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A Consultation with Sigmund Freud
The Scene: Vienna, Austria in the year 1897. Dr. Johannes Andreas Seite visits Dr. Sigmund Freud. Upon arriving at Freud’s consulting room at Berggasse 19, Freud silently motions Dr. Seite to recline on the couch. Dr. Seite begins, unprompted:
Please forgive me for being so late, my arrival was delayed by a gruesome accident near the university, I was immobilized in street traffic . . . crossing in the heavy rain on the corner of Währingerstrasse and Schottenring a man slipped and fell under a heavy horse-drawn wagon and one of the wheels ran over his head, fracturing his skull and killing him instantly, there was no pulse . . . I was unable to help him . . . I felt impotent . . . the horror of it, the blood . . . and, stopping at the scene, I overheard his father and lab assistant say – I believe they mentioned he was a physicist – I overheard that the man was generally absent-minded, frequently preoccupied with his thoughts, which, one might conjecture, contributed to the wretched fellow’s demise . . . I suppose . . . are you familiar with Melville? . . . “Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries” . . . do you recognize that? . . . a line from Moby Dick, an American novel . . . perhaps you are familiar with it? . . . it’s a book about a whaling voyage, an obsessive quest on “the bold and rolling” sea for a sperm whale, perhaps you are familiar with it . . .
Dr. Freud interrupts to acquaint his new patient with the method of free association he employs, “So say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway car and describing to someone inside the car the changing views you see outside.”
Dr. Seite continues:
Yes, yes . . . uncannily, last night alone in my dimly lit, wood-paneled study, the gas lamps providing barely sufficient light, I imagined that I was the captain of a sailing ship alone in his cabin plotting an ocean voyage, engaged in studying maps and charts of winds and ocean currents, and, brooding on Moby Dick, I picked off the bookshelf my time-worn copy of the text, my obsessive, marginal notes attesting to the keen interest the book aroused in me at one time, and, perusing the pages, I came across the line, But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must . . . and straight away I thought about my consultation with you today, for here I feel I must explain myself . . . I . . . I have been having a disagreeable dream for some time now, Dr. Freud, perhaps you could shed light on its deeper significance . . . the dream recurs with some regularity, un rêve obsédant, I believe the French call it . . . I am walking down the stairs of a house, the house resembles my childhood home . . . I have nightmares about a man breaking into the house and me coming down the stairs to find him eating eggs and sausages . . . the stranger stands at the staircase landing eating eggs and English-style blood sausages . . . and I feel inhibited on the stairs, as if moving with difficulty . . . I first had the dream after my wedding, oh, that was in late summer last year, our wedding was in Venice, and what a phenomenal event that was, I asked my mentor and friend, Professor Marburg from the medical school – I graduated in ninety-one – to be my best man, he’s much older, but we share a similar outlook, I have the sense he thinks I’m the son he never had, for my part I suspect Marburg is a stand-in for my inner ideals – he has a singular personality, I lack the skill to portray him adequately – then, too, he calls me out on my shallow conceits, my petty social perjuries, if you will . . . it was Marburg who referred you, quite by accident . . . by happenstance I was in his office where I noticed a copy of your book on hysteria on his desk, he’s familiar with your work through word of mouth . . . in any event, the wedding . . . making our way to Venice we encountered violent storms, it was actually quite frightful, a dreadful train ride, the station manager said the railroad bridge at Alba and the imposing bridge over the Adige at Verona collapsed only half an hour after we crossed them . . . in fact, we were the last people to traverse the second of the two . . . we arrived in Venice on Sunday September 6, a hazy, late summer afternoon, the image of Venice emerged gradually as if by magic through the mist as our ship approached the city bit by bit . . . we stayed at the Hotel des Bains, a newly-opened hotel in Lido, we were the inaugural guests, our room looked out over the ocean . . . the beach reminded me of Wannsee Beach in Berlin, where I grew up, . . . sensations of distant times . . . Venice, a fairy tale city, to be sure! . . . gondolas sliding quietly back and forth, in and out of narrow canals under centuries-old bridges in the mild waves lapping against decaying brick walls . . . a jumble of locals and tourists jamming cramped alleys, but I have to say, the pushing and shoving and the body odor can dispel the thrill of being in Venice . . . I love the story behind the enclosed Bridge of Sighs connecting the Doge’s Palace with the prison . . . they say that in bygone days the view from the Bridge of Sighs was the last glimpse of Venice that convicts saw before their imprisonment . . . our wedding ceremony was held in the Scola Levantina, a synagogue in the Old Ghetto . . . Leah’s Orthodox father insisted I convert to the Jewish religion as a precondition to our marriage, her father had to have a Jewish son-in-law . . . can you imagine? . . . probably to impress his relatives . . . I come from a Catholic family and I was brought up as a Catholic but Leah’s family is Jewish – her maternal grandfather, I believe, was chief Rabbi of Hamburg – Leah observes Jewish ritual, she keeps a kosher kitchen . . . I found Jewish dietary laws to be maddeningly ludicrous – so many foods that I once loved are now denied to me–and those medieval rituals! . . . but you could say that I am now contentedly Jewish . . .
