The White Hotel (14 page)

From this point, however, she became a little livelier and more frank, as though relieved that her burden of unreal perfection had been lifted. She even revealed, shortly afterwards, a flash of sly humour. She was describing to me one of her recurrent hallucinations, of falling through the air to her death. Her eyes twinkled for a moment and she said, “But I’m not having a baby!”
¹

She came one day with a dream. Normally she slept poorly and dreamt little: itself an aspect of her resistance. So a complete dream was a welcome rarity, and I expended a good deal of effort in trying to make sense of it. Here is the dream as related by Frau Anna:

   
I was travelling in a train, sitting across from a man who was reading. He involved me in conversation, and I felt he was being overfamiliar. The train stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere, and I decided to get out, to be rid of him. I was surprised that a lot of other people got out too, as it was only a small place
,
and completely dead. But the platform signs said
Budapest,
which explained it. I pushed past the ticket collector, not wanting to show my ticket, because I was supposed to go on further. I crossed a bridge and found myself outside a house which had the number 29. I tried to open it with my key, but to my surprise it wouldn’t open, so I went on past, and came to number 34. Though my key wouldn’t turn, the door opened. It was a small private hotel. There was a silver umbrella drying off in the hall, and I thought, My mother is staying here. I went into a white room. Eventually an elderly gentleman came in and said, “The house is empty.” I took a telegram out of my coat pocket and gave it to him. I was sorry for him because I knew what it contained. He said, in a dreadful voice, “My daughter is dead.” He was so shocked and sorrowful I felt I didn’t exist for him any more.

At my first hearing of the dream, I became alarmed, for it told me that the dreamer was quite capable of ending her troubles by taking her life. Train journeys are themselves dreams of death; and in this case all the more so, since she had got off “before her stop” and “in the middle of nowhere.” Avoiding the guard was an obvious allusion to the proscriptions against suicide; and the bridge was yet another symbol of dying. In a sense, Frau Anna’s dream could not have been clearer; yet I was also sure it contained many other elements of a more personal nature. I therefore asked her to take the dream bit by bit and tell me what occurred to her in connection with it. She had already had some training in dream interpretation from having previously analysed a few minor specimens; furthermore, since she was intelligent, I had encouraged her wish to read up some of my previous cases.

“Something occurs to me,” she said, “but it cannot belong to the dream, for it happened a long time ago, and really was of no importance in my life.”

“That makes no difference,” I said. “Start away!”

“Very well, then. I suppose the man in the train reminded me of someone who pestered me when I was travelling from Odessa to Petersburg to try and make a life for myself. It’s—what?—twelve years ago and I had forgotten it completely. It wasn’t particularly scaring, because there were plenty of other people about. But he leaned across and kept talking to me, in a rather obvious way; asking me what I was going to do when I reached Petersburg, and offering me his help in finding somewhere to live. It just got annoying, and in the end I had to move to a different compartment.”

I asked her if anything had happened to her recently to make her dream of the experience; and prompted her by recalling a few details, such as the book her companion had been reading in her dream.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I remember the young man in the Petersburg train was a nuisance because he was talking when
I
wanted to get on with my book. It was a copy of Dante, which I had to concentrate on to understand because my Italian was not very good. And now you mention it, I suppose my brother comes into the dream.”

I should interrupt at this point to say that Frau Anna had recently experienced a rather disturbing event. Her brother, with his wife and two children, had decided to leave Russia, because of the revolutionary turmoil, and emigrate to the United States; and they had stopped off in Vienna to say, as it were, hello and goodbye to Anna and her aunt. The patient had not seen her
brother for several years, and now might never see him again. Although—or even because—they had never been very close, the reunion and parting had depressed Frau Anna still further.

“When we were saying goodbye at the station, my brother covered the awkwardness by taking his time in choosing books for the journey. I recall thinking that Dante’s
A New Life
would be appropriate; except that my brother is not interested in the classics, he’s a very practical person. He bought himself some thrillers. It was absurd to think you could buy Dante at a station bookstall anyway.”

I was beginning to see the way the dream was going. I recalled to her the numbers of the houses, and asked her if they were of any significance.

She thought hard, but admitted bafflement.

“Could it be that you yourself are twenty-nine years of age?” I suggested. “And your brother is—how many years older? Five?”

Frau Anna agreed, surprised by her dream’s mathematical logic.

“You stopped first at the door of your own house. It should have been the right key but it wasn’t. Instead, you were able to walk into number 34—your brother’s residence, so to speak. You’re only a guest there, so you see it as a private hotel.” I asked her if she recognized the man who came into the room. I called to mind his words, “The house is empty.”

After a time, she was able to summon up the association. Her brother had rather tactlessly remarked how upset his father was at their going; for he had gone into his father’s business and continued to live near by, after his marriage. Frau Anna remembered thinking rather bitterly that
now
her father would feel lonely, in
his empty house; whereas he had never expressed more than conventional regret at her leaving home, nor any keen desire to see her again.

At this point my impressions of her dream became a certainty. Her brother’s departure, complete with wife and family,
en route
for
a new life
, contrasted with her own sense of having reached a dead end, or rather, of being on a pointless journey. Her brother had always had the assurance of being his father’s favourite, and he knew where he was going: unlike Anna’s girlhood journey to a distant city, which had clearly been a last desperate attempt to make her father take notice of her existence. He had been quite willing to let his innocent daughter battle with physical or moral dangers—foreshadowed by the pressing young man on the train.

