Dreaming for Freud Page 3

  He thinks of all the people he is responsible for: his six children, his worms, who need new shoes; his wife, who complains about his extravagance; his sister-in-law, Minna, who has come to live with them since her fiancé died of tuberculosis five years ago and who has recently had an intervention; and Marie, their devoted maid.

  Having known the helplessness that comes with poverty, he continues to fear it. His uncle, Josef, he knows, was tried and convicted of selling an enormous number of counterfeit rubles in a desperate attempt to attain wealth. His father, who had turned white after this event, had never recovered completely from the implications of his brother’s imprisonment. He remembers his own years of solitude and struggle, separated from his fiancée and desperately attempting to make a living. He recalls walking the streets of Vienna and staring with longing into the shop windows, going past Reitmayer and Ettlinger and the jeweler to the court, Schafransky. Since his father’s death, his own position is less precarious financially as he is no longer obliged to support him as well. Since his death he has even been able to begin his collection of antiquities. He looks with some satisfaction at the Florentine copy of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, in his swooning stance.

  He feels quite isolated within the world of medicine, even ridiculed. He remains unrecognized, passed over again and again for the professorship that would bring prestige and, above all, financial security, a position that has been accorded to people, usually Gentiles, much younger and much less accomplished than he, a position that surely he deserves. He has such a thirst for knowledge, such determination to find it, such clarity of mind, such ability to seize upon the essential and to render it understandable in crystalline prose. How his brain teems! He has missed so many opportunities for fame and advancement.

  Above all he needs to document his theories with facts drawn from the lives of his patients. His critics have accused him of not giving verifiable examples to back up his theories. Perhaps this patient, if she ever arrives, will provide some.

  He has left the door to his consulting room open and has become so engrossed in his thoughts that at first he does not notice the real girl standing in the doorway, trembling in her white dress like the sail of a boat in the wind. She looks younger than her age, this slip of a girl, dark haired, dewy eyed, and blooming with youth: her pale cheeks and forehead touched with a faint tinge of pink. She has a luminosity about her and despite her reluctance to enter, an unusual assurance in her stance and mien. She hesitates in his doorway in her delicate organdy dress with the green silk sash that accentuates her slender waist, an expensive dress, he thinks with a little pang of envy, the sort he cannot buy for his own three girls.

  The girl stands there before him, ravishing in all her youthful splendor, her dark thick hair long on her shoulders, her broad gold bracelets glinting on her wrist.

  Increasingly, his patients are from the small circle of wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie. He thinks of Anna von L., whom he saw sometimes twice a day, his prima donna, as he called her, from the wealthy Ephrussi family, who was brought to him because no one knew what to do with her, a woman of sophistication who taught him a lot in the end. This one’s dress he is certain his wife would covet, though after six children in almost as many years, she no longer has as fine a waist to show it off.

  The tall, handsome father stands behind the daughter like a dark shadow cast on the bright waters, his hand possessively on her white shoulder. “I leave you in very good hands, my dear,” the father says in a mellifluous tone, smiling down at his daughter, and across the room at him with complicity. He does not smile back, just bows his head briefly in acknowledgment and waits for the father to leave, but the man lingers, leaning elegantly against the lintel. He wonders why he does not have the good grace to go and leave the daughter with him. Instead, he stands there smiling with all the assurance of the successful businessman he is, in his fine gray gloves, his dark suit, silk hat in hand.

  He is glad he is wearing his best pinstriped trousers, a little bow tie, a new corduroy jacket with the hand stitching that he feels gives him a certain presence. Even decent clothes were a problem for him for many years. He had not known how to acquire all the necessary absurd accoutrements for his examinations: the top hat, etc., when he was obliged to present himself in formal dress.

  He remembers how he kept an account, recording all his expenses, the money he spent on the two meals a day he felt he could afford—his books, and his cigars, his only extravagance for years. Sometimes, he could not afford to take a cab for his house visits. So many of his schemes, which seemed so hopeful, have come to naught. He thinks of his early lectures, his sparkling, inspired words wasted on so few attendees, and these all drummed up with difficulty; his book on aphasia, which sold only 257 copies and had to be pulped; his work on cocaine, for which Köller got all the credit, and he, only grave reproaches.

  The father, he knows, has no such problems, his accounts on the contrary always on the credit side of the ledger at the Bank Ephrussi. His wife, unlike his own, has come with a fine dowry. He pays his bills with regularity and generosity, a good bottle of cognac or even opera tickets—the doctor has seen Don Giovanni, one of his favorite operas, in Salzburg thanks to him—thrown in from time to time. Both the father’s and the mother’s family have been successful in the textile business, like many of the Bohemian Jews based in Vienna who still have wool or linen factories in the Bohemian countryside.

  Indeed, he thinks, the father’s childhood in a small country town must not have been very different from his own, though, unlike him, the father never showed much aptitude or interest at school, and did not attend the university.

  As he stares at the father he sees tears glittering in the man’s blue eyes as he looks down at his daughter.

  She does not look up at her father or at him, but gazes blankly at the carpet, her long lashes lowered sullenly. What secrets does her shuttered gaze hide? What is her story? What can he do for her? What does she want of him?