Here Dr. Freud interrupts, “You sound discontentedly Jewish.”
. . . we visited the beach in front of the hotel in Lido where the gentle white foam ocean breakers splashed against the shore in rhythmic pulses – Leah said she preferred it rough – she said she loved how the moist sand caressed her feet, she had never been to the beach before, it was her first time . . . one evening a troupe of musicians serenaded the hotel staff and guests, a clarinetist, a mandolin player and . . . my wife said the accordion player reminded her of a dirty old man strumming his fingers on the keys of a “disgusting old box” . . . that’s what my wife called my old-fashioned piano when she first saw it, “a disgusting old box,” she refused to allow me to bring it to our new house, I had that piano since childhood . . . I hated to see it go, but my wife is not a fan of music . . .
Dr. Freud interrupts, “Our time is up, Dr. Seite.”
___________________________________
Wilhelm Fliess, a medical doctor, was Freud's best, and, perhaps, his only friend. Freud shared his emerging psychological ideas with Fliess during the early years when he was first developing what would become psychoanalysis. The two had a bitter falling out in 1904, when Freud was forty-eight years old. Freud scholar Jeffrey Masson writes, “The actual end of the friendship was particularly difficult for Freud, and later in his life he seldom spoke of Fliess at all.”
Dr. Sigm. Freud, 7.3.97. Vienna, IX Berggasse 19.
Lecturer in Nervous Diseases
at the University.
My dear Wilhelm,
I got your last letter and thank you very much for the material you sent. I plan to revise the dream book 1/ in accordance with your suggestions. Your encouragement and wise counsel have sustained me through this long, harsh winter.
A visit to the opera last night where I saw Meistersinger 2/ relieved my exhaustion brought on by mental labors. Parallels between Hans Sachs 3/ and Charcot 4/ occurred to me. Did I ever tell you about the fantasy I had before I found my patron in Paris? In my loneliness I conceived of a rescuer who throws himself in front of the king’s horse while it is out of control and puts the king in danger. I am able to stop the horse and the king steps out, saying, “I owe my life to you. What can I do for you?” More recently I hit upon a resemblance to the Oedipus myth, where there is a chance meeting between son and father, whom the son does not recognize. The son risks his life for the father, the censorship transforming the attack into a rescue. The son stops the horse’s agitated movement, which offers a primal symbol of out-of-control sexuality. The son controls the horse, evidence of masculine potency. The Oedipus myth’s representation of the son’s murder of the father, who is encountered accidentally on the road, was repressed in my fantasy and enacted in opposite fashion. I imagined saving the fantasy-father instead. As I wrote in the dream book, “Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, wishes which nature has forced upon us, and after the revelation of which we want to avert every glance from the scenes of our childhood.” We repress our base instincts and screen them by means of conscious, altruistic subterfuge.
Be that as it may.
