The Little Book (21 page)

Freud could see early on that Herr Burden walked a tightrope, trying valiantly to withhold information yet, through his compulsive nature, very much accustomed to expressing everything that popped into his head. Eventually, the doctor was confident, if they went at it long enough, all would be revealed. And it would not have taken the great doctor long to conclude that in the patient’s invented reality Freud himself was a very important player, something of a highly influential celebrity, in the league with, dare he say, Copernicus or Newton or Charles Darwin. This part of the reality explained that Herr Burden’s arrival at Berggasse 19 was not accidental. And the conversations flowed voluminously. Without divulging the specific details of the doctor’s own future world, this Herr Burden was willing to, or unable not to, construct his arguments based on those details, leaving a trail for the perceptive scientist to follow. And from those arguments, the ever-patient doctor of the mind could piece together at least part of the world the man inhabited, probably constructing notes between visits. At the same time, Dr. Freud would have had to acknowledge that he genuinely liked this man.

Basically, you see, Sigmund Freud had no reason not to play along. Somewhere in the process, this giant of a thinker—a total devotee of science and empirical evidence—must have wondered about the possibility that eventually he would come upon a patient whose unconscious ramblings would concoct an accurate, or at least more or less accurate, version of the real future: vehicles powered by the new internal combustion engine, telephones everywhere, wireless communication through voice and picture, mass global wars, weapons of huge destructive ability: evolutions on a gigantic scale, all predicted from existing technologies taken to logical outcomes. If an infinite number of monkeys, pecking away at an infinite number of typewriters, could eventually produce
Hamlet
, then eventually an individual unconscious, in delusions, could create a real future. At first, Freud would have listened intently from an objective distance. But eventually even the most objective scientist ran the risk of being seduced. Somewhere along the line, we know from the journal entries, the great scientist suspended the rules of therapy and began conversing.

“Aren’t we all subjective, Dr. Freud?” Wheeler said. “Haven’t you just like the rest of us been swayed by your own subjectivities?”

“Subjectivities?” Freud would have said, nonplussed.

“Your own relationship with your father.”

Freud moved in his chair ever so slightly but basically he took the blow, having trained himself well to have no reaction to the projections of even the most hostile patients. “And what of my own father?”

Wheeler paused in one of those moments when he was not sure how much knowledge to divulge. “Haven’t you let your feelings of aggression toward him as a boy shape your generalizations about all little boys?”

Freud gave his visitor a suspicious look. “You have read my writing, I take it.”

The visitor was on thin ice here obviously, careful to divulge nothing that Freud did not already know. “I am familiar with your ideas about fathers and sons,” he said, as noncommittally as possible.

“You seem to know a great deal about my newest thinking.”

“You may conclude that,” Wheeler said cautiously, now the one shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “But I need to be careful here.”

Freud’s eyes bored in for a long moment, considering perhaps just how deeply he could indulge the man’s delusion. “You can be frank with me, Herr Burden. I understand that you are in a difficult position. But you do not need to worry that you will affect my thinking. I am going to be what I am going to be and think what I am going to think without any slips of yours ruining things.”

“Thank you,” Wheeler said, giving the comment just a moment’s thought. “You have been operating in a pristine world,” he continued.

“Meaning?”

“I mean that your patients are completely untouched and uncontaminated by psychology.”

“Meaning?”

The words now came pouring out. “They have never been asked about deep inner emotions. In school they were not asked to write about feelings. Parents do not read books about child rearing. Women with premenstrual tensions are not given leeway. No one has suggested to them for years that their ailments might be psychosomatic. In fact, no one in Vienna in 1897 even knows what that word means.”

“I see,” said the great listener.

“You have seen many people overcome by symptoms that you suspect are psychological in nature and not derived from physical causes. You discover that they seem cured by hypnosis.”

“You know of my work with Dr. Charcot in Paris?”

