Dreaming for Freud (14 page)

H
E GLANC
ES AT THE CLOCK,
but there are still some minutes left until the end of the session. The girl is talking about something she did recently: sitting for two hours in the art gallery in Dresden looking at a painting of the virgin by Raphael, the
Sistine Madonna
.

He remembers the train ride to Dresden and the altercation with a rude Christian who had called him a dirty Jew when he wanted to open a window. The man had insisted he close the window, and now this girl is going on about the Madonna in the museum in Dresden. He remembers the painting, which he saw so long ago—it must be seventeen years, he thinks, the span of this girl’s life. How madly he had been in love with his princess at the time.

But he asks her, “And why did you sit there so long? Two hours is a long time! What was so interesting about the painting?”

“I’m not certain,” she says.

“Which part of the picture interested you particularly?” he asks, thinking of the central figure of the Madonna and the baby and the couple that flank them: on one side an older man, if he remembers correctly, some saint, or pope most probably, who points a finger at the viewer but looks up at the baby, and on the other side a beautiful blond woman with a mysteriously lowered gaze.

“The Madonna,” she says and adds, “I didn’t understand what Raphael was trying to say in this painting.”

“You think he was trying to say something?” he asks.

“The Madonna looks so frightened, as though she has seen something awful. She seemed to me to be trying to escape, to run forward, to run out of the picture, to run away from something.”

“What made you think she was running, escaping?” the doctor asks.

“You can see by her skirts moving around her ankles and the position of her feet,” she says. “Also, the baby Jesus seemed so strange to me, not at all the way he is usually portrayed. I was so puzzled by his expression. Have you seen the painting? Do you know what I mean?” she asks.

He admits that he has seen the painting but it was a long time ago, and adds, “That’s not what I remember,” and thinks that he was more interested in the Madonna. “What was so strange about the Christ child?” he asks.

“I thought he looked angry, or perhaps afraid, rather the way I have felt at times: his eyes stare so fearfully, and his hair is all in a mess, and his teeth seemed clenched with horror. I thought he looked as if he had seen some dreadful apparition, or anyway the way I felt when I had awoken and found Herr Z. by my bed, and how I felt when he suddenly clattered down the steps at his shop and clutched me to his chest.”

“I must have missed that during my brief inspection,” he says and remembers that the Madonna had actually reminded him of a young nursemaid and not any heavenly creature at all.

She says, “I felt the Madonna might be considering what was about to happen in the future to her baby, or perhaps even to all of us, and would have wanted to escape it. Only the beautiful woman on the right who looks down seems not to know or not to want to know what is about to happen to everyone. And the two little adorable angels at the bottom of the painting seem to be looking on ironically or with even a touch of humor. I somehow felt the painting was trying to warn me of something.”

“And what could that be?” the doctor asks her.

“I don’t know,” she tells him, shaking her head.

“It is certainly a beautiful painting of the Madonna,” the doctor now admits, though he is thinking of his own increasing isolation within Christian society and how he has been driven back to his own people, joining B’nai B’rith,
where he has found some comfort and companionship.

She tells the doctor that she was drawn to the painting because it seemed directed at her. She felt an intimate part of the family portrayed there. “In a way I felt I was both the Madonna and the baby, and also the little angels watching the scene. It was an awful feeling. I felt the older man was both like my father and Herr Z. and perhaps, come to think of it now, also like you, all of you pointing the way I am supposed to go, urging me to do your bidding, none of you really thinking of what might be best for me in the end. The beautiful woman was both Mother, who refuses to lift her eyes and see how terrible it all is, and the blond, beautiful, and mysterious Pippina, who insists on ignoring the horror of my real situation and her own.”

“And you felt no longing to be like the Madonna, to one day bear a child, a baby yourself?” he finds himself saying, thinking of his own children and how he loves them, and how much pleasure they have given him with their amusing, charming ways. He thinks of young Martin, who already shows such promise with his imaginative poems; such an intelligent child, a strange bird, sensitive and good natured.

She says, “I have no wish to marry and bear children. What happiness have men brought me? What have they ever given me? How have they ever helped me?”

He is not sure how to answer her, taken aback by her bitter words. Has he then brought her nothing at all? Have all his words been in vain? Has she gained nothing from her time with him? He looks at the clock and sees it is time for the end of the session.

But later, when she is gone, has left him for good, he will think of what she was trying to tell him. He will think of that painting and her words when he hears, two years later, that she has married despite her bitter words, and to a young engineer apparently of not particularly promising qualities, whom her father has been obliged to take into his employ as he has no other work.

He thinks of the painting again above all, two years after the marriage, when he hears that she and her husband have had a baby boy and have decided to convert to Lutheranism. Like so many in Viennese Jewish society, he presumes, they hope thus to make it easier for their boy to advance in life, to protect him from the dangers around him, from any danger that might arise. A vain hope, as he will eventually find out, as under the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 one Jewish grandparent is enough to condemn a man or woman to death.