My work with Dr. J.A.S. goes on productively. As I mentioned in an earlier communication he stands out among my patients as shrewd, ambitious, and possessing an intuitive grasp of my ideas. If I ever founded a movement I would want him for an acolyte! Though, I must confess in dismay, that he continues to drop references to Marburg, thinking that impresses me, as if Marburg is the Pope and J.A.S. were the Pope’s protégé. Thoughts of Marburg turn my stomach. You recall his sharp attack on my Hysteria? 4/ The great professor wrote, “Freud presents his dubious therapeutic successes as evidence of his even more dubious theories.”
I am impelled time and again to return to my consideration of the patient’s initial consult, which, in retrospect, seems like the overture of an opera in which the essential themes of the drama are presented. At the start of his treatment, J.A.S. first apologized for being late and conveyed his remorse at being unable to provide medical assistance to a man who, moments before, had been killed in a traffic accident; he proceeded to talk about the Melville book (Moby Dick), which I subsequently learned (having no prior familiarity with it) tells the story of a sea captain obsessively determined to avenge an attack by a whale at sea in which the captain lost a leg; there was a reference to collapsed bridges; then there were a series of associations that led to a recurring dream about a burglar dining on the patient’s sausages at the foot of the stairs in the patient’s house, and so on. (I went into greater detail previously.) Since my last letter, it crossed my mind that his opening remarks about the fatal traffic accident acted as a stimulus to a number of recollections all relating in one way or another to a loss or a taking. This key opens many doors.
Let me clarify. A young doctor upon entering the medical profession might entertain high hopes of relieving every suffering and averting every death. In short order, reality forces the doctor to confront his reasonable limitations. These reasonable limitations are an injury to his self-regard. A patient’s death or that of a stranger in dire circumstances in which the doctor is unable to render aid results in a loss of the young doctor’s narcissistic omnipotence. In choosing to get married, a man resigns the liberties of bachelorhood. The collapsed bridges were lost. And so on. In the Melville book, the sea captain struggles with the grief associated with the loss of a limb. In the patient’s specimen dream, the robber steals food from the patient, which generically symbolizes loss; the shape of the sausages conjured up the image of the sea captain’s lost leg in the Melville book, and by extension, to all the lost objects to which the patient referred. I must confess that I can only give a very incomplete account of the whole business. The loss of the patient’s childhood piano is symbolized by the stairs of his home (“I have nightmares about a man breaking into the house and me coming down the stairs to find him eating eggs and sausages”). Note that stairs = scales (as in music).
The patient gave an indication of this connection by reacting to my mention of the word “Unbewusst” [“unconscious”] with a slip of the tongue, stating the nonsense word “Unbe-wurst” [“Unbe-sausage”]. In his obsessional deliria he had coined himself a regular sausage currency. When, for instance, in reply to a question, I told him the amount of my fee for an hour’s treatment, he said to himself (as I learned days later): “So many florins, so many sausages.” Indeed, little by little he translated into this language the whole complex of my treatment, which aims to “rob the unconscious of its unpalatable secrets by bringing them into consciousness,” that is to say, all his ideas connected with our therapeutic work were, by way of the verbal bridge “Diebstahl aus dem Unbewussten” [theft from the unconscious] = “Diebstahl der Unbe-wursten” [theft of the unbe-sausages].
I will relay this interpretation to J.A.S. at our next session. Hopefully, J.A.S., in delight, will then pass on the interpretation to his mentor, the eminent Professor Marburg, my nemesis. I will have redeemed my good name. Dubious theories? I think not!
Farewell, and let me soon know your opinion of this Schmegegge.
Your
Sigm.
____________________________________________________________________________
1. Freud’s seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, published in the year 1900.
2. Wagner’s comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg about a medieval song contest.
3. Hans Sachs, an experienced elder mastersinger in Die Meistersinger who mentors a young, inexperienced aspirant in a song contest.
4. In October 1885, at age 31, Freud went to Paris on a three-month fellowship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who was conducting scientific research into hypnosis.
