Dreaming for Freud (13 page)

She will try to come up with a dream that will please him and distract him at least for a while. She looks around her room with its pale walls, the bed pushed against the wall, the bowl of dried flowers on the desk, the little pink lamp with its tassels by the bed. How much she has suffered and hoped in silence between these walls. She will try and imitate the dreams from his book. She will use the compression, displacement, and condensation he speaks of; she will intensify the ideas. She takes out her pen and copies the inscription in his book into her diary. Then she tries out a few dreams in its pages, attempting to make them sound just like the ones in the dream book, writing them in a voice that resembles the doctor’s and using exact details and conversation, which she doesn’t usually hear or anyway remember in her own dreams, but which seem to come up frequently in the doctor’s dreams and those of his patients, he reports. She imagines how he would interpret them and decides on two which she likes particularly. She decides to start with one, which is short and simple, and see his reaction and if she gets away with her ruse. Then she will take him a second one which is longer and rather more complicated.

S
HE BRINGS TH
E DOCTOR THE
first one. She is rather proud of it, though she is a little nervous that he might deduce her duplicity. She has kept this first one quite short and fairly simple and used bits and pieces of dreams she has really dreamed. She has added a line of dialogue and the images she knows the doctor will recognize. She has provided all the necessary elements: her father, her mother, her brother, a fire, and, of course, a jewel box which needs to be saved from the fire. The doctor, she has remarked, seems particularly interested in boxes of one kind or another, and she knows how he will interpret this one.

“I have a dream for you,” she says in a clear voice.

“Ah, excellent! Tell me what you dreamed,” he responds.

There is a fire in the house. Father stands before my bed and awakens me. I dress myself quickly. Mama still wants to save her jewelry box, but Papa says, “I do not want my children and me to burn up because of your jewelry box.” We hurry down, and as soon as I am outside I wake up.

“That’s it?’ he asks, and she nods.

“And when did you dream this?” he asks.

For a moment she is taken aback by the question, but she knows he likes to interpret numbers, and seems indeed to give them considerable significance, so she quickly says she has dreamed this three times, which doesn’t quite answer the question. Three is always such a good number: there are always three princesses or three princes in all the fairy tales.

The doctor, indeed, as she had expected, seems very excited by the dream. He does not question it for a minute but seems to swallow it whole, hook, line, and sinker. What a gullible man, she thinks, ready to believe whatever she says, and feels a little guilty. For a while he stops talking about Herr Z., her desire for him, and a possible marriage to him, as he encourages her to associate freely on the dream.

She would so like to please him, and she is aware she has been rude and disagreeable at times. She imagines he thinks of her as
recalcitrant
, a word he uses in his dream book to describe several of his patients who resist his interpretations. She feels she has wounded his self-esteem in a way. Perhaps this dream gift will really help restore his confidence in his work, and advance his career. This will be her gift.

She tells him quite truthfully how her imaginary dream reminds her of the moment Herr Z. came into her hotel room in the afternoon, after his proposal on the lake. She was lying down and taking a nap, and he gave her such a fright. She had, in reality, asked for the key to the room, so that she could make sure he did not disturb her again. She was particularly afraid he might enter the room when she was undressing and see her naked.

The doctor interprets the dream at some length, showing off a bit, like a little boy riding a bicycle with no hands. He says the escape from the house represents her wish to escape from
him
and leave the treatment, which is not so far off the mark. She thinks that this dream story does indeed express her fears in a way. She feels they are, indeed, all in danger, that their existence is precarious at best. She remembers the very real burning of her father’s textile factory a few years ago in Bohemia, something the doctor doesn’t seem to consider at all, or the recent trouble in the factories because of her father’s religion. She is glad her gift has enabled him to come up with all sorts of ingenious interpretations. He puzzles over every aspect of the dream and even writes it down. For the first time she can hear him writing down her exact words, and she is pleased.

When the doctor jumps to the inevitable conclusion, that the jewel box in the dream represents her lady parts, she cannot help saying, “I
knew
you would say that.”

“Because you know it’s true, don’t you? And what do you think about the smoke from the fire?”

T
HE DOCTOR SITS IN HIS
study thinking about the dream the girl has brought him and how he can use it. A useful dream, he can see. She has, like so many of his intelligent and wealthy female patients, brought him what he needs to demonstrate his theories.

He intends to use what he has learned from her in this analysis of the dream for his own purposes. Women’s sorcery, he realizes, as he looks around his cluttered room with all its ancient statues, need not always be destructive but can be used for his own purposes. He can use his understanding of this clever, attractive young woman, his ability to identify with her. He can use his own feminine side. He can write it down, write it up, analyze it, control it.

It is through the use of women that he, like the hero of Maupassant’s
Bel ami
, must advance, he understands. He has already used their early memories, their frank talk, their access to their feelings, which have helped him to understand his own sometimes incomprehensible desires. Women and the great writers, who know all and surely have access to their repressed longings, their bisexuality, and particularly the Greeks with Sophocles and the English with Shakespeare, have said it all before him. Now he must take charge of what they have discovered.

He decides that he
will
go to Rome, finally. His fears of contracting some sort of illness there are absurd. He will thrust his hand into the
Bocca della verita.
He will overcome his ambivalence and, unlike Hannibal, storm the gates, and once he has accomplished this, he will write to his influential patient who has repeatedly offered to use her connections in order to obtain his professorship. He has been passive for far too long and put himself through too much suffering. He has, like everyone, a feminine side, feminine intuition, feminine wiles, and it is time to stop denying it and to use it. He will take the path that others have taken for the sake of his career, his ambition, the well-being of his family, his faithful wife. He will scheme. He will plot and plan. He will use his connections, this influential woman and her husband and perhaps even her wealthy friend who has also offered to help. Given the situation, rejected again and again and often enough because of his religion, he must use every means at his disposal. He is tired of being poor and underestimated, passed over again and again for a position he deserves. He needs to take his destiny into his own hands. No one else will do it for him, he realizes. He will write to Elise Gomperz and ask her to use her connections, her money, her friend’s paintings, whatever she has in hand.

