Dreaming for Freud (3 page)

He is a Jewish doctor, of course, the best kind, and has even been called a miracle worker, her father says, exaggerating, she imagines, as usual, as the carriage stops on the sloping street of the quiet and respectable, if not exactly distinguished, neighborhood, before the solid wooden door with the number 19 Berggasse. Their footsteps echoing, they go along the narrow, dark passage, which leads to the few steps on the right, up to the ground floor office with the sign on the brown door that announces, “Dr. Sigmund Freud.”

T
HE
PATIENT IS LATE, HE
thinks with annoyance, looking at his watch. He is afraid the father will not manage to convince the spoiled girl to come. She sounds as if she has become quite a handful. When he saw her briefly a couple of years earlier, she was not much older than his eldest girl, his sensible Mathilde, is today. He had proposed treating her then, but she had recovered sufficiently—or so he was told—and refused to return. Now, her father has insisted she do so. But will she actually turn up? Will the doting father convince his cosseted daughter to come?

They might at least have used the telephone to announce their delay. He has had that necessary apparatus, the telephone, installed in his office for several years.

He paces uneasily back and forth over the Persian carpets. He looks up at the statue of the two-faced stone Janus he bought recently, which seems to regard him with a superior snarl, and wonders if this new patient might be a mistake, but he tells himself he has little choice. He needs the florins, and the father has them.

The father has become extremely rich, whereas he, who was such a hardworking and brilliant student, has only a few patients this month, and must worry about money.

This paucity of patients is a continual source of anxiety. Herr E. has finally left after five years of therapy, and his faithful elderly patient has died, which has cut off a steady source of revenue. It has been a long time since Breuer referred anyone to him. Breuer has been very good to him over the years—they even wrote a book together—and has helped him financially again and again, but the man lacks courage. In the end he had fled, grabbed his hat in a state of panic and perspiration—or so he remembers being told—and run from his neurotic patient when she announced she was bearing his child.

He is reminded of his father’s story of being accosted in the street by an arrogant Christian who threw his father’s splendid cap into the gutter and told him to get off the sidewalk; he had simply stepped into the road, picked up the cap, and gone on his way. Only Fliess seems to have followed in Hannibal’s father’s footsteps, the father who made his son swear to take revenge on the Romans. Only Fliess has had the courage of his convictions, but perhaps this is at least in part because he has the means.

He thinks of all the people he is responsible for: his six children,
his worms
, who need new shoes; his wife, who complains about his extravagance; his sister-in-law, Minna, who has come to live with them since her fiancé died of tuberculosis five years ago and who has recently had an intervention; and Marie, their devoted maid.

Having known the helplessness that comes with poverty, he continues to fear it. His uncle, Josef, he knows, was tried and convicted of selling an enormous number of counterfeit rubles in a desperate attempt to attain wealth. His father, who had turned white after this event, had never recovered completely from the implications of his brother’s imprisonment. He remembers his own years of solitude and struggle, separated from his fiancée and desperately attempting to make a living. He recalls walking the streets of Vienna and staring with longing into the shop windows, going past Reitmayer and Ettlinger and the jeweler to the court, Schafransky. Since his father’s death, his own position is less precarious financially as he is no longer obliged to support him as well. Since his death he has even been able to begin his collection of antiquities. He looks with some satisfaction at the Florentine copy of Michelangelo’s
Dying Slave
, in his swooning stance.

He feels quite isolated within the world of medicine, even ridiculed. He remains unrecognized, passed over again and again for the professorship that would bring prestige and, above all, financial security, a position that has been accorded to people, usually Gentiles, much younger and much less accomplished than he, a position that surely he deserves. He has such a thirst for knowledge, such determination to find it, such clarity of mind, such ability to seize upon the essential and to render it understandable in crystalline prose. How his brain teems! He has missed so many opportunities for fame and advancement.

Above all he needs to document his theories with facts drawn from the lives of his patients. His critics have accused him of not giving verifiable examples to back up his theories. Perhaps this patient, if she ever arrives, will provide some.

