Dreaming for Freud (6 page)

H
E SITS AT HIS DESK
and waits impatiently for the girl to arrive. He is glad to have this new case, this young girl, however difficult she might be. Yesterday, she went on at length and quite monotonously about her father. He wants to explain the secondary benefits of illness. It is important she understand how she is using her illness to get her father’s attention. She complains that her father has sent her to him to get her to do what he wishes, but behind that lies her own wish to get her father to do what
she
wishes. The doting father seems willing to do almost anything for her, including paying for a session that she does not attend. Once again the rude girl is very late.

He looks at the clock and decides to distract himself by writing to his friend Fliess about this new case. He writes a few words and then puts down his pen and runs his hand over the ring of bronze statuettes and terra-cotta figurines. He moves them as he once did his toy soldiers when he was a child. He remembers sticking labels on the flat of their backs with Napoléon’s marshals’ names on them. He is on a quest for origins: of this new patient’s illness, of her early memories, her dreams, of his own symptoms, of his faults and failures. Above all he desires renown, which will come surely from finding the origins of these illnesses of the mind.

He stares at the figurines, which he thinks of as his old and grubby gods and uses as weights for his papers and for his fleeting and flickering ideas, trying to pin them down, to catch them in his net. He particularly likes the Egyptian ones he has been able to acquire quite cheaply and which suggest the beginnings of civilization.

He tries to write a few words to his friend but is overcome by a sensation of dizziness. Like his young patient he often faints. He gets up and pours himself a glass of water from the glass pitcher on the table by the window.

His children all have colds and sore throats and his youngest boy, Ernst, an elevated temperature, which worries him. Certainly his children have his attention when they are ill. Above all he craves a cigar. He is trying once again to follow Fliess’s prescription, no doubt a wise one, not to smoke. He finds it impossible, harder even than giving up cocaine, which he was taking in ever larger quantities and distributing to his fiancée and friends. When he tries to stop the cigars, he feels an arrhythmia, a breathlessness, and a burning in his chest. The smoking calms him, the sucking has a soothing effect, enables him to work the ten hours a day it takes him to earn the one hundred florins he and his family need.

Also, he has not received a response from Fliess for several days, which makes him feel something close to panic. “Why do you not write to me? And where is my new patient?” he says aloud. He is often in a mental conversation with Fliess, running his ideas by him, trying to see them as his Other would do. How hard it is to live alone in the solitude and silence of this room.

He remembers how he longed for letters from his fiancée when they were separated, and if Martha did not write for a day or two, how desperate he was. His life seemed to hang on a thread—a letter from his beloved. It has not changed that much, he feels, though the letter writer has. Since their last meeting, Fliess does not answer his letters as rapidly as he would like, and again he feels abandoned, perhaps, as he did when his mother went away to have a baby, following the imprisonment of his nursemaid, and he feared she, too, might be locked away. Like his dreams, his feelings stand on two legs: one in the present and one in the past. One echoes the other.

He is afraid his friend is withdrawing from him. Will they ever have another “congress,” he wonders, after the last one in August at Lake Achensee, when they quarreled bitterly over who had come up first with the idea of bisexuality in human beings and its role in the neuroses. He can see them both clearly walking along the edge of the lake arguing fiercely, waving their hands in the air, rather like an old married couple.

Not having heard from Fliess for several days and his patient’s tardiness—has she decided already to abandon the treatment?—have brought on a feeling of breathlessness. His heart flutters, and he cannot help thinking again of his young patient’s words about the presence of death in her family. Without his friend’s approval of his work and the promise of his company in the future, life seems without purpose. How will he write anything new if he cannot share it as he did the dream book, chapter by chapter, listening to his suggestions and taking them seriously? And without his writing, how can he continue to live? Without his friend’s approval, how can he bear the constant criticism of the medical world around him? How viciously they have attacked him for pointing out what is obvious! Even Krafft-Ebing had called his lecture on the origin of hysteria—admittedly a theory he has revised—a scientific fairy tale. How that had stung! In the shadows of the late afternoon, looking at the clock, his heart beating irregularly, he feels he is only good at heart-misery.