Wheeler nodded. “I know that the use of hypnosis proved to you that hysterical illnesses exist, and you made them go away with hypnosis. But those cures didn’t last. So you abandon hypnosis, but your practice with it has led you to your great yearning: what is the true source of hysteria, its
etiology
, as you call it?”

Freud nodded. “Go on,” he encouraged. “I am impressed.”

“You realize that the great majority of your patients, mostly women, report some sort of sexual assault by a father, an uncle, a brother, and you conclude that the early sexual trauma, incomprehensible to the child, is the cause of the hysteria. You reported that in a well-publicized lecture. You have launched the idea. It will come to be known as your ‘seduction theory.’ You have offended most of your colleagues in the medical establishment of this city, but you have staked out your turf. You have begun to make a name for yourself. You have brought into the daylight the incredible power of sex.”

Wheeler had hardly stopped for a breath. Freud sat watching him, transfixed, now uncertain whether to join in the discussion. “And hypnosis, ” Freud said cautiously. “Where does that leave hypnosis?”

“Hypnosis,” Wheeler continued, “is the door through which you entered, but it was not enough, and easy as it is to get dramatic results, and to draw patients in this pristine city where hysterics abound, it was not good enough for you. You devised a new technique.”

“And that would be?”

“Talking,” Wheeler said confidently. “You discovered that merely by getting the patient to talk, you could bring about much of the spectacular cessation of symptoms that you had arrived at by hypnosis, and it seemed to last.”

“And that tells us?”

“The cause of the hysteria is something that has not been talked about before. It has been suppressed for some reason. Talking about it somehow frees it and brings it forward into the light of day where the mind can work on it.”

“The original precipitating trauma.”

“Exactly,” Wheeler said enthusiastically.

“It’s miraculous, is it not?”

“Yes. And in this city at this time the idea of cure by such a simple means is surprising, almost unbelievable. And yet you can prove it. You have encountered great success. It all comes from that fact that people have not talked before.”

“And that is why you say it is a pristine world, Herr Burden?”

“You are in new territory. It’s Eden.”

“And things are different, I take it, in the world you come from?”

“I’ll say.” Wheeler shook his head. “Where to begin? Imagine a world—” Wheeler paused, trying to find the words. “Imagine a world in which conception, infection, detection, and guilt have been neutralized. A world in which sex is freely practiced openly outside marriage—beginning with teenagers—in which women are admitted as equals in number and status in universities, medical and law schools, in which children are raised without corporal punishment, with an abundance of lessons and activities, in which schoolteachers really care about how children are feeling, where adolescents have sex education, where married couples are given counseling on conflict resolution and methods of intercourse. A world in which a seemingly endless variety of drugs and chemicals have been developed to counteract negative psychological conditions and to produce ecstasy.” Wheeler paused again for breath. “And, imagine most of all, Dr. Freud, a world in which your ideas have been accepted as a religion and you are considered the most influential thinker in the century, sainted, revered, condemned, scrutinized, and critiqued, and in minute detail.”

The great doctor was now shaking his head in disbelief.

“Imagine a world,” Wheeler continued, “in which you are so famous that you will become an adjective.”

“You mean I would be Freudian?” the doctor said, smiling.

“Exactly,” Wheeler said, dead serious. “And how would you be right now, if you knew such a world was coming?”

The great man gave the idea some thought. “I would have no choice but to be what I am right now, would I?”

“Perhaps not.”

“Why
perhaps
?”

“Well,” Wheeler said, drawing in a deep breath. “It seems that much of what you have come up with so far is defensive, against the fact that you know the medical establishment is offended by what you have discovered and by the fact of your Jewishness. You rocked them back on their heels by saying sexual abuse was at the bottom of everything.”

“I thought you would add that I have accused them of molesting their own children.”

“So that is what the talking has led you to. Your patients talk and talk and suddenly their images and memories come back to trauma associated with sexual assaults, and that is what you have brought forward to the elders of the medical establishment. Hysteria is caused by sexual abuse at an early age.”

