Human Traces (32 page)

her', as she put it. She had, at this time, an irrational fear that she would die virgo intacta and felt she could not rest easy until she had experienced the sexual act, though her modesty and upbringing of course made such a thing impossible. When she returned home for the holidays, she found that her father had hired a secretary, Frau E, a commanding character who had to some extent taken over Kitty's role in the house. A domestic war seemed to break out between this woman and Katharina, who not only resented the way that Frau E had usurped her place but found, to her alarm, that she felt physically fascinated by her. Things came to a head about a year later when Katharina was seventeen, when, after they had drunk some of her father's wine, the secretary seduced her and apparently showed her how to masturbate to orgasm, something Katharina had never achieved before. The important events of the next few years can be briefly summarised: on leaving school, Katharina resumed her position as her father's principal helpmeet and secretary; Frau E parted from the family on good terms, and wrote frequently to Kitty, whom she called 'my little weasel'. Their secret was not discovered by either parent and the incident itself was apparently not repeated. Soon afterwards, Katharina's father fell seriously ill with a heart complaint and was obliged to retire from work; the task of nursing him fell to Kitty, since her mother declared herself too distraught and was not in good health herself. During this time, the house in Vienna was frequently visited by Herr P, a lawyer of about thirty-five who was a junior partner in Herr von A's company and his confidant in business matters. Kitty would be obliged to leave the sick room when Herr P came to visit so that the men could conduct their business in private. On such occasions, she would either repair to the kitchen to instruct the maid to make some refreshment for the visitor or would go to her own bedroom until such time as her father should need her again. She would also, quite naturally, follow the same course of action when the doctor came to see her father. On one such occasion the regular doctor could not come but sent some sort of lo cum tenens in his place, a young man less well-mannered than the regular physician, who, after his consultation with Herr von A came into Katharina's room without knocking to tell her he was leaving. She had felt irrationally furious and embarrassed by this intrusion, she said; she felt powerless, 'as though my hands were tied', and she thought it typical of this young man's presumptuous yet stealthy manner in her father's house. For almost two years Fraulein Katharina nursed her dying father, with little help from her mother, who was suffering from chronic anaemia, and none at all from her younger brother and sister, who were respectively at university in Heidelberg and at Kitty's old school near Wolfsburg. She was doubtless lonely and vulnerable at this time, though was still able to leave the house occasionally and to see friends of her own age, and usually of her own sex. She said that she 'fell in love easily' with young men, but distrusted her emotions and had never had any sort of sexual relations with a man; her mother told her she was 'too affectionate' and she was inclined to agree. During all the time of her father's illness, Herr P was the most regular visitor, though various family friends called for half an hour or so in the evening and Frau E remained a regular correspondent. One day at lunchtime, Kitty left her father with the doctor and went down to the kitchen where she made a tray for herself and took it back to her room so she could be near at hand if he should call. While she was drinking some courgette soup and eating a bread roll, the door swung open after a single knock, and the doctor came in to tell her that the worst had happened: her father was dead. Kitty, overcome by grief at the loss of this most loving and gentle of fathers and distraught that after a vigil of almost two years she should not be present at his bedside when it happened, was violently sick, vomiting her lunch back over the tray. After persistent questioning on my part, she confirmed that she had no recollection of abdominal pain before this moment, but that it had been intermittently with her ever since. Fraulein Katharina had been extremely co-operative during the preceding ninety minutes; she had evinced some surprise at the intimacy of some of the enquiries, but had done her best to respond, even when evidently embarrassed by the memories that I had unearthed. I judged it prudent to terminate the consultation at this point. April 20 [evening] Katharina was in much better spirits this evening. She had had a bran bath in the morning and ate well at lunchtime; she had had some galvanic treatment on her shoulders and arms and then a warm bath before coming to see me. Her menstrual period had started today after an interval of only two and a half weeks; although she seemed pleased by this, I promised her that if she were fully hypnotised, I could reset the interval, using suggestion, at twenty-eight days. We began by bringing the story of her life up to date, and this was easily accomplished. Her mother had recovered her health quite quickly after her father's death and within the year was engaged to be married again to Herr P, her father's young colleague whose visits to the house had been a regular but, she claimed, to Katharina a less than welcome feature of life during her father's illness. The newly married couple would move to a house in the outskirts of Vienna and the family home would be sold; Katharina expected to set up house in an apartment in town with her younger sister Anna, since her brother Gustav was now working in Paris. In the time immediately preceding our first appointment, she had been searching for a suitable place and helping to pack up her parents' old house. I had spent many hours reflecting on what Fraulein Katharina had told me in the course of our previous meeting. I felt that a fairly clear picture of the trauma that had precipitated her hysteria was now available to me (and must by now also be taking shape in the mind of anyone to whom the outline of the case has been related), yet I was puzzled by the fact that the patient had found access to the relevant memories without being in a state of hypnosis, since it is a principle of resolution that pathogenic memories are not present in the conscious mind, or at least only in summary form. I continued my questioning, therefore, on the assumption that a part of what Fraulein Katharina had told me was the result of what I shall call a 'delegate' or 'proxy' memory that is to say a recollection which, while not in itself mendacious or incomplete, is of interest to us chiefly for what it tells us of something more important which is absent or withheld. With this thought in mind, I decided to see if I could find a more direct road into her unconscious by asking her about her dreams. She affected to find this amusing at first, assuring me that her dreams were commonplace and lacking significance, but I emphasised that, on the contrary, as Maury had explained so well, the commonplace is the one thing that is never present in our dreams. Eventually, she was able to tell me of a dream that she could clearly remember after some months, aspects of which still troubled her. She was in a large street in Vienna, probably