The Interpretation Of Murder (34 page)

    Jung grasped Freud under the
shoulders and laid him down on the sofa. Freud looked to Jung suddenly old and
powerless, his fearsome faculty of judgment now as limp as his dangling arms
and legs. Freud came to within a few seconds. 'How sweet it must be,' he said,
'to die.'

    'Are you ill?' Jung asked.

    'How did you do that? That noise?'

    Jung shrugged.

    'I will reconsider parapsychology -
you have my word,' said Freud. 'Brill's behavior. I'm deeply sorry. He doesn't
speak for me.'

    'I know.'

    'For a year I have placed too great a
demand on you to keep me informed of your doings,' said Freud. 'I know it.

    I will withdraw the excess libido,
that I promise you too. But I'm worried, Carl. Ferenczi saw your - village.'

    'Yes, I have found a new way to
rekindle the memories of childhood. Through play. I used to build whole towns
when I was a boy.'

    'I see.' Freud sat up, handkerchief
to his forehead. He accepted a glass of water from Jung.

    'Let me analyze you,' said Jung. 'I
can help you.'

    'Analyze me? Ah, my fainting just
now. It was neurotic, you think?'

    'Of course.'

    'I agree,' said Freud. 'But I already
know its cause.'

    'Your ambition. It has made you
blind, horribly blind. As I have been.'

    Freud took a deep breath. 'Blind, you
mean, to my fear of being dethroned, my resentment of your success, my
unstinting efforts to keep you down?'

    Jung started. 'You knew?'

    'I knew what you would say,' said
Freud. 'What have I done to warrant that charge? Have I not advanced you at
every turn, referred my own patients to you, cited you, credited you? Have I
not done everything in my power for you, even at the price of injuring old friends,
conferring on you positions I could have retained for myself?'

    'But you undervalue the most
important thing: my discoveries. I have solved the incest problem. It is a
revolution. Yet you belittle it.'

    Freud rubbed his eyelids. 'I assure
you I do not. I appreciate its enormity all too well. You told us a dream you
had on board the
George Washington.
Do you remember? You are deep in a
cellar or cave, many levels below ground. You see a skeleton. You said the
bones belonged to your wife, Emma, and her sister.'

    'I suppose,' said Jung. 'Why?'

    'You suppose?'

    'Yes, that's right. What of it?'

    'Whose bones were they really?'

    'What do you mean?' asked Jung.

    'You were lying.'

    Jung didn't reply.

    'Come,' said Freud, 'after twenty
years of seeing patients prevaricate, you think I can't tell?'

    Still Jung made no answer.

    'The skeleton was mine, wasn't it?'
said Freud.

    'What if it was?' said Jung. 'The
dream told me I was surpassing you. I wished to spare your feelings.'

    'You wished me dead, Carl. You have
made me your father, and now you wish me dead.'

    'I see,' said Jung. 'I see where you
are going. My theoretical innovations are an attempt to overthrow you. That's
what you always say, isn't it? If anyone disagrees with you, it can only be a
neurotic symptom. A resistance, an Oedipal wish, a patricide - anything but
objective truth. Forgive me, I must have been infected with a desire to be
understood intellectually for once. Not diagnosed, just understood. But perhaps
that is not possible with psychoanalysis. Perhaps the real function of
psychoanalysis is to insult and cripple others through subtle whispering about
their complexes - as if that were an explanation of anything. What an abysmal
theory!'

    'Listen to what you are saying, Jung.
Hear your voice. I ask you only to consider the possibility, just the
possibility, that your "father complex" - your own words - is at work
here. It would be a terrible pity for you to make a public pronouncement of
views whose true motivations you saw only later.'

    'You asked if we could speak
honestly,' said Jung. 'I for one intend to. I see through you. I know your
game. You ferret out everyone else's symptoms, every slip of their tongue, aiming
continually at their weak spots, turning them all into children, while you stay
on top, reveling in the authority of the father. No one dares tweak the
Master's beard. Well, I am not in the least neurotic. I am not the one who
fainted. I am not incontinent. You said one true thing today: your fainting was
neurotic. Yes, I have suffered from a neurosis -
yours,
not mine. I
think you
hate
neurotics; I think analysis is the outlet for it. You
turn us all into your sons, lying in wait for some expression of aggression
from us - which you have made certain will occur - and then you spring,
shouting Oedipus or death wish. Well, I don't give a damn for your diagnoses.'

    There was perfect silence in the
room.

    'Of course you will take all this as
criticism,' said Jung, a note of diffidence creeping into his voice, 'but I
speak out of friendship.'

