Dreaming for Freud (4 page)

He must get down to business fast. He commences speaking in as dry and matter-of-fact a tone as possible. He explains that it is by association, by linking one thing to the next, the present to the past, that the causes of her malady will be found. Nothing is too insignificant or too shocking to be stated aloud.

She glances at him blankly without moving, her gaze dull, her full lips slightly turned down at the corners in a proud scowl.

He thinks of the Baroness Fanny M., who could be quite surly at times and had told him to stop interrupting her with his numerous questions, a remark which as it turned out had been most helpful over time, however it might have caught him up short. His own mother, too, has that proud will of her own, even arranging to have her birthday fall on the same day as that of the Emperor Franz Joseph.

“I am not going to hurt you in any way,” he reassures her. He says, “I need you simply to tell me freely and frankly what comes to mind without censoring your thoughts. I will leave the subjects entirely up to you and I will listen carefully, and unlike your family or friends, consider what you have to say as objectively as possible. I would like to hear your side of the story your father has told me.”

“See if you can bring her to reason. She has an overstimulated imagination, nourished by reading unsuitable texts. She has been telling all sorts of wild tales,” the father has said. He is aware that the father has an agenda that may be very different from his own, not to speak of the girl’s.

“Ultimately,” he says, “you are the one who must discover what it is that ails you. I am here simply to mirror your words.”

“A mirror?” she says dubiously, opening her eyes wide and looking at him directly.

He thinks of the many devoted, loving women he has treated, who have long sat in attendance by sickbeds in darkened rooms, as she has. These intelligent and often courageous women, Breuer’s Bertha P. among them, have taught him a lot with their vivid, frank talk. He remembers the young girl in the mountains who told him her sad tale of incest with more directness than most.

This one gazes at him with a flicker of interest in her dark eyes. “Within the confines of these walls,” he says, indicating the ancient Egyptian and Roman statuettes, “we will not be bound by false prudery.” One hour every day except Sunday will be reserved for their work together so that they may unravel the mystery behind her symptoms. “To quote the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras,” he says, feeling the need for a little Greek, “the symptoms—the phenomena that we see—are just the visible expression of something hidden. Something is surely locked away, and together we must find the key to open the lock. To accomplish this, we will have to call
un chat un chat
,” he says.

The girl says, in her dry, faint voice, “You said that before. And how long will you take to cure me?”

The doctor replies that, of course, it depends, but it might take up to a year.

She looks at him with disdain and says, “It would take you that long!”

He thinks of Goethe’s lines from
Faust
: “Not art or science serve, alone; patience must in the work be shown,” and ignores this and goes on with his explanation. He will ask her questions no one has probably ever asked her before and speak of subjects she may never have spoken of. “All we need is for you to follow what comes to your mind freely and frankly,” he says.

She looks up at this and says with a glimmer of humor in her eyes that surprises him, “I will try, though it might be easier just to make things up. If you tell me I have to say everything I actually
think
, it will
make
me think unspeakable, rude things! Are you sure you really want to hear them? You might not
like
what I have to say. I wouldn’t want to say anything that would
hurt
you.”

He smiles slightly at this and thinks this girl is bolder than many her age. Was the father right in his surmise? Has she been making things up? He asks, “You like to make things up?”

“Sometimes, yes. I do like to make up stories. But father is wrong.
I
know the difference between the truth and a lie. Truth is very important to me. I don’t lie the way
he
does,” she says firmly, narrowing her eyes at him. “Mostly it seems to me that no one actually wants you to tell the truth, though they might say they do. It is understood that I should say things that are pleasant and agreeable, things people want to hear,” she says, moving slightly on the sofa, relinquishing her reticule for a moment. She picks up a plump pillow with both her hands, holds it on her lap like a puppy dog, stroking it absently, then positioning it behind her and leaning back. She picks up her reticule and places it on her lap again. “That’s better,” she says. “My leg doesn’t hurt as much. As the day goes on the pain gets worse and worse. I don’t know why.”

The doctor recalls the numerous hysterical women he has treated for similar symptoms, common among women and even some men. Despite the revered Meynert’s opinion and the origin of the word, the doctor, like Charcot, is certain hysteria exists in both sexes. Has he not known hysterical symptoms himself—shortness of breath, heart palpitations, angina, fainting?

He has used various methods to cure these symptoms with varying degrees of success over the years: electricity, pressure of the hands, even massage, and finally just obliging the patients to confront a shameful secret from the past, one that is so often hidden even from themselves.