When he climbs into the conjugal bed that night he reaches over to Martha and wakens her with a caress. He turns her over, and enters her body from behind, and touches her until he hears her moan with pleasure.

C
ARRIED AWAY B
Y HER SUCCESS
with the first dream, she brings him the second one, which is longer and more complex. She would never have dreamed something this long and remembered it in such detail, but the doctor’s dreams are lengthy and filled with details he seems to have remembered. The last dream she read in the dream book is about his mother’s death, a dream which has made an impression on her with its beaked figures hovering over the body of the mother. It has given her the idea. Also, the doctor often talks about stations and trains, indeed, he has used the analogy of a train trip to describe an analysis: the first stage being the preparation for the trip, the acquisition of tickets, the planning of the route, and the second stage the actual voyage from one station to the next.

Again she hears him writing down her words:

I go walking in a city that I do not know, and see streets and squares that are foreign to me. Then I come to the house where I live, go into my room, and find lying there a letter from my mother. She writes that since I have been away from home without my parents’ knowledge, she has not wanted to tell me that Papa has fallen ill. Now he has died, and if I want to I can come. Then I walk to the station and ask, perhaps one hundred times, Where is the station? I always receive the answer: five minutes. Then I see a thick forest before me into which I enter, and question a man whom I encounter there. He tells me: another two and a half hours. He offers to accompany me. I decline and go on by myself. I see the station in front of me but cannot reach it. This is accompanied by the usual feeling of anxiety that arises in dreams when one cannot move ahead. Then I am home again, which I must have walked to, but I do not know anything more about it. I enter the porter’s lodge and ask him about our dwelling. The servant girl opens up for me and answers: Mama and the others are already at the cemetery.

She can really see this city in her imagination in the mist and the gray. She has seen it in a postcard her beloved sent her of a city in Hungary. The letter, of course, is a recall of the letter she wrote announcing her own intention to commit suicide, which she knows the doctor will recognize. Now it is her father who is dead in the dream. This will puzzle the doctor, surely, though he may think of this as her revenge on her father. The doctor likes to make analogies and link things together, she has learned, just as one does in a poem.

Indeed, he interprets the dream with glee, coming up with all sorts of convoluted and complicated reasons for the events, working on it diligently, almost as if she were not there lying before him on his couch, clutching her reticule, with her suffering body, her pains in the legs, her cough coming and going. He asks her for added information, and she speaks of looking up the symptoms of appendicitis in the encyclopedia.

“I like to look up things in the encyclopedia, to find the causes,” she tells him and thinks she has used his own book rather like an encyclopedia to look up the meaning of dreams. He has never complimented her on her curiosity or her ambition to learn the meaning of things, but surely that is what makes life interesting: the process of learning. She says that she had suffered from an attack of this kind, which several doctors felt might be the cause of her fever, the pains in her abdomen and down her right leg, and so she wanted to find out what it might be.

“When did this occur?” he naturally wants to know.

She doesn’t remember exactly but says this happened nine months after the scene at the lake with Herr Z., which makes him talk about an imaginary pregnancy and not the pains in her stomach or legs or an appendicitis.

“You seem to accuse me of being in love with everyone! So many people: my father, Herr Z., and perhaps even with you! It is very confusing to me. In the meantime I am still suffering from pains in my stomach and my leg, and I keep coughing and feeling as though I will not be able to breathe!” she says, but he doesn’t seem to pay attention to that.

It is her dreams that interest him above all and not her pains, she thinks, and certainly not
her
: one suffering girl. It occurs to her that if she were simply to turn into smoke, to rise up on his magic carpet and fly out of the room or become invisible and drift out the window, float out into his courtyard, he might not notice. He might just go on talking, making clever remarks, playing with her words almost as if they were a poem and this a literature class. He is much more interested in this dream, these images she has imagined, than in her real suffering.

How little sympathy he seems to have for a fellow human being. He is interested in a theory he wishes to prove—an imaginary pregnancy, which will prove her desire for Herr Z., which she has supposedly repressed, or her original desire for her father—much more than he is in the suffering of the dreamer, she realizes, with a little shock. He is looking for added information to prove his theories in the dream book, she supposes. It is an intellectual game for him, where he is on a treasure hunt for the gold he hopes will prove his theories and make him famous. She is not sure that he is particularly interested in making her, just one insignificant girl, well or happy. Perhaps he does not really think it is possible, though he said he did, and perhaps he is right. Perhaps it is impossible to be without pain of some kind, without suffering. But she also feels he is talking more about his own life than hers.

She wonders how she could get him to concentrate on her and what she is thinking and feeling. How can she reach him? How can she get him to pay attention to
her
? What weapons does she have at her disposal? She wonders what he would say if she were simply to tell him that she has decided to end the treatment, to leave. Would he then become aware of her suffering presence? Would he say he would miss her? Would he beg her to stay? Or at least advise her to continue her treatment in order to get well? Would he at least miss the money her father is paying him? How can she get a rise out of him, get him to react in some way to her real life, to
her
,
to her
?

Would he even say that he needs more time to cure her of her ills? For a mad moment she imagines the doctor down on his knees, his hands lifted in prayer, his male member thrusting in supplication against his trousers.

Suddenly she needs to know. She determines to tell him at the start of the next session, at the start of the year, that she is leaving, and to see what happens. Surely then he will pay attention to
her
,
take her words more seriously and beg her to stay. In the meantime she will change the subject slightly and tell him about a painting that intrigued her.