He has already, inexplicably, lost two good friends: first the charming and successful Breuer, a man who radiated optimism and who sincerely sought to do good, and now, perhaps, his adored Fliess. It is too hard to work alone. He crumples up the piece of paper before him. He is determined that he will not write to him and complain about this silence—he will not beg.

When he finally hears the patient’s footsteps in his waiting room, his heart beats hard. He is a hunter stalking his prey. He is an adventurer, a conquistador,
Pisarro, a searcher of gold! He is hunting down the truth of the heart, and this girl must be made to give it to him, whether she wishes to or not.

But when the girl enters his room, her skin glowing, her perfume like a breath of sweet air, her thick dark hair partly pinned back and partly free around her shoulders, her “Good day” clear, he loses all his confidence. What does she really want of him, coming in, leaning on her maid’s arm? She looks better today, unexpectedly, and she does not cough as she enters the room, though she does still look rather pale and shaky in her white dress.

He watches her walk across the room to his couch and waits for her to continue her story, but when she finally lies down on his couch in her finery—she seems to be wearing another new and splendid dress—sighing profoundly and waving her hands around dramatically, her gold bracelets clinking, it is in stubborn silence.

“Well?” he says. “You were telling me about your father’s illness, the deaths in your family, and how that made you feel.” She waves her hands, sighs again, and tells him that she cannot think of how to go on. He would like to tell her she is wasting his time and her father’s money.

He stares at the dark Etruscan funerary urn he has placed in a corner of the room and thinks of the girl’s words about death and illness in her family, the beloved aunt who was so important to her, and about his own dead father. He continues to miss
him
more than he ever realized he would. He had not been aware how important the man was in his life. During his life his father had often made him think of Dickens’s Micawber, a tragicomical figure, someone who always believed something would turn up. He had borrowed, begged, and who knows, perhaps even stolen so that his boy could study.

Something he had forgotten comes to him: riding on the train once, sitting opposite his father in the window seat and watching him fall asleep with the sun on his face, his mouth slightly open, a thread of saliva on his chin. He remembers staring at his smooth, innocent sleeping face and thinking, “One day he will die and he will be buried, but I will be alive.”

His ambivalence about his father, which had made him arrive late for his funeral, is rather like his ambivalence about Rome, which he both longs and fears to visit. After his father’s death he had felt strangely uprooted. He was not sure what he wanted or even where he was going. He had been obliged to discover himself anew, to descend into the underworld of his own buried self, to attempt with Fliess to lead him, his Virgil, to discover his own unconscious, in what he came to think of as his self-analysis. It was a difficult time for him. Perhaps his mood swings were also due to his attempts to stop the cocaine he and Fliess had been taking in large doses, and which he now realized was unwise. These objects that he began collecting shortly after his father’s death are in some way related to that wild search for self.

All this passion to collect, Fliess has dismissed as a waste of time. “Behind every collector there is a Don Juan,” he once said.

Still the girl says nothing, lying there coughing on his couch.

“You do not trust me enough to tell me what comes to your mind?” he asks her.

“Why should I ?” she replies disconcertingly.

“Well, after all, why would you not? I trust you to tell me the truth,” he replies.

She sighs and waves her hands and seems to think about his words.

He goes on, “You think I am like your father, or even Herr Z., both of whom you consider, I gather, untrustworthy?” he says.

The girl says, “Well, they have both been your patients, haven’t they, and my father is paying you to cure me, isn’t he?”

He decides not to answer that, taken aback by her rudeness.

It is possible that he should let the girl settle in for a while longer before bringing up the matter of repressed desire and before explaining how her complaints about her father, their vehemence, are a sure sign of her attachment to him. But he is afraid she might escape without this essential clarification. He is in a hurry to cure her. She is obviously quite perceptive, but just as obviously puffed up with pride, spoiled, and rude. She seems to know a surprising amount about her father’s illness.

