Gracefully Insane (16 page)

Freud continued to see Carl Liebman for five more years while his patient was pursuing graduate work at the University of Vienna. He chronicled his relationship with the wealthy young American in letters to Pfister:

In 1928, in a letter to Marie Liebman, Freud ventured a diagnosis: “I have no right to keep from you that the diagnosis in your son’s case is Paranoid Schizophrenia.” He admitted that “such a diagnosis means little and does not help penetrate the uncertainty about his future. Even [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau was such a case,
not less abnormal. Whenever I examine the analysis I tell myself that one couldn’t do anything for him but to give him much out of which he
himself
can make something.” Marie would later remark that her son understood that Freud had given him permission to embark on a “self-analysis,” which in his case meant holing up in a hotel room and shunning the outside world. In 1930, Freud gave up on Liebman and shunted him off to his own analysand and “adoptive daughter,” the American Ruth Mack Brunswick, apparently hoping that a female analyst might help Carl overcome his sexual fetishes. According to psychiatrist David Lynn, who reviewed Liebman’s case file at McLean, the patient got nowhere with Brunswick. He “withdrew into his psychosis, declared an end to his relations with his parents, and saw Freud one last time, in 1931.”

By interviewing Liebman’s doctors at McLean, Lynn culled many droll tidbits about the five-year-long, failed analysis. (Observing McLean guidelines, Lynn identified Liebman with the pseudonymic initials “A.B.”) During his meetings with Freud, Liebman remembered the great doctor’s chow dog seated quietly at his master’s feet. Freud generally smoked a cigar, waving it in the air to punctuate his speech. (Other patients reported that Freud lit cigars to celebrate diagnostic insights.) Freud never offered Liebman a cigar, which the patient interpreted as a rejection of his manhood. In sum, a bad experience for all concerned.

Like Thayer and Frink, Liebman was not a successful patient of Dr. Freud. After his brief acquaintance with Dr. Brunswick, Liebman journeyed to Paris for a few sessions with the celebrated Dr. Otto Rank, who first hypothesized on “birth trauma.” Soon afterwards he returned to New York City, traveling steerage and arriving with $150 in his pocket. He lived alone in the Mills Hotel and sent occasional postcards to his family. Seeking financial independence from his parents, he took driving lessons in order to become a cabdriver and washed cars at night to pay his way. But he soon ended up back in the parental ambit, accepting a small allowance from his father plus the use of a car. He started driving
his father to and from the Brooklyn brewery, but he proved to be a less-than-ideal chauffeur. While driving, “he was possessed with the fear of running over a child” and continually looked back over his shoulder to see if he had hit anyone. In 1933, in his parents’ bathroom, Liebman stripped to the waist and drove a bowie knife into his rib cage, beneath the left nipple. Even though the knife tip missed Carl’s heart by just a half-inch, the phlegmatic family doctor Stieglitz characterized the “performance” as “rather theatrical,” a classic suicide “gesture.” Immediately afterwards, Liebman was sent to yet another distinguished analyst, the increasingly famous Abraham Brill. After Frink’s breakdown, Brill had assumed the mantle of America’s Number One Freudian; he was chief of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and translator of Freud’s early works into English, Brill’s second language. It was Brill who recommended what would prove to be a lifetime stay at McLean. Noting that Liebman had been seen by no fewer than six psychiatrists in his brief lifetime—Dr. Hermann Nunberg, a Viennese disciple of Freud who had emigrated to Philadelphia had been added to the mix—Brill concluded that “analysis gave [Liebman] considerable insight, but has not at all changed his delusional trend.” As an example of such a delusion, Brill noted that Liebman “imagined that he was followed by detectives.” In a letter written at almost the same time, Liebman’s sister Kitty explained to McLean officials that the family knew of their son’s various New York adventures because “we had him followed by detectives from the time he left Vienna. He knows nothing of this.” It is true; even paranoids have enemies.