He has left the door to his consulting room open and has become so engrossed in his thoughts that at first he does not notice the real girl standing in the doorway, trembling in her white dress like the sail of a boat in the wind. She looks younger than her age, this slip of a girl, dark haired, dewy eyed, and blooming with youth: her pale cheeks and forehead touched with a faint tinge of pink. She has a luminosity about her and despite her reluctance to enter, an unusual assurance in her stance and mien. She hesitates in his doorway in her delicate organdy dress with the green silk sash that accentuates her slender waist, an expensive dress, he thinks with a little pang of envy, the sort he cannot buy for his own three girls.

The girl stands there before him, ravishing in all her youthful splendor, her dark thick hair long on her shoulders, her broad gold bracelets glinting on her wrist.

Increasingly, his patients are from the small circle of wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie. He thinks of Anna von L., whom he saw sometimes twice a day, his
prima donna, as he called her,
from the wealthy Ephrussi family, who was brought to him because no one knew what to do with her, a woman of sophistication who taught him a lot in the end. This one’s dress he is certain his wife would covet, though after six children in almost as many years, she no longer has as fine a waist to show it off.

The tall, handsome father stands behind the daughter like a dark shadow cast on the bright waters, his hand possessively on her white shoulder. “I leave you in very good hands, my dear,” the father says in a mellifluous tone, smiling down at his daughter, and across the room at him with complicity. He does not smile back, just bows his head briefly in acknowledgment and waits for the father to leave, but the man lingers, leaning elegantly against the lintel. He wonders why he does not have the good grace to go and leave the daughter with him. Instead, he stands there smiling with all the assurance of the successful businessman he is, in his fine gray gloves, his dark suit, silk hat in hand.

He is glad he is wearing his best pinstriped trousers, a little bow tie, a new corduroy jacket with the hand stitching that he feels gives him a certain presence. Even decent clothes were a problem for him for many years. He had not known how to acquire all the necessary absurd accoutrements for his examinations: the top hat, etc., when he was obliged to present himself in formal dress.

He remembers how he kept an account, recording all his expenses, the money he spent on the two meals a day he felt he could afford—his books, and his cigars, his only extravagance for years. Sometimes, he could not afford to take a cab for his house visits. So many of his schemes, which seemed so hopeful, have come to naught. He thinks of his early lectures, his sparkling, inspired words wasted on so few attendees, and these all drummed up with difficulty; his book on aphasia, which sold only 257 copies and had to be pulped; his work on cocaine, for which Köller got all the credit, and he, only grave reproaches.

The father, he knows, has no such problems, his accounts on the contrary always on the credit side of the ledger at the Bank Ephrussi. His wife, unlike his own, has come with a fine dowry. He pays his bills with regularity and generosity, a good bottle of cognac or even opera tickets—the doctor has seen
Don Giovanni
, one of his favorite operas, in Salzburg thanks to him—thrown in from time to time. Both the father’s and the mother’s family have been successful in the textile business, like many of the Bohemian Jews based in Vienna who still have wool or linen factories in the Bohemian countryside.

Indeed, he thinks, the father’s childhood in a small country town must not have been very different from his own, though, unlike him, the father never showed much aptitude or interest at school, and did not attend the university.

As he stares at the father he sees tears glittering in the man’s blue eyes as he looks down at his daughter.

She does not look up at her father or at him, but gazes blankly at the carpet, her long lashes lowered sullenly. What secrets does her shuttered gaze hide? What is her story? What can he do for her? What does she want of him?

He beckons for the girl to enter his office and watches the father give her a gentle push. He ushers the elegant girl in, nods to the frowning father, who looks as though he might break down and weep, and closes the door firmly on him.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he says to the girl and indicates the ottoman, a gift from a grateful patient. The girl eyes it with suspicion and perches there stiffly as though sitting on eggshells, her back ramrod straight, feet planted neatly side-by-side, hands firmly clutching her reticule as though she were afraid someone might snatch it from her.

Since the girl’s first visit to him, she has seen many doctors who have not been able to help her. Her behavior has become increasingly troublesome at home. She needs to understand, the father maintains, that her demands are very rude and unreasonable, going even so far as to suggest he break off his friendship with old and dear friends of the family. She, who was so angelic, who looked after him with such devotion in his various illnesses, has become sullen and bad tempered with both her parents, and her symptoms are worse, particularly the cough, the pains in her leg, the aphasia.

