Gracefully Insane (14 page)

Packard might have been entitled to his healthy skepticism over the
usefulness of Freud’s methods because just a few years before, he had admitted one of Freud’s most famous patients, Dr. Horace Frink, into McLean. Frink occupies an unusual place in the history of psychotherapy; his was possibly the most famous disastrously botched analysis in the annals of Freudianism. A graduate of the Cornell Medical School, Frink pursued a brief surgical career before turning to psychiatry. Soon he became one of the first in a line of American ephebes who Freud hoped would proselytize his new science in the United States—“the most brilliant and promising of the young Americans,” Freud called him. In 1911, Frink cofounded the New York Psychoanalytic Society with Abraham Brill and two other doctors, and he was unanimously elected its president in 1913. Five years later, Frink published a landmark study,
Morbid Fears and Compulsions;
forty years after its publication and twenty years after the author’s death, Karl Menninger hailed it as “one of the clearest and best written expositions of psychodynamics.” Not only was Frink smart, he was also a Gentile, which pleased Freud, who fretted constantly that psychoanalysis was attracting only Jews. An added plus was Frink’s access to money via his attractive (married) mistress and patient, the comely Warburg family heiress Anjelika “Angie” Bijur, whom Freud encouraged the (married) Frink to wed.

When Horace Frink presented himself to Freud in person for the first time in the spring of 1921, he was in trouble. He had been experiencing occasional depressions for thirteen years and suffered from “toxic headaches,” which could be relieved only by extended periods of relaxation. In Vienna, he was giddy, sleeping only a few hours a night and savoring the Austrian capital’s heady nightlife in between his $10-an-hour sessions with “the master” in his office at 19 Berggasse. “I was very happy, and more talkative and full of fun than ever before in my life,” Frink reported. Yet he also admitted to experiencing a “sense of unreality and an inability to form mental pictures.”

A cynic, or a realist, might suggest that Frink’s biggest problem was that he had started making love to his own patient, Madame Bijur. Aside from the obvious ethical concerns—Bijur had been his patient since 1912—there were complications. Horace’s own wife Doris realized that he was unhappy in their marriage and was willing to grant him a divorce. But Anjelika’s husband Abraham proved recalcitrant. Angie herself journeyed to Vienna in the spring of 1921, and Freud encouraged the two lovers to pursue their sexual destiny. As Madame Bijur later explained to the ubiquitous Adolf Meyer: “When I saw Freud, he advised my getting a divorce because of my own incomplete existence ... and because if I threw Dr. F[rink] over now he would never again try to come back to normality and probably develop into a homosexual though in a highly disguised way.”

Freud was alluding to Frink’s purported unconscious homosexuality. Although Frink was alternately promiscuous and sexually equivocal—he once complained that Anjelika looked “queer, like a man, like a pig”—he is not known to have engaged in homosexual relationships.

In a letter to Anjelika’s husband’s analyst, Freud explained his conduct: “I simply read my patient’s mind and so I found out that [Frink] loved Mrs. B., wanted her ardently and lacked the courage to confess it to himself.... I thought it the good right of every human being to strive for sexual gratification and tender love if he
saw a way to attain them, both of which he had not found with his wife.”

What ensued was worthy of a Georges Feydeau farce. Freud suggested that the two lovers confront the cuckolded husband, Abraham, in Paris and implore him to release his wife from her marital vows. All this came as a shock to Abraham, who thought his marriage might be saved. He had made love with Angie only a few days before and had just received a pair of $5,000 pearl studs from her as a token of her affection. Enraged, Mr. Bijur steamed back to New York and threatened a major scandal. He wrote Freud a long letter, which he intended to publish as a full-page advertisement in the New York press:

Luckily for Freud, Abraham died of cancer before he could publish the letter, which was forwarded to Vienna by Mr. Bijur’s analyst. Freud responded tartly that the letter was silly and crafted to appeal to America’s easily manipulated public opinion. But in fact, Freud was very worried about negative publicity, as he had every
reason to be. In the 1920s, he was promoting psychoanalysis as a helpful, innovative new neuroscience, not a marriage-counseling service for anyone with a college education and boat fare to the Continent. Freud told Frink that he had specifically asked Anjelika not to “repeat to foreign people I had advised her to marry you on the threat of a nervous breakdown. It gives them a false idea of the kind of advice that is compatible with analysis and is very likely to be used against analysis.” Freud, whose attraction to the American dollar was enhanced by Austria’s rampant inflation, was also vulnerable to accusations of financial manipulation where the Bijur-Frink romance was concerned. Unbeknownst to him—at first—Angie had to settle $100,000 on Horace’s first wife Doris to make her go away. Furthermore, Freud confirmed to his patient and disciple Frink that part of Mrs. Bijur’s allure was her fortune:

Dr. Silas Warner, who wrote a scholarly article on the “therapeutic disaster” that was the Freud-Frink relationship, notes that “the question has to be raised whether it was not Freud’s fantasy that he would become a rich man from Mrs. Bijur’s becoming Mrs. Frink, and making a substantial contribution to ‘the psychoanalytic fund.’”

