Dreaming for Freud

Praise for Sheila Kohler

“Sheil
a Kohler has written a slyly subversive, subtle, and sensuous revisionist interpretation of Sigmund Freud and his iconic Dora case that might be subtitled ‘The Analyst Analyzed.’”

—Joyce Carol Oates,
New York Times
bestselling author of
We
Were the Mulvaneys

“With delicate and terrifying grace Kohler illuminates the complex hidden lives of her characters, whose needs and desires transgress the bounds of the familiar and comfortable. This seductive and wonderfully unexpected tale confirms Sheila Kohler’s place as a master of the novel.”

—A. M. Homes (on
The Bay of Foxes
), author of
May We Be Forgiven

“Sheila Kohler’s prose smokes and burns like a fire that cannot be put out and that suddenly leaps into all-devouring flame. She has all the gifts of a natural storyteller—a passionate interest in human motives, an eidetic recall of period and place, and a sense of the shape of a tale unfolding in the fullness of time.”

—Edmund White, author of
City Boy
and
Genet

“Sheila Kohler possesses a gorgeous imagination.”

—Patrick McGrath, author of
Trauma

“Sheila Kohler’s timeless stories are always transporting. The elegance of her writing underscores the charged, disturbing behavior she presents so vividly.”

—Amy Hempel, author of
The Dog of the Marriage

“Sheil
a Kohler is a gifted storyteller, as this her latest attests.
Dreaming for Freud
is well crafted, depicting two great strong-willed characters: the forty-five-year-old Sigmund Freud and the feisty seventeen-year-old patient he made famous as Dora. Kohler reveals her secrets slowly, layer by layer, teaching us much about the early days of Freud’s ‘talking cure.’ Like any good mystery writer, she keeps us suspended until the very end. This is a compelling and very satisfying read.”

—Selden Edwards, author of
The Lost Prince

“In this meticulously researched novel, Kohler infuses Freud’s case report of his analysis of Dora with a richly imagined, entirely credible reading between the lines. Her effortless prose is powerfully evocative of the characters, the times, and the essence of the unique relationship that we call psychoanalysis.”

—David I. Joseph, MD, George Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

“
Dreaming for Freud
is an extraordinary novel that focuses on one of Freud’s seminal cases involving a highly intelligent, sensitive young woman that contributed to a tectonic shift in the science of psychodynamics and psychiatry in general. In this mesmerizing work, Kohler brilliantly constructs fascinating dialogue between Freud and his patient, but even more interesting, excursions into their minds, which reveal their ambivalences, vulnerabilities, and power plays.”

—Laurence R. Tancredi, MD, JD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University

“Compelling and beautifully nuanced.”

—Elizabeth Strout (on
Crossways
), author of
Olive Kitteridge

“Kohler is undoubtedly a talent to watch.”

—
Vogue

“Hypnotic . . . unsettling . . . a combination of domestic drama and psychological thriller.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle
(on
Crossways
)

“Her themes of displacement and alienation cut to the heart as she quietly strips away the tales we tell ourselves in order to go on from day to day.”

—
Booklist

“Patricia Highsmith meets Nadine Gordimer in this mesmerizing tale of sex, longing, and murder.”

—Jonathan Santlofer (on
The Bay of Foxes)
, author of
The Death Artist

“Bravo! I couldn’t put it down and finished it in the depths of the night.”

—Lyndall Gordon (on
Becoming Jane Eyre
),
author of
Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life

“Erotic and disturbing.”

—
Vanity
Fair
(on
Cracks
)

“Riveting . . . Kohler’s writing is so smoothly confident and erotic that she has produced a tale resonant with a chilling power all its own.”

—
Elle
(on
Cracks
)

“Spare, haunting.”

—
Marie
Claire
(on
Cracks
)

“Her writing is precise, colorful, and sensual . . . expertly paced. Kohler has produced a masterful narrative.”

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
(on
Crossways
)

ALSO BY SHEILA KOHLER

The Bay of Foxes

Love Child

Becoming Jane Eyre

Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness

Cracks

Stories from Another World

Crossways

The Perfect Place

The House on R Street

Miracles in America

Children of Pithiviers

One Girl

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in Penguin Books 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Sheila Kohler

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Extracts from Freud’s
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
, Standard Edition, Volume VII,
translated from the German by William Tucker.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-
PUBLICATION DATA

Kohler, Sheila.