  He beckons for the girl to enter his office and watches the father give her a gentle push. He ushers the elegant girl in, nods to the frowning father, who looks as though he might break down and weep, and closes the door firmly on him.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he says to the girl and indicates the ottoman, a gift from a grateful patient. The girl eyes it with suspicion and perches there stiffly as though sitting on eggshells, her back ramrod straight, feet planted neatly side-by-side, hands firmly clutching her reticule as though she were afraid someone might snatch it from her.

  Since the girl’s first visit to him, she has seen many doctors who have not been able to help her. Her behavior has become increasingly troublesome at home. She needs to understand, the father maintains, that her demands are very rude and unreasonable, going even so far as to suggest he break off his friendship with old and dear friends of the family. She, who was so angelic, who looked after him with such devotion in his various illnesses, has become sullen and bad tempered with both her parents, and her symptoms are worse, particularly the cough, the pains in her leg, the aphasia.

  He stares at her hands. Gestures tell us a great deal, he has learned from his favorite writers as well as from Charcot, a visuel who had the nature of an artist, a man who saw, who taught him not to take anything for granted but to look and look again in order to understand. He thinks of Charcot saying, “La théorie c’est bon, mais ça n’empêche pas d’exister.” She has long-fingered hands with white knuckles, and the nails bitten down to the quick. She looks as if a slight breeze could unseat her and carry her off.

  The doctor recalls his bashful patient, Herr E., who would blush with the desire to ravish every woman he saw, perhaps a more common feeling than is generally admitted to by those of his sex.

  She seems to stare with fascination at the lithograph he brought back from his year in Paris.

  “What is wrong with the girl?” she asks, gesturing toward the lit
hograph without looking at him.

  Taken aback for a moment, he stares at the beautiful Blanche Wittman, seeing her anew through this girl’s eyes: her smooth shoulders and bodice indecently exposed, leaning back into the arms of Charcot’s assistant, the lucky doctor Babinski, surrounded by a group of staring men during one of Charcot’s Tuesday lessons.

  “Too tightly laced,” he deems it expedient to reply and thinks of the talented Blanche, whom they called the “Queen of Hysterics.”

  When this girl finally directs her gaze toward him her eyelids seem heavy, the long, dark lashes weighing them down. Her eyes are large and wide spaced, like her father’s, and lucent but sullen. He realizes with a little shock that this girl is in a rage. She gives him a blank but angry stare. He thinks of the English expression “if looks could kill.”

  For a moment he regrets no longer being able to use hypnosis on a girl of this kind. It might be easier to get her to comply. He thinks of his early success with the mother whom he hypnotized, who could not feed her baby. He has been obliged to give it up as, unlike Charcot, he has often had difficulty putting his patients to sleep, which was perhaps a blessing in disguise, as it has forced him to come up with other, more lasting methods.

  He stares back at the girl and is about to explain his new method, what Breuer’s former patient has aptly dubbed “the talking cure,” when she asks disconcertingly, looking around the room disdainfully, “Why do you have all these old statues?”

  “The psychoanalyst,” he says, drawing himself up, “like the archaeologist, must clear away layer after layer, as though digging down through a buried city, in order to reach the deepest layers of the patient’s mind to discover the secrets that lie buried there.” He points to the Roman statue of a child on the table by his chair and thinks of the city of Rome and how he both wants and fears to visit it. He is afraid of contracting an illness there in the summertime, which is when he is free to travel.

  “How very interesting!” she says in an inimitable tone and peers at the statue, rather like a grande dame being led through a museum and glancing at the objects through a lorgnette.

  For a moment he would like to give her a shake. He remembers how easily Charcot had access to Blanche Wittman’s memories of a traumatic childhood through hypnosis: her childish, unprotected body sexually abused again and again. He remembers Charcot saying “toujours la chose génitale—toujours, toujours!” and wondering why, if the problem was always genital, no one ever mentioned it then.

  Years later he will hear of the repeated amputations of Blanche’s beautiful body, which left her with only one hand and arm. Her fingers, her other hand and arm, and both her legs were all removed because of the effects of radiation, the result of her work in the photography department at the Salpêtrière Hospital where she had been the star in Charcot’s weekly demonstrations.

  Now he says, “Our bodies are sometimes able to speak when we ourselves cannot. In a sense our stories are written on them. What I hope is to have you translate your story from the pain you feel into words.”

  He tells her he would like her to lie back on the couch, to relax, even to close her eyes if it helps her to concentrate, and simply to tell him what passes through her mind.

  “You mean you want me to tell you everything I think?” she says, looking at him sharply, frowning, sounding and looking appalled at the thought, and for a moment, as the fine curtain lifts a little in the breeze and he hears a rush of beating wings, this young girl brings back his first love, the young Gisela Fluss, with her dark hair and the wild hare’s look in her eyes. In the small, dimly lit room he suddenly sees the hills as blue as the sky, the grass quivering and billowing, and smells the sweet fragrance of the trees and the wildflowers all around her. For a brief moment he experiences a full-blown surge of adolescent lust, as he did returning to the village where he was born. It surprises and appalls him, here in his consulting room, this reawakening of a buoyant and total discovery of sexual longing which he had felt in his sixteenth year. It had made him horribly awkward, reduced him to a stammering young fool. Something not to be repeated, ever. He knows all the dangers of passion. He needs to be careful this girl does not catch him in her net.