He stares at her hands. Gestures tell us a great deal, he has learned from his favorite writers as well as from Charcot, a
visuel
who had the nature of an artist, a man who saw, who taught him not to take anything for granted but to look and look again in order to understand. He thinks of Charcot saying, “
La théorie c’est bon, mais ça n’empêche pas d’exister.
”
She has long-fingered hands with white knuckles, and the nails bitten down to the quick. She looks as if a slight breeze could unseat her and carry her off.

The doctor recalls his bashful patient, Herr E., who would blush with the desire to ravish every woman he saw, perhaps a more common feeling than is generally admitted to by those of his sex.

She seems to stare with fascination at the lithograph he brought back from his year in Paris.

“What is wrong with the girl?” she asks, gesturing toward the lithograph without looking at him.

Taken aback for a moment, he stares at the beautiful Blanche Wittman, seeing her anew through this girl’s eyes: her smooth shoulders and bodice indecently exposed, leaning back into the arms of Charcot’s assistant, the lucky doctor Babinski, surrounded by a group of staring men during one of Charcot’s Tuesday lessons.

“Too tightly laced,” he deems it expedient to reply and thinks of the talented Blanche, whom they called the “Queen of Hysterics.”

When this girl finally directs her gaze toward him her eyelids seem heavy, the long, dark lashes weighing them down. Her eyes are large and wide spaced, like her father’s, and lucent but sullen. He realizes with a little shock that this girl is in a rage. She gives him a blank but angry stare. He thinks of the English expression “
if looks could kill.
”

For a moment he regrets no longer being able to use hypnosis on a girl of this kind. It might be easier to get her to comply. He thinks of his early success with the mother whom he hypnotized, who could not feed her baby. He has been obliged to give it up as, unlike Charcot, he has often had difficulty putting his patients to sleep, which was perhaps a blessing in disguise, as it has forced him to come up with other, more lasting methods.

He stares back at the girl and is about to explain his new method, what Breuer’s former patient has aptly dubbed “the talking cure,” when she asks disconcertingly, looking around the room disdainfully, “Why do you have all these old statues?”

“The psychoanalyst,” he says, drawing himself up, “like the archaeologist, must clear away layer after layer, as though digging down through a buried city, in order to reach the deepest layers of the patient’s mind to discover the secrets that lie buried there.” He points to the Roman statue of a child on the table by his chair and thinks of the city of Rome and how he both wants and fears to visit it. He is afraid of contracting an illness there in the summertime, which is when he is free to travel.

“How very interesting!” she says in an inimitable tone and peers at the statue, rather like a grande dame being led through a museum and glancing at the objects through a lorgnette.

For a moment he would like to give her a shake. He remembers how easily Charcot had access to Blanche Wittman’s memories of a traumatic childhood through hypnosis: her childish, unprotected body sexually abused again and again. He remembers Charcot saying “
toujours la chose génitale—toujours, toujours!
” and wondering why, if the problem was always genital, no one ever mentioned it then.

Years later he will hear of the repeated amputations of Blanche’s beautiful body, which left her with only one hand and arm. Her fingers, her other hand and arm, and both her legs were all removed because of the effects of radiation, the result of her work in the photography department at the Salpêtrière Hospital where she had been the star in Charcot’s weekly demonstrations.

Now he says, “Our bodies are sometimes able to speak when we ourselves cannot. In a sense our stories are written on them. What I hope is to have you translate your story from the pain you feel into words.”

He tells her he would like her to lie back on the couch, to relax, even to close her eyes if it helps her to concentrate, and simply to tell him what passes through her mind.

“You mean you want me to tell you everything I think?” she says, looking at him sharply, frowning, sounding and looking appalled at the thought, and for a moment, as the fine curtain lifts a little in the breeze and he hears a rush of beating wings, this young girl brings back his first love, the young Gisela Fluss, with her dark hair and the wild hare’s look in her eyes. In the small, dimly lit room he suddenly sees the hills as blue as the sky, the grass quivering and billowing, and smells the sweet fragrance of the trees and the wildflowers all around her. For a brief moment he experiences a full-blown surge of adolescent lust, as he did returning to the village where he was born. It surprises and appalls him, here in his consulting room, this reawakening of a buoyant and total discovery of sexual longing which he had felt in his sixteenth year. It had made him horribly awkward, reduced him to a stammering young fool. Something not to be repeated, ever. He knows all the dangers of passion. He needs to be careful this girl does not catch him in her net.