Upon admission to McLean, Liebman and his family joined in a ghoulish debate over whether he should reenter analysis inside the hospital. In 1935, McLean was pushing a precursor of milieu therapy, placing their patients in a salubrious, comfortable, nonthreatening environment and hoping for the best. Carl wanted more psychoanalysis, but his mother argued no. “If Drs. Pfister, Freud, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Brill and Nunberg have not helped
you by analysis, it is pretty well proven that analysis will not help you,” she wrote to her son’s McLean doctor. She added, “Freud had given him up, saying: ‘I have given you all of which analysis is capable, now you must try to get along by yourself’ (which I fear Carl Liebman has construed as his own written self analysis of which even Freud told him, I could not cure).”

But in a ten-page, handwritten cri de coeur addressed to his parents from the hospital, Liebman protested his forced incarceration (“a police arrest”) and his inability to engage in “self-analysis,” or any kind of analysis, at McLean:

Psychiatrists who analyzed Liebman always mentioned his intelligence and his ability to articulate his dilemmas, even if he seemed incapable of solving them. In this first letter from McLean, Carl correctly predicted a long stay:

Almost immediately, Carl’s father wrote back, explaining the family’s motivation for the forced commitment.

Carl contemptuously dismissed the McLean routine as “eggnogs, shower-baths and occupational ‘therapy.’” But in fact, the hospital had many cures in mind for him. Within months of Liebman’s arrival, Dr. Manfred Joshua Sakel passed through McLean and met with him, among others. Not surprisingly, Liebman’s parents authorized Sakel to perform his innovative insulin coma therapy on Carl. There is no evidence that it accomplished much. Nurses’ notes indicate that Liebman remained paranoid. Around Christmas time in 1935, a nurse took him shopping in nearby Waverley Square.

Carl also attempted a feeble “escape” that year. He attacked a fellow patient in 1943. In 1948, he made a supervised visit to his parents in New York. The following year, psychiatry unveiled its latest panacea for Carl’s suffering. Yet another doctor from New York’s Upper East Side traipsed up to McLean in 1949 to examine the disturbed patient. As always with doctors, Liebman impressed him with his general articulateness and mastery of certain conversational subjects. “My recommendations that topectomy be performed rather than a lobotomy were based on the patient’s apparent intellectual preservation and the desirability of maintaining as much intellectual function as possible,” this doctor wrote. Liebman underwent a topectomy, performed by the man who had invented the procedure, in the operating room at McLean.

Just a year later, another New York doctor traveled northwards from Craig House, a pricey psychiatric sanitarium, to interview Carl. “I took the opportunity of asking him whether he considered his illness a neurosis or a psychosis and I used those words,” Dr. Jonathan Slocum reported to McLean’s superintendent Dr. Franklin Wood. “His answer was that he was not qualified to say, but that he believed that the diagnosis of ‘Paranoid schizophrenia was probably correct.’” Slocum continued:

The radical lobotomy was never performed.

Carl Liebman’s condition never improved. But he did become better known. Although the first analysts trained primarily in Freudian methods showed up at McLean in the late 1930s, it was not until the centennial of Freud’s birth—1956, when his face appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine—that virtually every man and woman entering psychiatry were steeped in Freudian teachings. The New York and Boston Psychoanalytic Institutes, which certified “genuine” Freudian analysts, reigned supreme. The top spots in academic psychiatry were reserved for the men and few women who had undergone a multiyear training analysis with an Institute-certified doctor. Small wonder that Carl Liebman became a celebrity at McLean.

Liebman stories abound, such as his greeting doctors on the manicured pathways with the salutation “I am my father’s penis.” That greeting ended when one interlocutor countered with “Good morning, Mr. Penis.” In his old age, Liebman had substituted a relatively common hand-washing fetish for the more exotic jockstrap fixation of his youth. “He thought he was tainted with a sexually transmitted disease, and if he could, he would get a hold of surgical tape and bind his hands,” recalls Dr. Paul Dinsmore, who administered Upham while Liebman was there. “Then he would get contractions, which was a shame, because he was a talented artist. He could have had more privileges, but when he got off the grounds he would go down to Corbett’s drugstore and get more surgical tape to bind his hands.”

By the 1960s, Liebman was just another debilitated old man serving out his sentence at McLean. Nurse Constance Holian remembers him as unsociable but popular among the dotty Upham crowd. He was famous as the Man Who Knew Freud, but he was hardly an advertisement for the achievements of talk therapy: “We used to joke that Freud didn’t do him much good,” she recalls.