  He must get down to business fast. He commences speaking in as dry and matter-of-fact a tone as possible. He explains that it is by association, by linking one thing to the next, the present to the past, that the causes of her malady will be found. Nothing is too insignificant or too shocking to be stated aloud.

  She glances at him blankly without moving, her gaze dull, her full lips slightly turned down at the corners in a proud scowl.

  He thinks of the Baroness Fanny M., who could be quite surly at times and had told him to stop interrupting her with his numerous questions, a remark which as it turned out had been most helpful over time, however it might have caught him up short. His own mother, too, has that proud will of her own, even arranging to have her birthday fall on the same day as that of the Emperor Franz Joseph.

  “I am not going to hurt you in any way,” he reassures her. He says, “I need you simply to tell me freely and frankly what comes to mind without censoring your thoughts. I will leave the subjects entirely up to you and I will listen carefully, and unlike your family or friends, consider what you have to say as objectively as possible. I would like to hear your side of the story your father has told me.”

  “See if you can bring her to reason. She has an overstimulated imagination, nourished by reading unsuitable texts. She has been telling all sorts of wild tales,” the father has said. He is aware that the father has an agenda that may be very different from his own, not to speak of the girl’s.

  “Ultimately,” he says, “you are the one who must discover what it is that ails you. I am here simply to mirror your words.”

  “A mirror?” she says dubiously, opening her eyes wide and looking at him directly.

  He thinks of the many devoted, loving women he has treated, who have long sat in attendance by sickbeds in darkened rooms, as she has. These intelligent and often courageous women, Breuer’s Bertha P. among them, have taught him a lot with their vivid, frank talk. He remembers the young girl in the mountains who told him her sad tale of incest with more directness than most.

  This one gazes at him with a flicker of interest in her dark eyes. “Within the confines of these walls,” he says, indicating the ancient Egyptian and Roman statuettes, “we will not be bound by false prudery.” One hour every day except Sunday will be reserved for their work together so that they may unravel the mystery behind her symptoms. “To quote the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras,” he says, feeling the need for a little Greek, “the symptoms—the phenomena that we see—are just the visible expression of something hidden. Something is surely locked away, and together we must find the key to open the lock. To accomplish this, we will have to call un chat un chat,” he says.

  The girl says, in her dry, faint voice, “You said that before. And how long will you take to cure me?”

  The doctor replies that, of course, it depends, but it might take up to a year.

  She looks at him with disdain and says, “It would take you that long!”

  He thinks of Goethe’s lines from Faust: “Not art or science serve, alone; patience must in the work be shown,” and ignores this and goes on with his explanation. He will ask her questions no one has probably ever asked her before and speak of subjects she may never have spoken of. “All we need is for you to follow what comes to your mind freely and frankly,” he says.

  She looks up at this and says with a glimmer of humor in her eyes that surprises him, “I will try, though it might be easier just to make things up. If you tell me I have to say everything I actually think, it will make me think unspeakable, rude things! Are you sure you really want to hear them? You might not like what I have to say. I wouldn’t want to say anything that would hurt you.”

  He smiles slightly
at this and thinks this girl is bolder than many her age. Was the father right in his surmise? Has she been making things up? He asks, “You like to make things up?”

  “Sometimes, yes. I do like to make up stories. But father is wrong. I know the difference between the truth and a lie. Truth is very important to me. I don’t lie the way he does,” she says firmly, narrowing her eyes at him. “Mostly it seems to me that no one actually wants you to tell the truth, though they might say they do. It is understood that I should say things that are pleasant and agreeable, things people want to hear,” she says, moving slightly on the sofa, relinquishing her reticule for a moment. She picks up a plump pillow with both her hands, holds it on her lap like a puppy dog, stroking it absently, then positioning it behind her and leaning back. She picks up her reticule and places it on her lap again. “That’s better,” she says. “My leg doesn’t hurt as much. As the day goes on the pain gets worse and worse. I don’t know why.”

  The doctor recalls the numerous hysterical women he has treated for similar symptoms, common among women and even some men. Despite the revered Meynert’s opinion and the origin of the word, the doctor, like Charcot, is certain hysteria exists in both sexes. Has he not known hysterical symptoms himself—shortness of breath, heart palpitations, angina, fainting?

  He has used various methods to cure these symptoms with varying degrees of success over the years: electricity, pressure of the hands, even massage, and finally just obliging the patients to confront a shameful secret from the past, one that is so often hidden even from themselves.

  He has listened for hours with patience, sympathy, and interest, and he has had the humility to learn from his mistakes. But the patients are usually scrupulously polite, overconscientious, arriving on time, often trembling, weeping, begging for his help, sometimes even falling in love with him, throwing their arms around his neck. It is true that this one is being more or less forced back to see him.