Dreaming for Freud Read online

  Faced by her silence, he is not quite sure what to say to her. An older or even a younger person would certainly be easier. He is not used to rebellious adolescents and feels he is not quite sure how to deal with this one. He was never a rebellious adolescent himself. He has worked so hard for so much of his life, earnestly aware of the sacrifices his family made for the adored boy, his mother’s golden Siggie, given the privilege of his own kabinett, reading Shakespeare at eight, taking his meals alone, his sister’s musical ambitions stifled so that he could study in silence with the only oil lamp, in the scant space of the exiguous apartment, then sent to the university at considerable cost, so that he could pursue his medical studies.

  He has to admit the girl’s concise speaking style is strangely convincing. He wonders how much her symptoms are simply inherited, how much she may be acting, how hysterical she is, after all.

  Intelligent teenage girls are instinctively theatrical, often uttering sentences just to confuse people or to attract attention. It seems difficult to distinguish the acting from reality here, despite her assurances. It will be in her dreams that he will find the truth.

  “Above all, I would like to hear about your dreams,” he tells her. “They will hold the secret to your symptoms.” In the dream, he explains, it is as though the sentinel, the night watchman of our conscious thoughts, can be evaded, and the hidden desires can emerge.

  “I know you are interested in dreams. I am too, though I don’t always remember mine. My father told me you have written a book about them,” she says with a shrewd look in her dark eyes, which again surprises him. His patients rarely bring up his writings.

  He thinks of his new book on dream interpretation, which he had expected would bring him instant renown but has only brought a few bad and even malicious reviews. He wrote to Fliess, wondering if there would, someday, be a plaque on the place where the “model dream” had come to him, announcing that this was the house where the mystery of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud. What folly!

  He glances at the portrait of the handsome, bearded Fleischl that he has hung in an oval frame on the wall, that brilliant man, whom he admired so much. What a terrible tragedy! Suddenly he remembers Fleischl’s colorful parrot, wings spread, which he adored, and how he would talk to him. He will always regret bitterly the role he played in his death. He had been so hopeful that he could cure him of his morphine addiction with cocaine.

  “It is through your own words that we will discover the cure for what has troubled you for such a long time now, your tussis nervosa, gastric pains, ambulatory difficulty, the loss of voice,” he says.

  She says she hopes he can cure her fast, as she is in pain, but she continues to sit with her head slightly lowered, her petulant bottom lip protruding, her gaze on her lap. From time to time she impatiently throws a rebellious lock of hair behind her neck. He can see that she is not looking at him. Is she even listening to him? She seems to have little curiosity about or faith in the doctor who is supposed to treat her. He notices the shape of her ears beneath her small black hat, curiously shaped ones. He adds, a little sternly now—her continued sullen silence, the rigidity of her pose, her recalcitrance are beginning to annoy him—that her father is very worried about her. She stares back sullenly at him, her childish cheeks reddening.

  She admits, “I can be terrible sometimes, it is true, because if I want something and I can’t get it, then I am after it regardless of whether my parents like it or not,” and she stares at him rudely.

  He has confronted rude patients before. He thinks of the elderly woman all dressed in black who would receive him with an ivory crucifix clutched in her hand as though he were the Evil One, yet he had managed to ferret out her secrets.

  “You have frightened your parents, you must be aware. Your father was particularly worried by your moment of complete unconsciousness after a quarrel with him, when you fell to the floor onto your face in the red-tiled corridor leading to the kitchen, he said. What was all that about?”

  She replies, “I don’t remember anything about that except finding myself on the floor.”

  “And the suicide note you left in your desk that upset them terribly?” he says, remembering the scream of the maid who had watched as young Pauline S., the wife of his best childhood friend, had thrown herself over the balustrade of his building in her elegant clothes.