Dreaming for Freud : a novel / Sheila Kohler.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-698-14189-6 (eBook)

I. Title.

PR9369.3.K64D84 2014

823'.914—dc23 2013048717

This is a work of fiction based on real events.

For my best—my husband, Bill Tucker

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

H
E SITS AT HIS DESK
in his study, sucking on his cigar. It is late, and his family is already in bed, which is where he should be, but instead he picks up and puts down the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman statuettes before him, bought at some sacrifice, which only makes them more precious. He began this collection shortly after the death of his father and after dreaming a series of dreams about Rome, four years ago, as though mourning had sent him on a voyage of discovery, searching for memories in an underworld linked to the beginnings of things. He is irresistibly attracted to this world of ancient things, studying, buying, rearranging. He finds handling these small, light objects strangely comforting—sometimes he even takes them with him to the table at mealtimes—and he is much in need of comfort tonight, moving them around restlessly at will. He cannot stop thinking about the case.

Just when the treatment seemed to be going so well, just when he was analyzing the girl’s dreams with what he can only feel was considerable understanding and expertise, just when he was breaking through her hysterical resistance, the girl has, to his consternation, broken off the treatment, refused to come back. This slip of a girl who had come to him in the autumn of the first year of the century, in his forty-fourth year, has escaped him.

She has left him with nothing but a fragment of an analysis in his hands. Not given sufficient time, he has been unable to explore her case fully and to his satisfaction. He thinks with a dull ache that like all the rest ultimately, and young as she is, this woman will remain a dark continent. Once again he has failed with a patient. His dreams of finding gold in the heart of her story have not been realized. He is strangely troubled by this abrupt departure, which he is aware must recall earlier and even more painful leave-takings. The origin of all this heartache lies in the past, he knows.

He stubs out his half-finished cigar, rises, and walks back and forth over the Persian carpets, his hands behind his back. As his favorite sister, Rosa, with her husband and two small children, has the apartment opposite his on the second floor, he has been obliged to move his study and consulting rooms downstairs.

He looks at his empty ottoman, draped with its soft Smyrna rug, and thinks he would like to tell his friend Fliess how the girl has fled, will never come back and lie down here. She will never plump herself down and lean against the large, plush pillows, as though she owned the place. Despite all his efforts to create as much of an impression of comfort as he has had the means to do within these small, modest rooms, she has left him for good. This place where he has brought up his family seems empty; three of his six children were born in this house—his youngest girl, Anna, is five years old.

Looking around the crowded, dimly lit interior, he remembers floating through his great master Charcot’s vast and elegant rooms in Paris fifteen years ago, high on cocaine. Here he has no such elegance, nor the comfort of the drug, but he does have his ancient statuettes and his books. He has been reading Burckhardt’s famous book,
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
. He has tried to give his patients an illusion of reassuring permanence, a sense of eternity evoked by the past, something that will mirror the solidity of this brilliant, bourgeois Viennese world and even the vast empire beyond, with its apparently immortal emperor, the ancient Franz Joseph, who has been on the throne now for more than fifty years, ever since he replaced his idiot uncle in 1848. A stable world, he would like to believe, everything in its well-appointed place, a world of flourishing science and arts; of music, literature, theater, and painting, a world where his own Jewish people have played such a prominent part.

Many years later he will think back on the irony of these paltry attempts to portray a solid world. He will cling to this illusion until the last moment—until his own daughter has been rounded up and taken from him twice by the Gestapo and held for a whole day—unable to imagine it shattering, coming to an abrupt end in the new century. Though there was never a time in his life when he was not aware of the hatred for his people, he will not be able to imagine what this orderly space will become. How can he imagine the suffering that will take place in this bourgeois room, a room that will be copied again and again all over the world by budding analysts in search of legitimacy?

What he now sees so clearly in his mind, the image coming to him repeatedly in the silence and loneliness of the late hour, is his young patient as he last saw her, waving her slender, white hands in the air. She is a girl who uses her hands expressively when she speaks. He can hear the chink of her many gold bracelets and see her large, lucent eyes fill with tears as she stands at the door in her white dress—she often wears white—and presses his hand warmly between hers. “I will be back to see you, one day, I’m sure,” she tells him, which he takes for a white lie. In any case he is determined never to take her back should she really want to come. Her voice trembles a little, her long lashes lowered to her cheeks, as she says good-bye and wishes him and his family a very happy new year.