“I thought that, and I exposed that. But—”

“Enter your new theory.”

“And what is that?”

“Oedipus.”

Freud at this point would have looked surprised, shocked suddenly, and Wheeler would realize in an instant that he had made a great error, that he had gone too far. Freud had followed him patiently, even enjoying his diatribe describing the great doctor’s evolution over a decade’s work. Wheeler realized in a moment his new dilemma. He could refer to any of Freud’s public statements up until this moment; they would be common knowledge, talked about by any Viennese academic or medical student. He could mention any of Freud’s theories in the future—interpretation of dreams, the pleasure principle, totem and taboo—because the great man had not thought those up yet, and they would be unknown and foreign to him. But what he could not do—how he had touched a raw nerve—was mention those ideas on which Freud was currently ruminating, as he had just done with Oedipus, a theory that has not yet been made public. Wheeler had stumbled onto the very moment when the great doctor was formulating his monumental discovery, the one his critics said abandoned the plight of abused children, and the one his devotees said set him free to become the most influential thinker of the next century.

“How do you know about my Oedipus thinking?” Freud said, suddenly turning serious, sensing a threat. “Just this morning I wrote to my friend in Berlin about it. It is highly private.”

Wheeler froze for a moment, realizing his error, for the first time feeling the cold sweat of the risk he was taking. The two men stared at each other. “I saw the book when I came in,” Wheeler said suddenly, taking a wild stab.

“Oh, that,” Freud said, motioning over to his desk, where Wheeler saw for the first time a volume of plays by Sophocles. “You are very observant, Herr Burden.”

“I have a high interest in Greek mythology,” Wheeler backpedaled.

Freud’s eyes searched his guest’s face, looking for some sign that he might be being manipulated. “Myths are the dreams of cultures,” he said finally. “They tell much about the human unconscious, don’t they?”

“So enter Oedipus.”

“Exactly,” Freud repeated, as if suddenly enjoying the conversation.

If we are watching for the moment when the relationship turned, we will notice it happening here. Now it was the great doctor who felt compelled to speak. “It has occurred to me that we are subject to the same dilemma as Oedipus. It means that the stories that my hysterical patients tell are metaphoric and imagined and
do not
stem from real sexual assault by their fathers.” The doctor’s fierce dark eyes looked into his guest’s. “That will come as a great relief to thousands of adults in Vienna. Don’t you agree, Herr Burden?”

“I agree, Herr Doctor. But maybe you oughtn’t to let them off the hook so fast. Perhaps you abandon too quickly the possibility of real seduction. Perhaps you are pulling away too quickly from the controversial.”

“And you think I desire to avoid controversy?”

“No, I know you are not afraid of controversy. In fact, there will be those perhaps who think you invite it.”

“That I prefer controversy? That I enjoy this self-flagellation?”

“I didn’t mean to imply—”

Freud stopped him. “No, no, Herr Burden. You do not offend me. I have heard that over the years. I appear masochistic to some.”

“You are after truth,” Wheeler said, returning his intense gaze. He could see that the doctor was touched by the empathy. “That means you step on many toes, sometimes even your own.” That brought back the doctor’s smile. “Now, I want to hear more about your Oedipus idea.”

A new warmth had come into Freud’s eyes, as if he was actually enjoying himself. “I am beginning to believe,” he said slowly, “that falling in love with the mother and jealousy of the father are the universal events of early childhood, and if that is so, we can understand the riveting power of
Oedipus Rex
, in spite of all the objections raised by reason against its presupposition of destiny.”

“Very interesting,” Wheeler said.

A break came in their conversation. Freud fixed his guest in his gaze for a long hard moment, a look of true concern now on his face. “So
this
, Herr Burden, is where you think me dead wrong?”

“No,” Wheeler Burden said. “We will come to that.”

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