answer the question. Three is always such a good number: there are always three princesses or three princes in all the fairy tales.

  The doctor, indeed, as she had expected, seems very excited by the dream. He does not question it for a minute but seems to swallow it whole, hook, line, and sinker. What a gullible man, she thinks, ready to believe whatever she says, and feels a little guilty. For a while he stops talking about Herr Z., her desire for him, and a possible marriage to him, as he encourages her to associate freely on the dream.

  She would so like to please him, and she is aware she has been rude and disagreeable at times. She imagines he thinks of her as recalcitrant, a word he uses in his dream book to describe several of his patients who resist his interpretations. She feels she has wounded his self-esteem in a way. Perhaps this dream gift will really help restore his confidence in his work, and advance his career. This will be her gift.

  She tells him quite truthfully how her imaginary dream reminds her of the moment Herr Z. came into her hotel room in the afternoon, after his proposal on the lake. She was lying down and taking a nap, and he gave her such a fright. She had, in reality, asked for the key to the room, so that she could make sure he did not disturb her again. She was particularly afraid he might enter the room when she was undressing and see her naked.

  The doctor interprets the dream at some length, showing off a bit, like a little boy riding a bicycle with no hands. He says the escape from the house represents her wish to escape from him and leave the treatment, which is not so far off the mark. She thinks that this dream story does indeed express her fears in a way. She feels they are, indeed, all in danger, that their existence is precarious at best. She remembers the very real burning of her father’s textile factory a few years ago in Bohemia, something the doctor doesn’t seem to consider at all, or the recent trouble in the factories because of her father’s religion. She is glad her gift has enabled him to come up with all sorts of ingenious interpretations. He puzzles over every aspect of the dream and even writes it down. For the first time she can hear him writing down her exact words, and she is pleased.

  When the doctor jumps to the inevitable conclusion, that the jewel box in the dream represents her lady parts, she cannot help saying, “I knew you would say that.”

  “Because you know it’s true, don’t you? And what do you think about the smoke from the fire?”

  XVIII

  * * *

  WOMEN

  THE DOCTOR SITS IN HIS study thinking about the dream the girl has brought him and how he can use it. A useful dream, he can see. She has, like so many of his intelligent and wealthy female patients, brought him what he needs to demonstrate his theories.

  He intends to use what he has learned from her in this analysis of the dream for his own purposes. Women’s sorcery, he realizes, as he looks around his cluttered room with all its ancient statues, need not always be destructive but can be used for his own purposes. He can use his understanding of this clever, attractive young woman, his ability to identify with her. He can use his own feminine side. He can write it down, write it up, analyze it, control it.

  It is through the use of women that he, like the hero of Maupassant’s Bel ami, must advance, he understands. He has already used their early memories, their frank talk, their access to their feelings, which have helped him to understand his own sometimes incomprehensible desires. Women and the great writers, who know all and surely have access to their repressed longings, their bisexuality, and particularly the Greeks with Sophocles and the English with Shakespeare, have said it all before him. Now he must take charge of what they have discovered.

  He decides that he will go to Rome, finally. His fears of contracting some sort of illness there are absurd. He will thrust his hand into the Bocca della verita. He will overcome his ambivalence and, unlike Hannibal, storm the gates, and once he has accomplished this, he will write to his influential patient who has repeatedly offered to use her connections in order to obtain his professorship. He has been passive for far too long and put himself through too much suffering. He has, like everyone, a feminine side, feminine intuition, feminine wiles, and it is time to stop denying it and to use it. He will take the path that others have taken for the sake of his career, his ambition, the well-being of his family, his faithful wife. He will scheme. He will plot and plan. He will use his connections, this influential woman and her husband and perhaps even her wealthy friend who has also offered to help. Given the situation, rejected again and again and often enough because of his religion, he must use every means at his disposal. He is tired of being poor and underestimated, passed over again and again for a position he deserves. He needs to take his destiny into his own hands. No one else will do it for him, he realizes. He will write to Elise Gomperz and ask her to use her connections, her money, her friend’s paintings, whatever she has in hand.

  When he climbs into the conjugal bed that night he reaches over to Martha and wakens her with a caress. He turns her over, and enters her body from behind, and touches her until he hears her moan with pleasure.

  XIX

  * * *

  THE SECOND DREAM

  CARRIED AWAY BY HER SUCCESS with the first dream, she brings him the second one, which is longer and more complex. She would never have dreamed something this long and remembered it in such detail, but the doctor�
�s dreams are lengthy and filled with details he seems to have remembered. The last dream she read in the dream book is about his mother’s death, a dream which has made an impression on her with its beaked figures hovering over the body of the mother. It has given her the idea. Also, the doctor often talks about stations and trains, indeed, he has used the analogy of a train trip to describe an analysis: the first stage being the preparation for the trip, the acquisition of tickets, the planning of the route, and the second stage the actual voyage from one station to the next.

  Again she hears him writing down her words:

  I go walking in a city that I do not know, and see streets and squares that are foreign to me. Then I come to the house where I live, go into my room, and find lying there a letter from my mother. She writes that since I have been away from home without my parents’ knowledge, she has not wanted to tell me that Papa has fallen ill. Now he has died, and if I want to I can come. Then I walk to the station and ask, perhaps one hundred times, Where is the station? I always receive the answer: five minutes. Then I see a thick forest before me into which I enter, and question a man whom I encounter there. He tells me: another two and a half hours. He offers to accompany me. I decline and go on by myself. I see the station in front of me but cannot reach it. This is accompanied by the usual feeling of anxiety that arises in dreams when one cannot move ahead. Then I am home again, which I must have walked to, but I do not know anything more about it. I enter the porter’s lodge and ask him about our dwelling. The servant girl opens up for me and answers: Mama and the others are already at the cemetery.