5. Studies on Hysteria is an 1895 book by Freud and the physician Josef Breuer.
The Scene: Vienna, Austria in the year 1897. Dr. Johannes Andreas Seite visits Dr. Sigmund Freud. Upon arriving at Freud’s consulting room at Berggasse 19, Freud silently motions Dr. Seite to recline on the couch. Dr. Seite begins, unprompted:
Please forgive me for being so late, my arrival was delayed by a gruesome accident near the university, I was immobilized in street traffic . . . crossing in the heavy rain on the corner of Währingerstrasse and Schottenring a man slipped and fell under a heavy horse-drawn wagon and one of the wheels ran over his head, fracturing his skull and killing him instantly, there was no pulse . . . I was unable to help him . . . I felt impotent . . . the horror of it, the blood . . . and, stopping at the scene, I overheard his father and lab assistant say – I believe they mentioned he was a physicist – I overheard that the man was generally absent-minded, frequently preoccupied with his thoughts, which, one might conjecture, contributed to the wretched fellow’s demise . . . I suppose . . . are you familiar with Melville? . . . “Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries” . . . do you recognize that? . . . a line from Moby Dick, an American novel . . . perhaps you are familiar with it? . . . it’s a book about a whaling voyage, an obsessive quest on “the bold and rolling” sea for a sperm whale, perhaps you are familiar with it . . .
Dr. Freud interrupts to acquaint his new patient with the method of free association he employs, “So say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway car and describing to someone inside the car the changing views you see outside.”
Dr. Seite continues:
Yes, yes . . . uncannily, last night alone in my dimly lit, wood-paneled study, the gas lamps providing barely sufficient light, I imagined that I was the captain of a sailing ship alone in his cabin plotting an ocean voyage, engaged in studying maps and charts of winds and ocean currents, and, brooding on Moby Dick, I picked off the bookshelf my time-worn copy of the text, my obsessive, marginal notes attesting to the keen interest the book aroused in me at one time, and, perusing the pages, I came across the line, But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must . . . and straight away I thought about my consultation with you today, for here I feel I must explain myself . . . I . . . I have been having a disagreeable dream for some time now, Dr. Freud, perhaps you could shed light on its deeper significance . . . the dream recurs with some regularity, un rêve obsédant, I believe the French call it . . . I am walking down the stairs of a house, the house resembles my childhood home . . . I have nightmares about a man breaking into the house and me coming down the stairs to find him eating eggs and sausages . . . the stranger stands at the staircase landing eating eggs and English-style blood sausages . . . and I feel inhibited on the stairs, as if moving with difficulty . . . I first had the dream after my wedding, oh, that was in late summer last year, our wedding was in Venice, and what a phenomenal event that was, I asked my mentor and friend, Professor Marburg from the medical school – I graduated in ninety-one – to be my best man, he’s much older, but we share a similar outlook, I have the sense he thinks I’m the son he never had, for my part I suspect Marburg is a stand-in for my inner ideals – he has a singular personality, I lack the skill to portray him adequately – then, too, he calls me out on my shallow conceits, my petty social perjuries, if you will . . . it was Marburg who referred you, quite by accident . . . by happenstance I was in his office where I noticed a copy of your book on hysteria on his desk, he’s familiar with your work through word of mouth . . . in any event, the wedding . . . making our way to Venice we encountered violent storms, it was actually quite frightful, a dreadful train ride, the station manager said the railroad bridge at Alba and the imposing bridge over the Adige at Verona collapsed only half an hour after we crossed them . . . in fact, we were the last people to traverse the second of the two . . . we arrived in Venice on Sunday September 6, a hazy, late summer afternoon, the image of Venice emerged gradually as if by magic through the mist as our ship approached the city bit by bit . . . we stayed at the Hotel des Bains, a newly-opened hotel in Lido, we were the inaugural guests, our room looked out over the ocean . . . the beach reminded me of Wannsee Beach in Berlin, where I grew up, . . . sensations of distant times . . . Venice, a fairy tale city, to be sure! . . . gondolas sliding quietly back and forth, in and out of narrow canals under centuries-old bridges in the mild waves lapping against decaying brick walls . . . a jumble of locals and tourists jamming cramped alleys, but I have to say, the pushing and shoving and the body odor can dispel the thrill of being in Venice . . . I love the story behind the enclosed Bridge of Sighs connecting the Doge’s Palace with the prison . . . they say that in bygone days the view from the Bridge of Sighs was the last glimpse of Venice that convicts saw before their imprisonment . . . our wedding ceremony was held in the Scola Levantina, a synagogue in the Old Ghetto . . . Leah’s Orthodox father insisted I convert to the Jewish religion as a precondition to our marriage, her father had to have a Jewish son-in-law . . . can you imagine? . . . probably to impress his relatives . . . I come from a Catholic family and I was brought up as a Catholic but Leah’s family is Jewish – her maternal grandfather, I believe, was chief Rabbi of Hamburg – Leah observes Jewish ritual, she keeps a kosher kitchen . . . I found Jewish dietary laws to be maddeningly ludicrous – so many foods that I once loved are now denied to me–and those medieval rituals! . . . but you could say that I am now contentedly Jewish . . .