Yet the termination of the analysis is, he feels, an act of revenge on her part. She must have realized how important her case had become to him. She has dismissed him, he thinks bitterly, with little notice, rather like a maid, or come to think of it, like his own adored Catholic nursemaid who was so abruptly dismissed for stealing. This girl, he feels, has stolen something precious from him.

All that is left to him now, he realizes, as he walks back and forth in the silence of the late hour, snow falling softly outside his window in the courtyard with its one tall chestnut tree, is to write up his account of the treatment. This will have to be
his
revenge. He will put aside the important work he has begun on the psychology of everyday life. He will leave the chapter about forgetting the name of Signorelli, the painter, and turn to the writing of this case. Its very brevity, the three months she has allowed him, he sees, with a sudden surge of hope, may be used to his advantage. The short time span will contain it; it will help him structure the account. He has not been able to write up the account of the longer and more complete analysis of Herr E. She has done him a favor, in a way, he suddenly sees.

A vague idea of how he will do it comes to him: it will have five parts perhaps, with an explanatory preface at the start and the two important dreams placed toward the end, just before the postscript.

He sits down again at his desk, puts aside the ancient statuettes, sweeps away the manuscript he was working on, and takes up a clean sheet of paper. He writes in a sort of fever. He needs to get it all down while the details are still fresh in his mind. He wants to demonstrate how dream interpretation elucidates an entire analysis, pointing the way through the formidable resistance of all hysterics. This will be the necessary continuation of his dream book as well as his earlier studies in hysteria. The two dreams she has brought him will be all the gold required.

Also, he is aware that he needs to express his thoughts in writing to understand this hysterical girl at least as much as he can, to reveal her to himself as much as to others, to relive on the page the moments he has spent with her despite all her rudeness and recalcitrance. Though he has never recorded their exchanges, except for her dreams, which he did write down—the most important part of the analysis—he has his nightly notes and remembers many of her exact words. They reverberate in his mind. Indeed, he finds himself repeating some of the things
he
has said to her aloud, aware of his lips.

“Why would you not trust me? I will trust you to tell me the truth,” he says aloud. “And can you be so sure we did not?” he repeats his last words to her. At forty-four he believes he still has a good enough memory, though it is not what it used to be when he was an adolescent and could remember pages of text by heart.

Despite his haste to record the analysis, he writes carefully, in what he is aware is a forceful and compelling style. He possesses the gift of going directly from his experience to the word. He has always seen things clearly, known how to seize on the essential and render it intelligible and convincing to his reader. He has learned a lot from his French master, Charcot. He knows how to simplify and clarify.

For the moment he does not ask himself who will read this account, or even if his admired Fliess, his Other, will consent to critique it, as he did his book on dreams. Though he knows it is impossible for him to write without hope of some audience, he now writes for himself as much as his future readers. He writes out of a desire to put this bright girl down on the page, to understand their interaction, to hold on to her in the stillness of the night, to possess her forever through the written word. Posterity will know her only through his eyes, he believes.

He will have to rename her, of course, and a perfect name comes to him immediately, as though waiting in the wings. It is the name they used for his sister’s maid, her given name, Rosa, having led to a confusion between mistress and maid. She will be cast in the role of the maid, not he. He is vaguely aware that it is also the name of a helpless child bride from a beloved novel by his favorite English writer, as well as one from a play he saw once in Paris about a Roman empress, a woman of great power and intrigue. He knows, too, that it is the name of the woman who opened up the box and let all the evils out into the world.

He will disguise the places where she has lived, too, and the people she has known. He will disguise her story just enough, and all in the name of scientific research, in the name of the truth.

As he begins to set down his account, he realizes he is inventing the girl, giving her a new life and substance, as he explains the reasons for her symptoms. Ultimately, he feels, she will now belong to
him
.

She will never refute his interpretations. Despite her unusual intelligence, her willfulness and recalcitrance, she will always be his creation. He will confer immortality on her and further science with his brilliant analysis, and if, in the future, she should hear of her fame, he suspects she may be proud. She is a proud girl.

And how many other readers might find themselves in these pages? How many hysterical adolescent girls will find their desires exposed, their masks removed? It will be his revenge not just on this one lively, pretty, bright girl who has dared to scorn him, but on all of them with their dangerous charms. It will be his revenge on all his enemies, his hypocritical Viennese colleagues who have snubbed him and his dream book, who have refused to see the truth of what is so clearly before their eyes.