the Karntnerstrasse, and running up the stairs to a set of rooms in an office building where her mother lay dead. She was in a panic because she had to make the arrangements for the burial as soon as possible, yet she felt that someone very important was missing. "I felt it was imperative that I take matters into my own hands," she said, 'yet I felt paralysed from doing so." It was this haunting or double sense of absence, not only of her mother but of someone else, that made the dream so memorable. She was also worried about her clothes, which had become mud-spattered as she ran down the Karntnerstrasse; there was a more suitable dress in a wardrobe in the corner of the room where her mother's body lay, but she feared to open it because there was a mouse hole in the adjacent wainscoting and she had seen a single eye glinting out at her from inside. April 25 [evening] I had seen Fraulein Katharina on a number of occasions since she revealed to me the content of her troubling dream, though without feeling that she had subsequently disclosed anything of a great significance so far as the resolution was concerned. I felt that the preconditions for the onset of her hysteria were now established beyond doubt: namely that a traumatic incident had been deliberately suppressed by her conscious mind because she found the implications of it intolerable. This sum of psychological excitation, being denied proper release, had converted itself easily through the pathways of somatic innervation into the distressing symptoms the abdominal discomfort, the joint pains in arms and fingers from which she now suffered. The basis of her decision to suppress the memory of the incident could quite easily be seen to spring from an unendurable conflict between the thoughts and desires it gave rise to on the one hand and, on the other, the entity of her social personality, composed of the duties and affections that had been expected of her. The last laugh, as it were, had remained with the suppressed ideas, however, which had turned pathogenic. I was now ready to reveal to the patient my understanding of the pathological process that had taken place and indeed I was eager to do so, since it must be remembered that it was distressing to see the anguish of a young woman of such principled and gentle character. Before proceeding, I asked her to recall the occasions on which she had suffered her aphonia and found that the first instance had followed swiftly on the incident in which the young doctor so suddenly interrupted her reverie in her bedroom. She could not place the second incidence with any degree of certainty. I began my resolution of Fraulein Katharina's difficulties by asking her to re-examine the dream she had described to me. Who was it that she believed to be bafflingly absent from the scene? "Why, my father of course!" she responded in a light-hearted way. I explained to her that the interpretation of dreams depended on their being understood essentially as the fulfilment of a frustrated wish a longing which the censor who watched her thoughts by day had compelled her to displace. The release of such a wish in her dream, albeit disguised and clothed in paradox, was the parallel process to that of resolution with which we had been engaged: her dream offered a semaphore version of a displacement that we should more surely establish in waking hours; we might pore over it, I suggested, as over a pictographic script. Since she was unable to identify the desire of which her dream was a fulfilment, I was obliged to do so for her. "You wish your mother dead," I explained. She cried out in remonstrance that she had no such desire, though this was of course entirely to be expected since, had she been conscious of her true feelings, they would not have been suppressed. "The reason you wish your mother dead," I continued, 'is to leave you free to marry Herr P, with whom you have been in love for more than two years." Fraulein Katharina, as I anticipated, indignantly denied that she had had any amorous feelings towards Herr P, whom she described as 'ingratiating' and irritating'. She did concede, however, that she felt her mother's remarriage followed with indecent haste on the death of her father. When she had calmed herself, I continued therefore to explain the resolution. The person whose absence so distressed her was, as we have seen, Herr P. Her mother's death ought to have freed him to marry Kitty, so it was to be expected that the lawyer would at least be present in what sounded like his own office. Her anxiety over her clothes (the funeral dress, the mud-spattered skirt) could be explained, as so often, by the reverse: she was anxious about her clothing precisely because she wished to be naked, as she had many times imagined herself with Herr P. The most conclusive detail of the dream, however, was the mouse hole in the wainscoting and her fear of the little animal which prevented her from arranging her dress or undress as she desired. Was it not true that Frau E had called her 'little weasel'? She herself had volunteered the fact that in the scene of childhood exposure, when she had enjoyed showing herself to her brother in the woods, she had also wanted to touch the genitals of her little friend Maria, while they were still wet, 'to lure something warm out of her." In Katharina's unconscious, the act of masturbating had become associated with the idea of small animals in their holes or burrows; doubtless Frau E s successful manipulation had involved the appearance of the clitoris from within its protective hood, like a timid animal that subsequently withdrew. At the moment she felt she had triumphed over her mother and secured the love of Herr P, she feared that Herr P knew both of her connection -with Frau E and of her solitary habits which disqualified her from possessing that which she most desired. Even at that moment she had felt a need to 'take things into her own hands' as though the frustrated part of her perversely still wished to demonstrate to Herr P that she was unworthy of him. I then asked Katharina to return to the moment when her abdominal pains first started. The doctor came into her room to tell her that her father had died; she vomited her lunch back onto the tray: from that moment, she had not been free from pain. Naturally, she ascribed her reaction to grief: shock at the loss of her adored father, and chagrin at being absent from his bedside when it happened. However, it was clear that the emotion that she truly felt, in order to become pathogenic, must have been otherwise What her vomiting in fact revealed was her revulsion at what the future now held in store for her: the death of the father had released her mother to marry Herr P an idea she literally rejected or threw out. The intermittent pains in her lower abdomen were a mnemic symbol or aide-memoire of that distressing emotion, which had been at once held outside the normal physiology of her consciousness. Since her father's death, she had been without a confidante: Frau E was gone, her brother and sister were away, and her mother's fondness for Herr P had ruled her out as a friend. The scope of Katharina's duties was wide, and she performed the whole of the mental work that was placed on her, in the winding-up of her father's estate, the organisation of his papers, and the emotional support she gave to other members of the family with her usual conscientiousness. In addition to the loss of her father and all