  “How on earth did they find the letter? It was shut up in my desk. Mother must have been snooping, as usual! Once, she found my imaginary diary and read it and thought that was all true!” She suddenly finds her voice, albeit a hoarse whisper, fueled by her rage, no doubt.

  “We will find out why you are so unhappy, why you are suffering,” he continues, trying to speak gently but firmly.

  She gives him another sullen look. “You would be unhappy too, if you had to spend your days sorting out pieces of string too short to use,” she says.

  “I beg your pardon?” he asks.

  “That’s the sort of task my mother gives me—useless things. She’s preoccupied with dust! The earth could crumble, and she’d still be dusting!” she spits out with disgust. “My father is a man of considerable means, as you undoubtedly know, so we have many servants, but my mother spends her time this way! The maids follow in her wake.” She explains that her mother constantly hovers over the housemaids. She breaks off and looks at him with her angry stare.

  “But you must know all about that, about Mother and about Father, don’t you? You probably know more than I do! He’s made me come to see you to persuade me to be more reasonable, hasn’t he, which actually means more willing to do what he wants me to do?” she says, coughing and sputtering over her sentences, bending forward and putting her hands on her thighs.

  “I’m not here to persuade you to do anything,” he says firmly, thinking though that this girl is not far from the mark. On an impulse he says, “Your father has told me something about the problem, as he sees it, but I would like to hear about it from you, in order to form my own opinion. You, after all, are the only one who can help us find the truth.” Recalling that the father has described the girl as unusually well read and intelligent, he quotes from his beloved Goethe, “The first and last thing required of genius is love of truth.”

  Suddenly the girl looks at him with a glimmer of something he takes for hope, sighs, and lies back down on his couch. He watches her breast heave with emotion, and she attempts to catch her rapid breath, her hands now relinquishing her reticule and fluttering like trapped butterflies to smooth her white organdy skirt.

  IV

  * * *

  THE SECOND VISIT

  SHE KNOWS HE IS WAITING for her to speak. She feels his impatience behind her head. This time he sits in a chair slightly at an angle to the sofa and behind her, so that she cannot see his face. She feels he is hiding back there, eavesdropping on a private conversation she is expected to produce, or as though he were playing hide-and-seek as she did with her brother in the nursery as small children, hiding from each other in the shadowy corners of the big room.

  Yet what can she safely say? What stories can she tell to placate and satisfy this man, these men? What version of the truth will please them? Which of her words could actually help with her pain? What does this man want her to say?

  He has asked her to tell him about her life, the history of her illnesses, when all these various troubles began. As if she could possibly do such a thing, even if she wanted to!

  She says, “I only remember unimportant bits and pieces of my life. I don’t really know where to begin. I had the usual childhood illnesses, like everyone else. Really my whole life seems very ordinary to me. I am an ordinary girl, except for my recent illness, the pains in my legs, the trouble with my voice, my breathing.”

  Her voice, which will sometimes disappear for as long as two weeks, has returned now. She is able to speak clearly, though her cough, which the doctor calls
tussis nervosa, comes and goes and makes her feel she will lose her breath. The pains in her legs and the right side of her stomach come and go mysteriously, too. For the moment she feels no pain at all in her legs stretched out before her.

  “So?” the doctor says clearing his throat as though he were about to speak. An impatient man. Perhaps he wants to put her in the book he is working on now. She knows he has written several, and most probably about his patients, though she has not read any of them. Perhaps she should read the latest one on dreams. She is interested in them herself.

  She would like to tell the doctor that what she sees in her mind at the moment as in a dream are odd things bobbing up on the surface of a rough sea, as they do after a shipwreck: all the flotsam and jetsam, the detritus of her life, thrown up onto the surface of dark waters. She hears shutters banging, the sudden clatter of footsteps on the stairs, she sees the deep blue water of the lake glinting, the brilliant light like knives; she sees herself running along the edge of the lake; she smells smoke. Is this smoke in this place or her past?

