Gracefully Insane

by Alex Beam

  It was Putnam and Clark University president G. Stanley Hall who invited Freud, Jung, and Ernest Jones to Worcester, Massachusetts, to deliver a series of lectures at the university’s twentiethanniversary celebration in 1909. The event quickly acquired mythic proportions. Even the political agitator Emma Goldman, who had heard Freud speak in Vienna, attended the lectures; she had once operated an ice-cream parlor in Worcester with two anarchist colleagues. Freud himself called it “the first official recognition of psychoanalysis.” It also proved to be Freud’s only North American visit; to have appeared in the famous group photograph taken after the sessions was tantamount to immortality in the psychoanalytic pantheon. McLean was represented by F. Lyman Wells, a young assistant in pathological psychiatry, who told Hall he was entirely unimpressed. (James, too, was underwhelmed by Freud; “a man obsessed with fixed ideas,” he reported.) Thomas Bond, a third-generation McLean psychiatrist, remembers his grandfather Earl telling him of his decision not to go to Worcester. “He thought Freud had no relevance to what they were doing at the asylum, and in a way he was right,” his grandson said. Many McLean patients, then and now, were psychotically disturbed and deemed to be beyond the reach of Freud’s intellectual “talk therapy.”11

  Freud’s inroads into the psychiatric establishment came slowly. The first psychoanalyst hired by Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, of which McLean was part, was stashed away in a cubbyhole under a flight of stairs, and his name was effaced, Sovietstyle, from the hospital’s official history. Starting in 1924, Freudian psychoanalysis begins to appear in the clinical section of McLean’s annual report. In 1928, the director, Frederick Packard, wrote that “a special attempt has been made to find out what, if anything, in the Freudian methods is practical of application in the psychoses.”

  Packard might have been entitled to his healthy skepticism over the usefulness of Freud’s methods because just a few years before, he had admitted one of Freud’s most famous patients, Dr. Horace Frink, into McLean. Frink occupies an unusual place in the history of psychotherapy; his was possibly the most famous disastrously botched analysis in the annals of Freudianism. A graduate of the Cornell Medical School, Frink pursued a brief surgical career before turning to psychiatry. Soon he became one of the first in a line of American ephebes who Freud hoped would proselytize his new science in the United States—“the most brilliant and promising of the young Americans,” Freud called him. In 1911, Frink cofounded the New York Psychoanalytic Society with Abraham Brill and two other doctors, and he was unanimously elected its president in 1913. Five years later, Frink published a landmark study, Morbid Fears and Compulsions; forty years after its publication and twenty years after the author’s death, Karl Menninger hailed it as “one of the clearest and best written expositions of psychodynamics.” Not only was Frink smart, he was also a Gentile, which pleased Freud, who fretted constantly that psychoanalysis was attracting only Jews. An added plus was Frink’s access to money via his attractive (married) mistress and patient, the comely Warburg family heiress Anjelika “Angie” Bijur, whom Freud encouraged the (married) Frink to wed.

  When Horace Frink presented himself to Freud in person for the first time in the spring of 1921, he was in trouble. He had been experiencing occasional depressions for thirteen years and suffered from “toxic headaches,” which could be relieved only by extended periods of relaxation. In Vienna, he was giddy, sleeping only a few hours a night and savoring the Austrian capital’s heady nightlife in between his $10-an-hour sessions with “the master” in his office at 19 Berggasse. “I was very happy, and more talkative and full of fun than ever before in my life,” Frink reported. Yet he also admitted to experiencing a “sense of unreality and an inability to form mental pictures.”

  A cynic, or a realist, might suggest that Frink’s biggest problem was that he had started making love to his own patient, Madame Bijur. Aside from the obvious ethical concerns—Bijur had been his patient since 1912—there were complications. Horace’s own wife Doris realized that he was unhappy in their marriage and was willing to grant him a divorce. But Anjelika’s husband Abraham proved recalcitrant. Angie herself journeyed to Vienna in the spring of 1921, and Freud encouraged the two lovers to pursue their sexual destiny. As Madame Bijur later explained to the ubiquitous Adolf Meyer: “When I saw Freud, he advised my getting a divorce because of my own incomplete existence ... and because if I threw Dr. F[rink] over now he would never again try to come back to normality and probably develop into a homosexual though in a highly disguised way.”