He has listened for hours with patience, sympathy, and interest, and he has had the humility to learn from his mistakes. But the patients are usually scrupulously polite, overconscientious, arriving on time, often trembling, weeping, begging for his help, sometimes even falling in love with him, throwing their arms around his neck. It is true that this one is being more or less forced back to see him.

Faced by her silence, he is not quite sure what to say to her. An older or even a younger person would certainly be easier. He is not used to rebellious adolescents and feels he is not quite sure how to deal with this one. He was never a rebellious adolescent himself. He has worked so hard for so much of his life, earnestly aware of the sacrifices his family made for the adored boy, his mother’s golden Siggie, given the privilege of his own
kabinett
, reading Shakespeare at eight, taking his meals alone, his sister’s musical ambitions stifled so that he could study in silence with the only oil lamp, in the scant space of the exiguous apartment, then sent to the university at considerable cost, so that he could pursue his medical studies.

He has to admit the girl’s concise speaking style is strangely convincing. He wonders how much her symptoms are simply inherited, how much she may be acting, how hysterical she is, after all.

Intelligent teenage girls are instinctively theatrical, often uttering sentences just to confuse people or to attract attention. It seems difficult to distinguish the acting from reality here, despite her assurances. It will be in her dreams that he will find the truth.

“Above all, I would like to hear about your dreams,” he tells her. “They will hold the secret to your symptoms.” In the dream, he explains, it is as though the sentinel, the night watchman of our conscious thoughts, can be evaded, and the hidden desires can emerge.

“I know you are interested in dreams. I am too, though I don’t always remember mine. My father told me you have written a book about them,” she says with a shrewd look in her dark eyes, which again surprises him. His patients rarely bring up his writings.

He thinks of his new book on dream interpretation, which he had expected would bring him instant renown but has only brought a few bad and even malicious reviews. He wrote to Fliess, wondering if there would, someday, be a plaque on the place where the “model dream” had come to him, announcing that this was the house where the mystery of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud. What folly!

He glances at the portrait of the handsome, bearded Fleischl that he has hung in an oval frame on the wall, that brilliant man, whom he admired so much. What a terrible tragedy! Suddenly he remembers Fleischl’s colorful parrot, wings spread, which he adored, and how he would talk to him. He will always regret bitterly the role he played in his death. He had been so hopeful that he could cure him of his morphine addiction with cocaine.

“It is through your own words that we will discover the cure for what has troubled you for such a long time now, your
tussis nervosa
, gastric pains, ambulatory difficulty, the loss of voice,” he says.

She says she hopes he can cure her fast, as she is in pain, but she continues to sit with her head slightly lowered, her petulant bottom lip protruding, her gaze on her lap. From time to time she impatiently throws a rebellious lock of hair behind her neck. He can see that she is not looking at him. Is she even listening to him? She seems to have little curiosity about or faith in the doctor who is supposed to treat her. He notices the shape of her ears beneath her small black hat, curiously shaped ones. He adds, a little sternly now—her continued sullen silence, the rigidity of her pose, her recalcitrance are beginning to annoy him—that her father is very worried about her. She stares back sullenly at him, her childish cheeks reddening.

She admits, “I can be terrible sometimes, it is true, because if I want something and I can’t get it, then I am after it regardless of whether my parents like it or not,” and she stares at him rudely.

He has confronted rude patients before. He thinks of the elderly woman all dressed in black who would receive him with an ivory crucifix clutched in her hand as though he were the Evil One, yet he had managed to ferret out her secrets.

“You have frightened your parents, you must be aware. Your father was particularly worried by your moment of complete unconsciousness after a quarrel with him, when you fell to the floor onto your face in the red-tiled corridor leading to the kitchen, he said. What was all that about?”

She replies, “I don’t remember anything about that except finding myself on the floor.”

“And the suicide note you left in your desk that upset them terribly?” he says, remembering the scream of the maid who had watched as young Pauline S., the wife of his best childhood friend, had thrown herself over the balustrade of his building in her elegant clothes.

“How on earth did they find the letter? It was shut up in my desk. Mother must have been snooping, as usual! Once, she found my imaginary diary and read it and thought that was all true!” She suddenly finds her voice, albeit a hoarse whisper, fueled by her rage, no doubt.

“We will find out why you are so unhappy, why you are suffering,” he continues, trying to speak gently but firmly.