The therapeutic disaster begat a romantic disaster. Horace Frink and Anjelika Bijur did marry, but what Dr. Freud had joined together, it turned out, could easily be put asunder. With Freud having declared his analysis complete, Frink returned to the United States, where his depression and anxieties continued to haunt him.
He and Bijur lived separately, and each consulted Adolf Meyer. The Swiss-born Meyer was cooling on Freud’s methods, and the Frink-Bijur mess sent him into the deep freeze. He called the case “nauseating.” In 1924, when Angie’s lawyer told Meyer that his client had “decided to obtain her freedom” from Dr. Frink, Meyer reacted furiously. Angie had seized upon Freud’s suggestion of Frink’s latent homosexuality, Meyer thought, when in fact Frink was simply the victim of a domineering wife. He fired back an answer to Bijur’s lawyer: “Mere Freudian love-philosophy cannot guarantee safety and success in life as whole. Man is too complex a subject for that.”

As Bijur proceeded with her divorce plans—this time from Frink—her husband became suicidal. He took an overdose of the barbiturates Veronal and Luminal, which his wife interpreted as a ploy to win back her affection. If so, it failed. She continued to plan their trip back to Paris for the purpose of annulling their French marriage. Ten days later, just before their ship was to sail, Frink deliberately cut the ulnar artery in the bend of his elbow. “The blood spurting out made an astonishingly loud noise,” he reported, and it woke the male nurse sleeping in the room with him. Luckily, Frink was boarding with his old friend, Dr. Swepson Brooks, whose prompt intervention saved his life. Brooks and Bijur decided to commit Frink to McLean.

Shortly after Frink’s arrival, Superintendent Frederick Packard—the man who would express a healthy skepticism concerning Freud’s methods a few years later—wrote to Meyer that Frink’s condition seemed to be improving. Frink had been doing some thinking, as well:

Frink stayed at McLean for about five months and recovered nicely. He appeared at his own divorce proceedings after his release in 1925. He moved first to upstate New York and then to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, supporting his two children with money provided by his divorce decree and income from the few patients that he saw. “From the time of his release [from McLean] in April 1925 until a week before his death in 1936, he served as single parent to my brother John and myself, during which time he had no manic episodes,” his daughter Helen wrote me. Suddenly, after eleven years of mental health, Horace Frink relapsed into catastrophic nostalgia for his bygone years. Reminiscing with his daughter over a watercolor of the Paris Opera House, he was assailed by the memory of his heady days with Anjelika Bijur. “Angie was radiant in a velvet cloak,” he told Helen. “We stood looking over Paris. She turned to me and said, ‘Horace, with your brains and my money, we can have the world.’” The next day he checked himself into Pine Bluffs Sanitarium in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and a week later he was dead of heart disease at age fifty-three. A packet of love letters was found next to his bed. No psychiatrist would dare say it, but Horace Frink had died of a broken heart.

Not long before his death, Helen asked her father what message she should give to Sigmund Freud, if she ever met him. Frink’s answer: “Tell him he was a great man even if he did invent psychoanalysis.”

Another well-known Freud analysand who became a familiar face at
McLean was the editor, poet, and art collector Scofield Thayer.

Almost unknown today, Thayer was a brilliant, well-born literary and artistic entrepreneur who took over the editorship of
The Dial
during the brief period, from 1920 to 1925, when it could claim to be America’s preeminent literary magazine. Thayer’s
Dial
traced its roots to
The Dial
edited first by Margaret Fuller and then by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s, and it had become a money-losing, socialist soapbox for the likes of John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Thorstein Veblen when Thayer and his equally wealthy friend James Sibley Watson bought the magazine. Thayer and Watson turned
The Dial
into a money-losing, literary and artistic soapbox for the emerging expatriate avant-garde. Watson and Thayer poured thousands of dollars into the tiny (circulation 25,000) magazine, which was printed on paper good enough for reproducing works of art in full color. The owner-editors commissioned art from Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall, and they published forty originals by Pablo Picasso. By the ripe old age of thirty-five, Thayer could claim to have known every major literary figure in America and Europe and to have published most of them. He was a close friend of T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos, many of whom first reached an American audience in the pages of
The Dial.
Among its notable coups were the first U.S. publication of Eliot’s
The Waste Land
and Mann’s
Death in Venice.

Poetically handsome (“strikingly pale, with coal-black hair, black eyes veiled and flashing, and lips that curved like those of Lord Byron” is
Dial
editor Alyse Gregory’s overheated description of her employer and sometime love interest) and properly prepared at Milton Academy, Harvard, and Magdalen College, Oxford, Thayer was “too wealthy to have to work for a living and too interested in the arts to want to increase his inheritance by engaging in business,” according to one chronicler. The Thayers were prominent in Worcester, Massachusetts, a thriving mill city at the turn of the century. Scofield’s father owned several textile factories; his uncle Edward was nationally famous for his composition “Casey at the Bat.” Thayer even had the right enemies; Gertrude Stein hated him for refusing to publish her poetry. He was an intimate and early promoter of E.E. Cummings, who penned a classical “Epithalamion” for Scofield’s wedding to Elaine Eliot Orr and
who later fathered a child with Elaine, apparently with Thayer’s encouragement.
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