  Freud was alluding to Frink’s purported unconscious homosexuality. Although Frink was alternately promiscuous and sexually equivocal—he once complained that Anjelika looked “queer, like a man, like a pig”—he is not known to have engaged in homosexual relationships.

  In a letter to Anjelika’s husband’s analyst, Freud explained his conduct: “I simply read my patient’s mind and so I found out that [Frink] loved Mrs. B., wanted her ardently and lacked the courage to confess it to himself.... I thought it the good right of every human being to strive for sexual gratification and tender love if he saw a way to attain them, both of which he had not found with his wife.”

  What ensued was worthy of a Georges Feydeau farce. Freud suggested that the two lovers confront the cuckolded husband, Abraham, in Paris and implore him to release his wife from her marital vows. All this came as a shock to Abraham, who thought his marriage might be saved. He had made love with Angie only a few days before and had just received a pair of $5,000 pearl studs from her as a token of her affection. Enraged, Mr. Bijur steamed back to New York and threatened a major scandal. He wrote Freud a long letter, which he intended to publish as a full-page advertisement in the New York press:Dr. Freud:

  Recently I am informed by the participants, two patients presented themselves to you, a man and a woman, and made it clear that on your judgment depended whether they had a right to marry one another or not. The man is at present married to another woman, and the father of two children by her, and bound in honor not to take advantage of his confidential position toward his patients and their immediate relatives. The woman he now wants to marry was his patient. He says you sanction his divorcing his wife and marrying his patient, but yet you have never seen the wife and learned to judge her feelings, interests and real wishes.

  The woman, this man’s patient, is my wife.... How can you know you are just to me; how can you give a judgment that ruins a man’s home and happiness, without at least knowing the victim so as to see if he is worthy of the punishment?

  ... Great Doctor, are you savant or charlatan?

  Luckily for Freud, Abraham died of cancer before he could publish the letter, which was forwarded to Vienna by Mr. Bijur’s analyst. Freud responded tartly that the letter was silly and crafted to appeal to America’s easily manipulated public opinion. But in fact, Freud was very worried about negative publicity, as he had every reason to be. In the 1920s, he was promoting psychoanalysis as a helpful, innovative new neuroscience, not a marriage-counseling service for anyone with a college education and boat fare to the Continent. Freud told Frink that he had specifically asked Anjelika not to “repeat to foreign people I had advised her to marry you on the threat of a nervous breakdown. It gives them a false idea of the kind of advice that is compatible with analysis and is very likely to be used against analysis.” Freud, whose attraction to the American dollar was enhanced by Austria’s rampant inflation, was also vulnerable to accusations of financial manipulation where the Bijur-Frink romance was concerned. Unbeknownst to him—at first—Angie had to settle $100,000 on Horace’s first wife Doris to make her go away. Furthermore, Freud confirmed to his patient and disciple Frink that part of Mrs. Bijur’s allure was her fortune:May I suggest to you that your idea Mrs. Bijur had lost part of her beauty may be turned into her having lost part of her money. If so I am sure she will recover her attraction. Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your
phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right let us change the imaginary gift into a real contribution to the psychoanalytic fund.

  Dr. Silas Warner, who wrote a scholarly article on the “therapeutic disaster” that was the Freud-Frink relationship, notes that “the question has to be raised whether it was not Freud’s fantasy that he would become a rich man from Mrs. Bijur’s becoming Mrs. Frink, and making a substantial contribution to ‘the psychoanalytic fund.’”