    Freud took out a cigar.

    'It is for your own good,' said Jung.
'Not mine.'

    Freud finished his glass of water.
Without lighting his cigar, he stood and walked to the hotel room door. 'We
have an understanding, we analysts, among ourselves,' he said. 'No one need
feel any embarrassment about his own bit of neurosis. But to swear that one is
the picture of health, while behaving abnormally, suggests a lack of insight
into one's illness. Take your freedom. Spare me your friendship. Good-bye.'

    Freud opened the door for Jung to
pass through. As he did so, Jung had a final remark. 'You will see what this
means to you. The rest is silence.'

    Gramercy Park was unreasonably cool
and peaceful. I remained on the bench a long time after she ran off, staring at
her house, then at my Uncle Fish's old house around the corner, which I used to
visit as a boy. Uncle Fish never let us use his key to the park. At first I had
the confused idea that, since Nora went home with the key, I would not be able
to get out. Then I realized the key must be for getting in, not out.

    Though it was hateful to me in every
possible way, I was obliged at last to concede the truth of Freud's Oedipus
theory. I had held out against it so long. To be sure, several of my patients
had produced confessions onto which I could have imposed an Oedipal
interpretation. But I had never had a patient admit, point-blank, without
interpretive gloss, to incestuous desires.

    Nora had admitted hers. I expect I
admired her self- awareness. But I was irredeemably repulsed.

    'To a nunnery, go.' I was thinking of
Hamlet's repeated injunction to Ophelia, right after 'to be, or not to be,' to
get herself to a convent. Would she be 'a breeder of sinners'? he asks her. 'Be
thou as chaste as ice… thou shalt not escape calumny.' Would she paint her
face? 'God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.'

    I think my heart's reasoning was as
follows: I knew I could not stand to touch Nora now. I could hardly stand to
think of her - that way. But I was damned if I would stand the thought of any
other man touching her either.

    I know how irrational my reaction
was. Nora wasn't responsible for what she felt. She didn't choose to have
incestuous desires, did she? I knew this, but it changed nothing.

    I rose from the bench, running my
hands through my hair. I made myself concentrate on the medical aspects of the
case. I was still her doctor. Clinically speaking, Nora's admission that she
had witnessed last night's assault from above was much more important than her
acknowledgment of her Oedipal wishes. I had told her that such experiences were
common in dreaming, but when combined with the very real cigarette burn on her
skin, her account sounded closer to psychosis. She probably needed more than
analysis. In all likelihood, she ought to be hospitalized. Get thee to a
sanatorium.

    Nevertheless, I could not bring
myself to believe that she had inflicted the initial set of wounds - the brutal
whipping she suffered Monday - on herself. Nor was I prepared to acknowledge as
a certainty that last night's attack was an hallucination. Some memory
associated with medical school flashed in and out of my head.

    New York University was not far
downtown. As it turned out, the gate to Gramercy Park was indeed locked shut. I
had to climb out - and felt, unaccountably, like a criminal as I did so.

    Walking through Washington Square, I crossed
under Stanford White's monumental arch and wondered at the murderousness of
love. What else might the great architect have built if he hadn't been gunned
down by a mad, jealous husband, the same man whom Jelliffe was trying to have
released from the asylum? Down the street was New York University's excellent
library.

    I began with Professor James's work
on nitrous oxide, which I already knew well from Harvard, but saw nothing there
meeting the description. The general anaesthesiology texts were one and all
useless. So I turned to the psychical literature. The card catalog had an entry
on astral projection, but it proved to be a piece of theosophical raving. Then
I came across a dozen entries under bilocation. Through these, after a couple
of hours of digging, I finally found what I was looking for.

    I was fortunate: Durville provided
several references in his just-published book on apparitions. Bozzano had
reported a highly suggestive case, and Osty an even clearer one in the May-June
Revue Metapsychique.
But it was a case I found in Battersby that eliminated
all doubt. Battersby quoted the following account:

    I struggled violently so that two
nurses and the specialist were unable to hold me… The next thing I knew was
some piercing screaming going on, that I was up in the air and looking down
upon the bed over which the nurses and doctor were bending. I was aware that
they were trying in vain to stop the screaming; in fact I heard them say: 'Miss
B., Miss B., don't scream like this. You are frightening the other patients.'
At the same time I knew very well that I was quite apart from my screaming
body, which I could do nothing to stop.

    I didn't have a telephone number for
Detective Littlemore, but I knew he worked in the new police headquarters
downtown. If I could not find him there in the flesh, at least I would be able
to leave word.