Here Dr. Freud interrupts, “You sound discontentedly Jewish.”
. . . we visited the beach in front of the hotel in Lido where the gentle white foam ocean breakers splashed against the shore in rhythmic pulses – Leah said she preferred it rough – she said she loved how the moist sand caressed her feet, she had never been to the beach before, it was her first time . . . one evening a troupe of musicians serenaded the hotel staff and guests, a clarinetist, a mandolin player and . . . my wife said the accordion player reminded her of a dirty old man strumming his fingers on the keys of a “disgusting old box” . . . that’s what my wife called my old-fashioned piano when she first saw it, “a disgusting old box,” she refused to allow me to bring it to our new house, I had that piano since childhood . . . I hated to see it go, but my wife is not a fan of music . . .
Dr. Freud interrupts, “Our time is up, Dr. Seite.”
___________________________________
Wilhelm Fliess, a medical doctor, was Freud's best, and, perhaps, his only friend. Freud shared his emerging psychological ideas with Fliess during the early years when he was first developing what would become psychoanalysis. The two had a bitter falling out in 1904, when Freud was forty-eight years old. Freud scholar Jeffrey Masson writes, “The actual end of the friendship was particularly difficult for Freud, and later in his life he seldom spoke of Fliess at all.”
Dr. Sigm. Freud, 7.3.97. Vienna, IX Berggasse 19.
Lecturer in Nervous Diseases
at the University.
My dear Wilhelm,
I got your last letter and thank you very much for the material you sent. I plan to revise the dream book 1/ in accordance with your suggestions. Your encouragement and wise counsel have sustained me through this long, harsh winter.
A visit to the opera last night where I saw Meistersinger 2/ relieved my exhaustion brought on by mental labors. Parallels between Hans Sachs 3/ and Charcot 4/ occurred to me. Did I ever tell you about the fantasy I had before I found my patron in Paris? In my loneliness I conceived of a rescuer who throws himself in front of the king’s horse while it is out of control and puts the king in danger. I am able to stop the horse and the king steps out, saying, “I owe my life to you. What can I do for you?” More recently I hit upon a resemblance to the Oedipus myth, where there is a chance meeting between son and father, whom the son does not recognize. The son risks his life for the father, the censorship transforming the attack into a rescue. The son stops the horse’s agitated movement, which offers a primal symbol of out-of-control sexuality. The son controls the horse, evidence of masculine potency. The Oedipus myth’s representation of the son’s murder of the father, who is encountered accidentally on the road, was repressed in my fantasy and enacted in opposite fashion. I imagined saving the fantasy-father instead. As I wrote in the dream book, “Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, wishes which nature has forced upon us, and after the revelation of which we want to avert every glance from the scenes of our childhood.” We repress our base instincts and screen them by means of conscious, altruistic subterfuge.
Be that as it may.