  The therapeutic disaster begat a romantic disaster. Horace Frink and Anjelika Bijur did marry, but what Dr. Freud had joined together, it turned out, could easily be put asunder. With Freud having declared his analysis complete, Frink returned to the United States, where his depression and anxieties continued to haunt him. He and Bijur lived separately, and each consulted Adolf Meyer. The Swiss-born Meyer was cooling on Freud’s methods, and the Frink-Bijur mess sent him into the deep freeze. He called the case “nauseating.” In 1924, when Angie’s lawyer told Meyer that his client had “decided to obtain her freedom” from Dr. Frink, Meyer reacted furiously. Angie had seized upon Freud’s suggestion of Frink’s latent homosexuality, Meyer thought, when in fact Frink was simply the victim of a domineering wife. He fired back an answer to Bijur’s lawyer: “Mere Freudian love-philosophy cannot guarantee safety and success in life as whole. Man is too complex a subject for that.”

  As Bijur proceeded with her divorce plans—this time from Frink—her husband became suicidal. He took an overdose of the barbiturates Veronal and Luminal, which his wife interpreted as a ploy to win back her affection. If so, it failed. She continued to plan their trip back to Paris for the purpose of annulling their French marriage. Ten days later, just before their ship was to sail, Frink deliberately cut the ulnar artery in the bend of his elbow. “The blood spurting out made an astonishingly loud noise,” he reported, and it woke the male nurse sleeping in the room with him. Luckily, Frink was boarding with his old friend, Dr. Swepson Brooks, whose prompt intervention saved his life. Brooks and Bijur decided to commit Frink to McLean.

  Shortly after Frink’s arrival, Superintendent Frederick Packard—the man who would express a healthy skepticism concerning Freud’s methods a few years later—wrote to Meyer that Frink’s condition seemed to be improving. Frink had been doing some thinking, as well:He is very bitter against Freud, he says that Freud does not understand psychoses, that the field of psychoanalysis is limited to psychoneuroses, that Freud himself knew this and never should have attempted to treat him when he was in a psychotic condition and that his treatment and advice was all harmful and detrimental to his best interests.

  Frink stayed at McLean for about five months and recovered nicely. He appeared at his own divorce proceedings after his release in 1925. He moved first to upstate New York and then to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, supporting his two children with money provided by his divorce decree and income from the few patients that he saw. “From the time of his release [from McLean] in April 1925 until a week before his death in 1936, he served as single parent to my brother John and myself, during which time he had no manic episodes,” his daughter Helen wrote me. Suddenly, after eleven years of mental health, Horace Frink relapsed into catastrophic nostalgia for his bygone years. Reminiscing with his daughter over a watercolor of the Paris Opera House, he was assailed by the memory of his heady days with Anjelika Bijur. “Angie was radiant in a velvet cloak,” he told Helen. “We stood looking over Paris. She turned to me and said, ‘Horace, with your brains and my money, we can have the world.’” The next day he checked himself into Pine Bluffs Sanitarium in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and a week later he was dead of heart disease at age fifty-three. A packet of love letters was found next to his bed. No psychiatrist would dare say it, but Horace Frink had died of a broken heart.

  Not long before his death, Helen asked her father what message she should give to Sigmund Freud, if she ever met him. Frink’s answer: “Tell him he was a great man even if he did invent psychoanalysis.”

  Another well-known Freud analysand who became a familiar face at McLean was the editor, poet, and art collector Scofield Thayer.

  Almost unknown today, Thayer was a brilliant, well-born literary and artistic entrepreneur who took over the editorship of The Dial during the brief period, from 1920 to 1925, when it could claim to be America’s preeminent literary magazine. Thayer’s Dial traced its roots to The Dial edited first by Margaret Fuller and then by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s, and it had become a money-losing, socialist soapbox for the likes of John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Thorstein Veblen when Thayer and his equally wealthy friend James Sibley Watson bought the magazine. Thayer and Watson turned The Dial into a money-losing, literary and artistic soapbox for the emerging expatriate avant-garde. Watson and Thayer poured thousands of dollars into the tiny (circulation 25,000) magazine, which was printed on paper good enough for reproducing works of art in full color. The owner-editors commissioned art from Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall, and they published forty originals by Pablo Picasso. By the ripe old age of thirty-five, Thayer could claim to have known every major literary figure in America and Europe and to have published most of them. He was a close friend of T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos, many of whom first reached an American audience in the pages of The Dial. Among its notable coups were the first U.S. publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Mann’s Death in Venice.