She gives him another sullen look. “You would be unhappy too, if you had to spend your days sorting out pieces of string too short to use,” she says.

“I beg your pardon?” he asks.

“That’s the sort of task my mother gives me—useless things. She’s preoccupied with dust! The earth could crumble, and she’d still be dusting!” she spits out with disgust. “My father is a man of considerable means, as you undoubtedly know, so we have many servants, but my mother spends her time this way! The maids follow in her wake.” She explains that her mother constantly hovers over the housemaids. She breaks off and looks at him with her angry stare.

“But you must know all about that, about Mother and about Father, don’t you? You probably know more than I do! He’s made me come to see you to persuade me to be more reasonable, hasn’t he, which actually means more willing to do what
he
wants me to do?” she says, coughing and sputtering over her sentences, bending forward and putting her hands on her thighs.

“I’m not here to persuade you to do anything,” he says firmly, thinking though that this girl is not far from the mark. On an impulse he says, “Your father
has
told me something about the problem, as he sees it, but I would like to hear about it from you, in order to form my own opinion. You, after all, are the only one who can help us find the truth.” Recalling that the father has described the girl as unusually well read and intelligent, he quotes from his beloved Goethe, “The first and last thing required of genius is love of truth.”

Suddenly the girl looks at him with a glimmer of something he takes for hope, sighs, and lies back down on his couch. He watches her breast heave with emotion, and she attempts to catch her rapid breath, her hands now relinquishing her reticule and fluttering like trapped butterflies to smooth her white organdy skirt.

S
HE KNOWS HE IS WAITING
for her to speak. She feels his impatience behind her head. This time he sits in a chair slightly at an angle to the sofa and behind her, so that she cannot see his face. She feels he is hiding back there, eavesdropping on a private conversation she is expected to produce, or as though he were playing hide-and-seek as she did with her brother in the nursery as small children, hiding from each other in the shadowy corners of the big room.

Yet what can she safely say? What stories can she tell to placate and satisfy this man, these men? What version of the truth will please them? Which of her words could actually help with her pain? What does this man want her to say?

He has asked her to tell him about her life, the history of her illnesses, when all these various troubles began. As if she could possibly do such a thing, even if she wanted to!

She says, “I only remember unimportant bits and pieces of my life. I don’t really know where to begin. I had the usual childhood illnesses, like everyone else. Really my whole life seems very ordinary to me. I am an ordinary girl, except for my recent illness, the pains in my legs, the trouble with my voice, my breathing.”

Her voice, which will sometimes disappear for as long as two weeks, has returned now. She is able to speak clearly, though her cough, which the doctor calls
tussis nervosa
,
comes and goes and makes her feel she will lose her breath. The pains in her legs and the right side of her stomach come and go mysteriously, too. For the moment she feels no pain at all in her legs stretched out before her.

“So?” the doctor says clearing his throat as though
he
were about to speak. An impatient man. Perhaps he wants to put her in the book he is working on now. She knows he has written several, and most probably about his patients, though she has not read any of them. Perhaps she should read the latest one on dreams. She is interested in them herself.

She would like to tell the doctor that what she sees in her mind at the moment as in a dream are odd things bobbing up on the surface of a rough sea, as they do after a shipwreck: all the flotsam and jetsam, the detritus of her life, thrown up onto the surface of dark waters. She hears shutters banging, the sudden clatter of footsteps on the stairs, she sees the deep blue water of the lake glinting, the brilliant light like knives; she sees herself running along the edge of the lake; she smells smoke. Is this smoke in this place or her past?

She sees some things so clearly, others not at all. Her whole life seems a jumble of moments of panic, situations which seemed so dangerous or embarrassing, so many humiliations. She sees danger and shame everywhere. She is so afraid of making a fool of herself. Her life does not seem a continuous stream, but rather a series of separate moments, photographs in someone else’s album. It is quite different from the suspenseful story, one thing causing the other to happen, which she has invented, writing about the engineering student she likes in her imaginary diary she now keeps hidden in a locked drawer.

So she remains silent, staring at the oval portrait on the wall of a bearded man, wondering who he is.