S
HE STARTS THE SESSION BY
telling him she has decided this will be the last time she comes to see him. She says she has been determined to stick it out until the end of the year but now she must leave.

She waits to hear what he will say, expecting him to protest, to tell her she is making a great mistake, that this is not what she really wants, that on the contrary she wants to stay, but to her surprise he says nothing. Why does he not respond to her words as he usually does, telling her she is mistaken, that a desire to leave is really her way of getting him to beg her to stay? Surely he understands that? Is he going to remain silent even under these circumstances? What has she done?

“For how long have you been considering this seriously?” is all he asks. Again he wants precise numbers. What is this mania for numbers?

“For two weeks,” she answers, though the truth is probably that she has thought of it from time to time since she first set foot in this room, this ultimate plea, an attempt to get him to react, to notice her, to ask her to stay. As she says these words, she is overcome by a pang of regret. Is he just going to let her go without protest? How could she really leave this man she has been talking to every day except Sundays for the last three months? Her intention was simply to get him to respond to her, to tell her he wanted her to stay.

At least he has listened to her with much interest. At least he has believed what she had to say with a trustfulness that is touching. What will she do without him? What will become of her without him? How could she live without coming here every day and without him telling her what her thoughts, her feelings, her dreams mean? Who will she be on her own without having him to confirm or deny her thoughts and feelings? How could she walk out of his door and never come back?

“You are dismissing me like a maid with two weeks’ notice ?” he says.

There is a moment of stunned silence in the small room that makes her very sad. It is true that this man has listened to her so carefully and paid more attention to her words than anyone else has ever done in her whole life. He has also admitted that what she told him was true, which her father and Herr Z. have not done. It is also true he has bullied her and hectored her and tried to make her admit to his theories and ideas about sexuality. At times she has felt she was under a police investigation, held here under close scrutiny for committing a monstrous crime of some kind. He has accused her of making herself ill by her thumb-sucking and masturbating, of using her illness for her own ends, to manipulate her father, who would do anything for her. He feels the best solution for everyone would be for her to marry Herr Z. What sort of a solution is that?

She tells him that she is very thankful for his help and admits she has found the analysis interesting, though disturbing.

“I have discovered a new way to look at the world, and though I don’t always like what I see, I feel more, well, more intelligent, in a way, just from the looking, the possibilities,” she says. She doesn’t feel much better physically, she must admit, and certainly she is still in a rage with her father and Herr Z., but perhaps she will now have the courage to confront the Z.’s.

The doctor says nothing to all of this. He says nothing about his feelings for her as a human being, as a young girl struggling with what is surely a difficult situation, or even offers any advice about the wisdom of such a decision. He voices not a word of affection or even any interest in the results of her departure. He does not even ask her to stay in touch, to let him know how she is getting on. Instead, he is obviously thinking about himself. He sounds very cross, and repeats something about her treating him like a servant, giving him two weeks’ notice.

She understands he has taken her decision personally, and now she does not know what to say. She has offended him. Like a rejected lover, like a child, he is hurt and angry with her and is now sulking in his corner in silence. Well, let him sulk. He is taking her decision to leave as her revenge on him. Perhaps he is not entirely wrong. Perhaps leaving him is the best thing she can do.

Obviously he feels she is rejecting him personally by breaking off the treatment. Perhaps he feels she is breaking off his masculine part which he seems so proud of and of which he speaks so often. She sees the gray stone crumbling. He goes on stubbornly with the analysis of the last dream.

She tries to change the subject and to talk about something else, hoping he might still ask her to stay. She has a little time left, she realizes, looking at his clock, and at least he won’t make her leave until her time is up today. What can she say? She had so hoped he would try to convince her to stay, that he might at least point out the advantages of his cure.

When it is time for the end of the session, he simply tells her the time is up. She rises and comes over to him and shakes his hand. She looks into his eyes with real affection and feels the tears rush into her eyes.

“I am so sorry I have to leave like this, but I feel I have no other choice now. I will be back to see you, one day, I’m sure,” she says, lifting her voice hopefully while he continues to scowl at her. Awkwardly, she pushes her hat back from her forehead and says she is so sorry that they could not have helped each other more. “I tried,” she says. He looks at her and says, coolly, “And can you be so sure we did not?”

H
E SITS IN HIS ST
UDY,
writing up the case all through the cold January nights of the new year. He smokes one cigar after another. He cannot work without this aid, which will one day be his undoing. The cancer of the palate, the operations, the prosthesis, and ultimately the morphine-induced death are all years ahead of him. Surrounded by his prized objects and warmed by the fire burning in the stove, he writes fast and furiously until late. He struggles to get the whole thing down but finally decides to curtail his account, leaving out the analytic process.

For the most part, he follows the slow, uneven process of the girl’s own gradual and reluctant revelations and his own penetrating interpretation of them. He models this account on his patient’s revelations, withholding certain important facts, until toward the end, just as the girl herself has done.