  Poetically handsome (“strikingly pale, with coal-black hair, black eyes veiled and flashing, and lips that curved like those of Lord Byron” is Dial editor Alyse Gregory’s overheated description of her employer and sometime love interest) and properly prepared at Milton Academy, Harvard, and Magdalen College, Oxford, Thayer was “too wealthy to have to work for a living and too interested in the arts to want to increase his inheritance by engaging in business,” according to one chronicler. The Thayers were prominent in Worcester, Massachusetts, a thriving mill city at the turn of the century. Scofield’s father owned several textile factories; his uncle Edward was nationally famous for his composition “Casey at the Bat.” Thayer even had the right enemies; Gertrude Stein hated him for refusing to publish her poetry. He was an intimate and early promoter of E.E. Cummings, who penned a classical “Epithalamion” for Scofield’s wedding to Elaine Eliot Orr and who later fathered a child with Elaine, apparently with Thayer’s encouragement.12

  As a youth, Thayer suffered from an unspecified nervous disorder and visited the eminent Manhattan psychotherapist Pierce Clark between twenty and thirty times a month. Like Horace Frink, Thayer had the resources and the will to travel to The Source. In 1920, he confided to his partner Watson that he hoped to travel to Vienna and become a patient of Freud’s: “I am extremely eager to lay before him my troubles.” After an exchange of letters, Freud accepted him as a patient the following year: I am sorry I cannot get you fresh, your having gone through a long, unsuccessful treatment with another man is surely no advantage; yet let us hope that the incompetency of the analyst was for something in the matter, and that I will be able to justify your expectations.... Let me say in concluding that I feel very sympathetic about the determination you express to get out of your inhibitions or whatever it may be. The man who suffers deeply has a good chance to recover by analysis.

  For a writer, Thayer left very little record of the time he spent with Freud. At times, when the analysis was going well, he talked of remaining in Vienna “indefinitely.” At times it proceeded poorly. In a letter to his friend Alyse Gregory, Thayer wrote,Speaking of the doctor [she had mentioned Freud] I might mention that he and I thanks to our “good” recent dreams and rather agreeable recent remarks of his own are to each other somewhat reconciled. We talked things over from the practical point of view yesterday and he now gives on record his feeling that we are making some advances and is hoping that in time we may get somewhere.

  Thayer’s life in Vienna clearly revolved around Freu
d. In one letter, he recounted bringing a Chagall watercolor he was thinking of buying to Freud for his approval, which was granted. Eighteen months into his analysis, like a bolt from the blue, Thayer announced that Freud has agreed to write for The Dial: “I have obtained from Freud an article,” he wrote to New York editor Kenneth Burke, “about 30 pages in length, elucidating a church account of the selling of a man’s soul to the devil in Austria in the 17th century. I consider this a scoop. As in all Freud’s writings, so here also, there are, of course, passages in which ‘details’ are mentioned.”

  Thayer was talking about sexually explicit details, and he left it to his New York-based colleague to determine whether Freud’s work was suited for the Yankee audience. Whatever they decided, “Freud absolutely refuses to have anything cut or to have any passage in any way altered.... Professor Freud is willing to have certain words (penis, etc.) translated as non-grossly as possible, but is not willing to make any further concessions whatsoever.”

  Not for the first time, Freud had cut himself a good deal. Thayer agreed to pay Freud the unusually high fee of two cents a word if the article was accepted. Thayer was paying for what we today would call third serial rights; Freud had already sold the same article to the German magazine Imago and to the International Psycho-Analytic Journal. If The Dial rushed the piece into print, they would beat out the Journal by a month, hence Scofield’s “scoop.” For reasons unknown, The Dial’s New York editors rejected the article.