Even the doctor himself, whom she remembers from her brief visit two years ago, seems different, as if
he
were someone else. She remembers him as somewhat thinner, smaller, older, and wearing glasses. Instead, when she entered the room this afternoon, she thought he looked slightly plump, his nose shiny. He seemed rather cheerful, greeting her heartily, a man pleased with himself, or pleased with her appearance in his consulting rooms, an optimistic, perhaps even deluded man, telling her he can cure her horrid pains with words. He seems to her a typical Jewish petit bourgeois, a shopkeeper or even a dressed-up peddler, a very ordinary potentate. How could such a boring, middle-aged man, with his silly pinstriped pants and his mournful bow tie and the hand-stitching on his corduroy jacket, understand the strange story she has to tell? She hardly believes it herself. And in the end does this story have anything to do with her body, her aching limbs, her breath? How can talking make pain go away? Is the body so intimately connected with the mind? She does remember how, when she left her home for some days, she had become terribly constipated, unable to use the
klo.

“Start away!” the doctor says, eager to earn his fee, she imagines. Her father is doubtless paying him well.

“When I was very young,” she tells him, speaking clearly, her voice coming to her almost as though it belongs to someone else, telling someone else’s story, “I felt much more extraordinary because everyone told me how clever I was, how quickly and early I had learned to read and write. Everyone said I was such a precocious child. I learned languages and the piano fast. I loved music—I still do. I was even good with numbers and liked to play number games.”

“Numbers?” he says.

Her throat tickles. She must not start coughing, because once she starts, she cannot stop. She tries to relax as he told her to do but she feels her throat contract. She swallows. Lying on his couch for the second time, her stomach cramps, and she is afraid she might have to go to the
klo
. It is a perpetual worry in here. The first time she had to get up and go in the middle of the session, but when she got there nothing happened.

She remembers how another dreadful doctor had once made her take off her underwear and lie flat on her stomach when she was suffering from severe constipation. He had covered her back with only a towel and she had had to lie there disgracefully with her bottom stuck up in the air. Then he had reached up and put an electrode directly into what she thinks of as her most private part. With the force of the electricity there had been immediate and explosive results. She will never forget the shame of it, the awful, humiliating shame. She had wanted to die.

Now, recalling it, she has a pain down her right leg, and she feels nauseated. The office smells of cigar smoke, she realizes, which is what is making her feel nauseated, though the window is open on this sunny fall afternoon.

She has always hated the smell of smoke and has never allowed anyone, even her father, to smoke in her own room. This doctor, like her brother and her father and his friend Herr Z., she divines, must be a smoker. She wonders if the doctor smokes the same kind of cigars as her father, which, he has told her, old Emperor Franz Joseph smokes, too. The smell is the same.

“Yes? You were a precocious child?” he says.

“I was a wild girl in those early days, free and pleased with myself,” she tells him, smiling at the memory, seeing herself running fast, laughing in the woods that were close to their home, teasing her nursemaid, going through light and shade, running away from the poor, stout, breathless woman in her white cap and apron. She had even tormented her poor brother, touching his bed when he didn’t want her to. “Please don’t touch my bed,” he would say miserably, and she would do it again with the tip of her finger just to torment him.

As she lies there a memory comes to her unbidden, and she finds herself telling the doctor: “Sometimes I was even cruel. I remember making a ring with some other girls—it was at my cousin’s house, I think, at a birthday party, holding hands and circling a poor girl, a foreigner who came from England. We taunted her, telling her she had killed Joan of Arc. ‘You killed Joan of Arc!’ we shouted at her. I suppose we must have learned about it in some history lesson as being the fault of the English.

“In those days I didn’t have any trouble with my voice or my bowels. The whole world seemed a brighter place, lit up, sunny, and clear. I felt so clever. Everything came easily to me. Sometimes I would even sign my letters ‘from an undiscovered genius,’” she says and giggles at the thought. “I was not quite sure whether I would be a great writer or a great musician, but something great, I was certain. I knew I couldn’t be a painter as I was no good at that, though I do love to look at paintings. There
were
famous women writers, were there not, like the English writers Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, but the only great women musicians I could think of were sisters or wives: Mozart’s sister and Schumann’s wife, Clara. I wonder if I’ll be known only as Otto’s sister?” she asks the doctor and giggles.

The doctor does not giggle. He says nothing to all of this. He probably thinks she is far from a genius. He probably thinks there is no such thing as a girl genius, or certainly no girl who needs to tell her story to the world. Yet how important it seems to her to record what she imagines and feels, to share it with someone even if it is only her secret diary.

She hears nothing but the ticking of the clock, the occasional crackle of the fire that burns in the tiled stove, and the muffled sounds from the courtyard, the voice of a servant girl shouting out something.