He realizes that each case presents a mystery story of sorts, perhaps the whole psychoanalytic method is somewhat like a mystery story, a crime novel, a thriller, gradually revealing connections between events and symptoms.

He has read a great deal of fiction in many languages and knows how to tell a story, hinting from the start at what is up ahead, releasing the information little by little, so as to pique the interest of the reader and catch him in his net, as he had hoped to catch this girl. Now he will pin her down with his pen like a butterfly on the page for posterity. He provides many mysterious footnotes to keep his reader questioning the exact reason for the girl’s symptoms, her distress.

This will be a necessary compliment to his dream book, supplementing and illustrating his theories with this very real experience. They have criticized him for not providing sufficient clinical illustrations—well, he will provide them with more than they may want.

His wife reproaches him in the morning at breakfast and tells him he looks pale and has dark rings under his eyes. He will make himself ill working this hard, she complains, but he feels driven to get his vision of this girl down on the page.

The father comes several times to say the girl will return, but she comes no more. She has broken off the treatment. She has escaped him, and perhaps the father, too, who seems unable to coerce her into coming back, depriving him of a considerable source of income if nothing else. The case is closed, as far as he is concerned. He will never take her back, should she wish to come. She has treated him shabbily, the way she felt Herr Z. had treated her, using the same words to woo her that he had used with the fräulein. He will use his words to put her in her place on the page.

But as he writes up the case he is increasingly aware that he has failed this girl. As he writes, he realizes what he should have been aware of earlier. Like the other hysterical women he has treated, she has taught him a lot, and not only about the psychoanalytic process, but also about himself. Women, despite his fear of them, his inability to understand them fully, have helped him enormously with his work, he knows. Without their frank words, their ability to understand their own feelings, their capacity for insight, without their connections in the real world, he could never have invented his method, his theories, and spread them. With sadness for her but gladness for him, he realizes that what he has learned from the girl has come too late for her but not for him.

Why had he not seen the break coming and analyzed the transference in time: the girl’s obvious anger and fear of him, along with the growing attraction? Why had he not connected these feelings to the obvious echoes from her past, her experiences with her father and above all with Herr Z., which have distorted her image of himself, just as he has distorted the image of his beloved Other, Fliess? He realizes that he has acted like a woman with Fliess, a womanly womb waiting for the intellectual siring of the Other, and it has taken this girl for him to see it, to understand the transference fully.

He is aware in the late-night silence of the street, in his loneliness and loss, that he has overvalued the competence of this man as friend, doctor, and man of science. He has played the woman, the nursemaid to him and his dubious ideas. He has been complicit in his doubtful number games, his wild ideas. He has followed the germination of his preoccupations; he has encouraged, admired, and adored. He has even tried to help him prove his mad ideas. All of this—Fliess’s perplexing biomedical numbers game, the extreme importance given to the nose, and above all his insistence that periods of euphoria inevitably followed periods of melancholy—all suggested that patients became better or worse strictly according to biological periods, whatever one did in an analysis, and this would entirely negate his own work.

He knows he is already envied for the sort of patients who come to him, often wealthy members of his own race. Perhaps Fliess himself is among those who envy him for his discoveries, as indeed so many do his entire race, envy them the ability to get up earlier and work later into the night, envy him this feminine ability to listen to the language of the heart.

He turns back to the text he is writing, determined to use this account to further the progress of psychoanalysis, to further his own position, even if his knowledge has come too late for this girl, even if he has not been able to help her as he would have wished.

Finally he adds a postscript with his later discoveries, comments on the transference, and ideas that have come to him since the girl’s departure.

In the preface, which he composes only at the end, when he has the whole case down, he provides his motives for divulging what will be the most intimate and scabrous details of her young life.

He gets it all down in three weeks, and when he has finished, he reads it over with some satisfaction. It is one of the most subtle things he has written, and surely subtlety is the essence of what distinguishes good work from the mediocre. He dares anyone, even a casual observer, to pick up this report and put it down without reading it to the end. It is as good as a short story by one of the great masters.

Yet as he looks around his cluttered study, with all his precious carpets and objects, he finds it empty: something is now missing in his life.

When he steps over to the window, he can see the snow still falling, joining the slush of melting flakes on the ground. He hears water drip from the drainage spout into the courtyard, and the lonely cry of a city bird.

He is moved to take up his pen and write yet another letter to Fliess, one more attempt to reach him, one of his last, though he knows now with a deep sense of loss that his friend, too, like the young girl, will come no more into his life. This man, his Other, whose praise was once nectar and ambrosia to him, has retreated. He is gone, vanished, only a dream of his own mind. He knows now that he existed only in the distortion of his own imagination, that he has endowed him, as one must the loved object, with attributes he never possessed. He will have to go forward without him. He knows he owes him for emphasizing the fact of bisexuality, which the girl has so clearly demonstrated. Yet he feels at this moment short of a drug, certain his friend will understand what he means. He cannot admit that without his approval, he is reluctant to publish this material. Nor does he yet know that he will keep this account to himself for five long years.