  She sees some things so clearly, others not at all. Her whole life seems a jumble of moments of panic, situations which seemed so dangerous or embarrassing, so many humiliations. She sees danger and shame everywhere. She is so afraid of making a fool of herself. Her life does not seem a continuous stream, but rather a series of separate moments, photographs in someone else’s album. It is quite different from the suspenseful story, one thing causing the other to happen, which she has invented, writing about the engineering student she likes in her imaginary diary she now keeps hidden in a locked drawer.

  So she remains silent, staring at the oval portrait on the wall of a bearded man, wondering who he is.

  Even the doctor himself, whom she remembers from her brief visit two years ago, seems different, as if he were someone else. She remembers him as somewhat thinner, smaller, older, and wearing glasses. Instead, when she entered the room this afternoon, she thought he looked slightly plump, his nose shiny. He seemed rather cheerful, greeting her heartily, a man pleased with himself, or pleased with her appearance in his consulting rooms, an optimistic, perhaps even deluded man, telling her he can cure her horrid pains with words. He seems to her a typical Jewish petit bourgeois, a shopkeeper or even a dressed-up peddler, a very ordinary potentate. How could such a boring, middle-aged man, with his silly pinstriped pants and his mournful bow tie and the hand-stitching on his corduroy jacket, understand the strange story she has to tell? She hardly believes it herself. And in the end does this story have anything to do with her body, her aching limbs, her breath? How can talking make pain go away? Is the body so intimately connected with the mind? She does remember how, when she left her home for some days, she had become terribly constipated, unable to use the klo.

  “Start away!” the doctor says, eager to earn his fee, she imagines. Her father is doubtless paying him well.

  “When I was very young,” she tells him, speaking clearly, her voice coming to her almost as though it belongs to someone else, telling someone else’s story, “I felt much more extraordinary because everyone told me how clever I was, how quickly and early I had learned to read and write. Everyone said I was such a precocious child. I learned languages and the piano fast. I loved music—I still do. I was even good with numbers and liked to play number games.”

  “Numbers?” he says.

  Her throat tickles. She must not start coughing, because once she starts, she cannot stop. She tries to relax as he told her to do but she feels her throat contract. She swallows. Lying on his couch for the second time, her stomach cramps, and she is afraid she might have to go to the klo. It is a perpetual worry in here. The first time she had to get up and go in the middle of the session, but when she got there nothing happened.

  She remembers how another dreadful doctor had once made her take off her underwear and lie flat on her stomach when she was suffering from severe constipation. He had covered her back with only a towel and she had had to lie there disgracefully with her bottom stuck up in the air. Then he had reached up and put an electrode directly into what she thinks of as her most private part. With the force of the electricity there had been immediate and explosive results. She will never forget the shame of it, the awful, humiliating shame. She had wanted to die.

  Now, recalling it, she has a pain down her right leg, and she feels nauseated. The office smells of cigar smoke, she realizes, which is what is making her feel nauseated, though the window is open on this sunny fall afternoon.

  She has always hated the smell of smoke and has never allowed anyone, even her father, to smoke in her own room. This doctor, like her brother and her father and his friend Herr Z., she divines, must be a smoker. She wonders if the doctor smokes the same kind of cigars as her father, which, he has told her, old Emperor Franz Joseph smokes, too. The smell is the same.

  “Yes? You were a precocious child?” he says.

  “I was a wild girl in those early days, free and pleased with myself,” she tells him, smiling at the memory, seeing herself running fast, laughing in the woods that were close to their home, teasing her nursemaid, going through light and shade, running away from the poor, stout, breathless woman in her white cap and apron. She had even tormented her poor brother, touching his bed when he didn’t want her to. “Please don’t touch my bed,” he would say miserably, and she would do it again with the tip of her finger just to torment him.