“A wild girl? In what way?” the doctor asks eventually.

She tries to go on with her tale, her cough interrupting her words: “I felt I was just as clever as my brilliant brother—though perhaps he has a better memory than I do. He can quote endlessly from books. Did you know he wrote a play about Napoléon when he was just nine? Still I felt that there was little he could do better than I could, and certain things I understood much better than he did.”

The doctor does not show much interest or comment on her brother. Many years later, when Otto has indeed become famous, a charismatic social leader, she will learn that the doctor has advised him not to try and make people happy, because that is not what they really want.

Still she continues, “We were inseparable. I loved—still love him so much, more than my life. One of my earliest memories is of sitting very close to him with my arm around his neck and pulling on his earlobe and sucking my thumb. We were sitting up in the bay window in the nursery, and it was almost as if he were part of me, and I were part of him,” she says, so sad in the silence of this dim room that what she remembers is no longer the case—that she is now here alone with this silent, distant man.

What
is
the doctor doing back there? What is he thinking? She doesn’t hear him writing down her words or even moving. Could he have passed out, fainted, as she has done before? Is he dead? She doesn’t dare look back. She is like Orpheus in the underworld, unable to look back or the doctor will disappear. She doesn’t want him to disappear.

Or perhaps he is actually snoozing after a heavy luncheon, as her father does sometimes in his study. Has he drunk a few beers or glasses of wine? He might, after all, be a drinker or even take drugs. Who knows? He sports too neat a waistcoat, too shiny a gold fob watch, and too neatly clipped a beard and mustache. He probably visits a barber daily and goes for his stroll on the Ringstrasse, marching along doggedly with a distracted gaze, like all the good bourgeois of Vienna: the very earnest sort of person who is trying too hard. He is not as elegant, or playful, or aristocratic as her auburn-haired, blue-eyed father, or nearly as handsome, though the doctor does have bright eyes that seem to see her. Nor does he have any of her father’s charm, but perhaps that is just as well. He is not an ugly man, though quite old, of course, as old as her father, as old as Herr Z.

She speaks into the silence, “In the beginning, I could keep up with my brother, as he shared many of the books he read at the
Gymnasium
,
but now since he has continued with his studies at the university, where I am not allowed to go, he has passed me by. He is interested in things in the wider world. He worries so about the poor weavers who work in such difficult conditions, for such long hours, and for so little money in Father’s factories in Bohemia. Like my uncle, Karl, he is always talking about politics, about how he wishes to do something useful for his fellow man.

“But what possibilities do I have to help my fellow man or even myself, for that matter? And though he always
says
he loves me, and I know he does, what has my brother ever done for
me
in reality? He almost always takes Mother’s side in the end,” she says and clenches her fists against the rug on the couch.

She runs her fingers over the silky soft Persian rug which covers the couch where she lies, wondering why something that belongs on the floor should have been put on a couch.

She traces the zigzag of the pattern of white birds and the strange winged creatures with fanned tails. She is in a cocoon spun of silken threads by skilled hands. The doctor and her father are trying to lull her into a false sense of security with all this false luxury, this appearance of calm, the shutters drawn on the afternoon sun, the inner courtyard sounds muffled by thick walls, the silky carpet to caress her body, so that she will tell them her secrets, but she knows she is in danger in this place.

She has been carried off by her father into this dim, silent, shadowy room, an Aladdin’s cave or perhaps even the lion’s den, and if she doesn’t speak, if she doesn’t find the right words, like Scheherazade she will be put to death. This doctor trades in dangerous secrets in this small dark room, she suspects. What will he do with hers should she be so foolish as to share them with him?

From the doctor’s silence, she deduces he is not particularly interested in her studies or lack thereof, nor the injustice of her brother being able to study when she cannot.

“I have tried to learn what he was learning by reading on my own or with the fräulein and going to visit museums. Like you, I am interested in art. I have been to the Secessionist show several times.”

She wonders whether the doctor has so many art objects in his cluttered consulting rooms because he is afraid of emptiness, of space, of silence. What did the art teacher in the evening class call that? Something like
horror vacui
?

She stares at all the ancient figurines, deities and seers perhaps, from different places and ages that the doctor has collected. She doesn’t feel his answer to her question about them explained anything. She likes the little statue of a child, perhaps Roman, who has an old face, because it looks the way she feels, an adolescent who is already old. But he says nothing about that so she goes on, still bent on impressing him with what she considers her valiant efforts to learn.