Two phantasies, I suggested, mingled in her dream. If her father should receive a telegram saying she was dead, then at last he might be sorry. But side by side with that wish, not contradicting it so much as reinforcing its tragic thought, was the wish that she might never have been born—as a girl, as Anna. If only she could have taken her brother’s place! She quits the train journey which is her own destiny, to enter an impossible existence as her brother. In the private hotel, the white room stood for the womb of her mother, which awaited only the coming of Anna’s father to conceive the male child. The drying-out umbrella in the hall was symbolic of the discharged penis. Her father brings the new life, because without a
son
his “house is empty.” Anna was dead—by suicide or prophylaxis; it did not matter which, and he did not care. His shocked and sorrowful reaction was the product of her wish-fulfilment. Her dream knew that too: she “did not exist” for him.

The young woman was overcome by the sadness of her dream,
and disinclined to dispute my interpretation to any serious extent—except on one point, of a melancholy nature, which she did not have the heart to tell me about, and which I myself will reserve till the proper time. In any case it did not affect the overall meaning, which was altogether apparent.

During our discussions, while I was questioning her about the nature of the young man’s overfamiliar attentions on the train, she recalled a forgotten fragment. She did not think the new material of any importance, but I have learnt from experience that dream elements which are forgotten at first but remembered subsequently are usually among the most vital. So it was to prove in this case, though its full meaning was not to become clear until much later on in the analysis.

   
I said to the young man I was going to Moscow to visit the T_____s, and he replied that they wouldn’t be able to put me up, and I’d have to sleep in the summer-house. It would be hot in there, he added, and I’d have to take all my clothes off.

The T_____s, she explained, were distant relatives on her mother’s side, who had settled in Moscow. Her mother and aunt had spent holidays with them in their youth, and they had maintained affectionate contact with Anna’s mother after her marriage. Frau Anna had never met them, but according to her aunt they were a warmhearted and hospitable couple. Her aunt, in fact, had mentioned them only the day before: recalling wistfully the holidays she had spent there, and wishing she could take Anna to meet them, since she was sure a break would do her niece a world of good. But they were old now, and might not even have survived the troubles.

The fragment appeared to me to express the young woman’s
yearning to free herself from the sad constraints of her present life and to reclaim the lost paradise of the years with her mother: that is, in effect, to be naked in the “summer-house” or house of blissfully hot summers. She did not disagree with this interpretation; and also brought to mind a memory of those far-off years which she found amusing, as well as affecting, to recall.

Their house in Odessa lay in many acres of semi-tropical trees and shrubs, which ran down to the very edge of the sea. There was a tiny private beach. The summer-house was in the midst of a grove of trees in a remote part of the garden. The previous owners had let it go to ruin, and as a result it was little used. One scorchingly hot afternoon, everyone had scattered in the grounds and the house, driven into isolation by the heat. Anna’s father was probably at work, and she believed her brother had gone off for the day with some friends. Anna was hot and bored, playing listlessly on the beach, where her mother was standing at her painting easel and so not willing to be disturbed. Having been scolded for chattering, Anna thought she would try to find her aunt and uncle. She wandered through the grounds, and eventually came upon the summer-house. She was pleased to see her uncle and aunt inside, but they were behaving in a way she could not understand; her aunt’s shoulders were naked, though normally she kept them covered from the sun, and her uncle was embracing her. The embrace continued, they were too absorbed to notice Anna’s approach through the trees, and she slipped away again. She returned to the beach to tell her mother the strange story; but her mother had abandoned her easel and had gone to lie on a flat rock, and appeared to be sleeping. The child knew there were two circumstances when on no account must she disturb her mother: when she was painting and, even more
so, when she was asleep. So, disappointed, she wandered away again, back to the house, to have some lemonade.

What was I to make of this memory? It was very much an adult’s view; but this was not proof that we were dealing with a phantasy. I have my doubts if we ever deal with a memory
from
childhood; memories
relating to
childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later period when the memories were aroused. The young woman was amused by her recollection of her first glimpse of adult sexuality; while at the same time her heart was touched by the knowledge of her aunt’s tender intimacy with her uncle, in the recreative atmosphere of a summer holiday in Odessa; more especially as her aunt now found it too painful to talk about those times.

However, it was necessary for me to ask whether she had perhaps witnessed more than she recalled? If she had, her memory could take her no further; and indeed it seemed highly improbable that a young married couple, who might withdraw to the privacy of their room, should take such a risk of embarrassment. Nevertheless, the memory’s appearance in Frau Anna’s dream seemed to suggest that it was significant. It was not impossible that it was connected with her hysteria; for those whom Medusa petrifies have glimpsed her face before, at a time when they could not name her.

The days and weeks following brought little advance. For this, probably both patient and physician were to blame. Frau Anna, for her part, withdrew altogether behind her defences, and sometimes made a worsening of her symptoms an excuse for not coming to me. To be fair to her, I am sure that she felt her pains to be unbearable. She pleaded with me to arrange for
an operation, for the removal of her breast and her ovary. For my part, I confess that I grew irritated by her unhelpfulness, and infected by her apathy. She remarked once that she had thrown a scrap of food to a dog in the street and it was too feeble and emaciated to crawl to it; and that she herself felt much the same. I found myself abandoning analysis altogether, on occasions, and simply urging her not to think of taking her life. I pointed out that suicide is only a disguised form of murder; but it would be a pointless exercise, unlikely to have any effect on its intended victim, her father. Frau Anna said it was only the unspeakable pains which would ever make her think of ending it all. She was quite rational during these discussions. Apart from her debilitating symptoms, no one would have taken her for an hysteric. There was something impenetrable, which increased my irritability. I considered using her evasiveness as an excuse for bringing the treatment to a close; yet in fairness I could not bring myself to do this, since, in spite of everything, she was a young woman of character, intelligence and inner truthfulness.