My work with Dr. J.A.S. goes on productively. As I mentioned in an earlier communication he stands out among my patients as shrewd, ambitious, and possessing an intuitive grasp of my ideas. If I ever founded a movement I would want him for an acolyte! Though, I must confess in dismay, that he continues to drop references to Marburg, thinking that impresses me, as if Marburg is the Pope and J.A.S. were the Pope’s protégé. Thoughts of Marburg turn my stomach. You recall his sharp attack on my Hysteria? 4/ The great professor wrote, “Freud presents his dubious therapeutic successes as evidence of his even more dubious theories.”
I am impelled time and again to return to my consideration of the patient’s initial consult, which, in retrospect, seems like the overture of an opera in which the essential themes of the drama are presented. At the start of his treatment, J.A.S. first apologized for being late and conveyed his remorse at being unable to provide medical assistance to a man who, moments before, had been killed in a traffic accident; he proceeded to talk about the Melville book (Moby Dick), which I subsequently learned (having no prior familiarity with it) tells the story of a sea captain obsessively determined to avenge an attack by a whale at sea in which the captain lost a leg; there was a reference to collapsed bridges; then there were a series of associations that led to a recurring dream about a burglar dining on the patient’s sausages at the foot of the stairs in the patient’s house, and so on. (I went into greater detail previously.) Since my last letter, it crossed my mind that his opening remarks about the fatal traffic accident acted as a stimulus to a number of recollections all relating in one way or another to a loss or a taking. This key opens many doors.
Let me clarify. A young doctor upon entering the medical profession might entertain high hopes of relieving every suffering and averting every death. In short order, reality forces the doctor to confront his reasonable limitations. These reasonable limitations are an injury to his self-regard. A patient’s death or that of a stranger in dire circumstances in which the doctor is unable to render aid results in a loss of the young doctor’s narcissistic omnipotence. In choosing to get married, a man resigns the liberties of bachelorhood. The collapsed bridges were lost. And so on. In the Melville book, the sea captain struggles with the grief associated with the loss of a limb. In the patient’s specimen dream, the robber steals food from the patient, which generically symbolizes loss; the shape of the sausages conjured up the image of the sea captain’s lost leg in the Melville book, and by extension, to all the lost objects to which the patient referred. I must confess that I can only give a very incomplete account of the whole business. The loss of the patient’s childhood piano is symbolized by the stairs of his home (“I have nightmares about a man breaking into the house and me coming down the stairs to find him eating eggs and sausages”). Note that stairs = scales (as in music).
The patient gave an indication of this connection by reacting to my mention of the word “Unbewusst” [“unconscious”] with a slip of the tongue, stating the nonsense word “Unbe-wurst” [“Unbe-sausage”]. In his obsessional deliria he had coined himself a regular sausage currency. When, for instance, in reply to a question, I told him the amount of my fee for an hour’s treatment, he said to himself (as I learned days later): “So many florins, so many sausages.” Indeed, little by little he translated into this language the whole complex of my treatment, which aims to “rob the unconscious of its unpalatable secrets by bringing them into consciousness,” that is to say, all his ideas connected with our therapeutic work were, by way of the verbal bridge “Diebstahl aus dem Unbewussten” [theft from the unconscious] = “Diebstahl der Unbe-wursten” [theft of the unbe-sausages].
I will relay this interpretation to J.A.S. at our next session. Hopefully, J.A.S., in delight, will then pass on the interpretation to his mentor, the eminent Professor Marburg, my nemesis. I will have redeemed my good name. Dubious theories? I think not!
Farewell, and let me soon know your opinion of this Schmegegge.
Your
Sigm.
____________________________________________________________________________
1. Freud’s seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, published in the year 1900.
2. Wagner’s comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg about a medieval song contest.
3. Hans Sachs, an experienced elder mastersinger in Die Meistersinger who mentors a young, inexperienced aspirant in a song contest.
4. In October 1885, at age 31, Freud went to Paris on a three-month fellowship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who was conducting scientific research into hypnosis.
5. Studies on Hysteria is an 1895 book by Freud and the physician Josef Breuer.