He stares at this sulky girl, who still has something of the child’s glow about her dimpled pink cheeks, her smooth hands, the soft glossy hair, the little ankles he glimpses in her dainty shoes. He cannot help but find her attractive and at the same time infuriating. She is a strange mixture of considerable acumen and childishness. He thinks that children are not the ignorant or innocent beings people like to think they are, though surely they know otherwise. At times he feels he is only discovering what every nursemaid must already know. The truth is, he cannot help finding this pretty, rich girl difficult and disagreeable but also endearing. He is anxious to rein her in.

Instead he asks, “Are there people you can talk to more easily?”

She thinks for a while and says she would find it much easier to speak to a woman.

“A woman? You would trust a woman more than you trust me?” he says, taken aback, offended despite himself. He would like to tell her she ought to be careful with women. She ought to watch out for them, particularly women as intelligent and appealing as she is herself.

He must not be fooled by this young one’s considerable wiles. He cannot help thinking sometimes of where his career might have taken him if he had not fallen so desperately in love with Martha. What if he had been able to have a full-time research career? What if he could have continued to work in the quiet of a laboratory with a microscope and something like a lamprey or a crayfish and his own fine mind, instead of having to listen endlessly to these querulous hysterics? He remains proud of his early discoveries, which surely bolstered Darwin’s idea that evolution operates conservatively, using the same basic building blocks in more and more complex arrangements. What if he had not followed von Brücke’s well-meaning suggestion to enter the clinical practice of medicine? What if he had not had to support such a large family and spend his time listening to patients like this one, he thinks, looking at this spoiled girl shifting around on his couch.

He remembers writing to Martha in the early days of their courtship and referring to women as sorceresses. Her power was such that it seemed almost magical to him in those days. He recalls how he blamed her for preventing him from achieving fame in the cocaine affair, of going to visit her and failing to pursue his findings fast enough, allowing Köller to step in and get the prize for his idea.

“The French fräulein you spoke of, for example? You feel you could trust her?” he asks, aware of the hint of sarcasm in his voice, thinking the girl would have preferred to confer with an ignorant servant girl rather than with a learned medical man, and wondering at the same time what happened there and why the girl had her dismissed.

He is suddenly aware that this girl, with the glow of her youth, her splendid dress, her odor of wildflowers, and her bright mind has somehow brought out his fear of women, their ability to harm and even to destroy. He thinks of his clever old Catholic nurse, the thief, who was always taking him off to church to listen to sermons about hellfire and scolded him for his clumsiness.

“Indeed, I liked her so much. We had so many interesting conversations,” she tells him enthusiastically. “We discussed the meaning of life, who we were, and a woman’s role in society.
She
encouraged me in my studies and even accompanied me to concerts and to the art galleries,” she mentions again loftily. She admires the painter Klimt, whom she saw exhibited with the Secessionists. “I love the frescoes he did at the new Court Theater on the ceiling. Have you seen them?” she asks in her airy way, as though they were at a dinner party. He avoids the question. He says, “I’m not particularly an admirer of modern art, it is ancient art that I find so intriguing.” He thinks that it is Rome he would like to visit, not a Klimt exhibition.

He brings her back to the fräulein who has obviously been important in her life.

“Why was she dismissed? What did she do to offend you?” he asks again.

She only says that the fräulein gave her so many interesting books to read.

“Molière, you said. What else?” the doctor asks, recalling what the father told him about the unsuitability of the texts and how they had led the girl astray.

She tells him, sounding rather proud of herself, that she has read Mantegazza’s
Physiology of Love
. “All three volumes, which we read in Italian—killing two birds with one stone, my fräulein said, all about the perversions and about men’s and women’s bodies,” she tells him without shame, shifting around on his comfortable couch, smoothing down her skirts over her legs, running her fingers through her soft ringlets, her gold bracelets chinking. “And we discussed them at length.” He has obviously struck oil here, he thinks, surprised by this revelation.