  As she lies there a memory comes to her unbidden, and she finds herself telling the doctor: “Sometimes I was even cruel. I remember making a ring with some other girls—it was at my cousin’s house, I think, at a birthday party, holding hands and circling a poor girl, a foreigner who came from England. We taunted her, telling her she had killed Joan of Arc. ‘You killed Joan of Arc!’ we shouted at her. I suppose we must have learned about it in some history lesson as being the fault of the English.

  “In those days I didn’t have any trouble with my voice or my bowels. The whole world seemed a brighter place, lit up, sunny, and clear. I felt so clever. Everything came easily to me. Sometimes I would even sign my letters ‘from an undiscovered genius,’” she says and giggles at the thought. “I was not quite sure whether I would be a great writer or a great musician, but something great, I was certain. I knew I couldn’t be a painter as I was no good at that, though I do love to look at paintings. There were famous women writers, were there not, like the English writers Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, but the only great women musicians I could think of were sisters or wives: Mozart’s sister and Schumann’s wife, Clara. I wonder if I’ll be known only as Otto’s sister?” she asks the doctor and giggles.

  The doctor does not giggle. He says nothing to all of this. He probably thinks she is far from a genius. He probably thinks there is no such thing as a girl genius, or certainly no girl who needs to tell her story to the world. Yet how important it seems to her to record what she imagines and feels, to share it with someone even if it is only her secret diary.

  She hears nothing but the ticking of the clock, the occasional crackle of the fire that burns in the tiled stove, and the muffled sounds from the courtyard, the voice of a servant girl shouting out something.

  “A wild girl? In what way?” the doctor asks eventually.

  She tries to go on with her tale, her cough interrupting her words: “I felt I was just as clever as my brilliant brother—though perhaps he has a better memory than I do. He can quote endlessly from books. Did you know he wrote a play about Napoléon when he was just nine? Still I felt that there was little he could do better than I could, and certain things I understood much better than he did.”

  The doctor does not show much interest or comment on her brother. Many years later, when Otto has indeed become famous, a charismatic social leader, she will learn that the doctor has advised him not to try and make people happy, because that is not what they really want.

  Still she continues,
“We were inseparable. I loved—still love him so much, more than my life. One of my earliest memories is of sitting very close to him with my arm around his neck and pulling on his earlobe and sucking my thumb. We were sitting up in the bay window in the nursery, and it was almost as if he were part of me, and I were part of him,” she says, so sad in the silence of this dim room that what she remembers is no longer the case—that she is now here alone with this silent, distant man.

  What is the doctor doing back there? What is he thinking? She doesn’t hear him writing down her words or even moving. Could he have passed out, fainted, as she has done before? Is he dead? She doesn’t dare look back. She is like Orpheus in the underworld, unable to look back or the doctor will disappear. She doesn’t want him to disappear.

  Or perhaps he is actually snoozing after a heavy luncheon, as her father does sometimes in his study. Has he drunk a few beers or glasses of wine? He might, after all, be a drinker or even take drugs. Who knows? He sports too neat a waistcoat, too shiny a gold fob watch, and too neatly clipped a beard and mustache. He probably visits a barber daily and goes for his stroll on the Ringstrasse, marching along doggedly with a distracted gaze, like all the good bourgeois of Vienna: the very earnest sort of person who is trying too hard. He is not as elegant, or playful, or aristocratic as her auburn-haired, blue-eyed father, or nearly as handsome, though the doctor does have bright eyes that seem to see her. Nor does he have any of her father’s charm, but perhaps that is just as well. He is not an ugly man, though quite old, of course, as old as her father, as old as Herr Z.

  She speaks into the silence, “In the beginning, I could keep up with my brother, as he shared many of the books he read at the Gymnasium, but now since he has continued with his studies at the university, where I am not allowed to go, he has passed me by. He is interested in things in the wider world. He worries so about the poor weavers who work in such difficult conditions, for such long hours, and for so little money in Father’s factories in Bohemia. Like my uncle, Karl, he is always talking about politics, about how he wishes to do something useful for his fellow man.