by Morris West
The three of us had no shame with each other – and no fear of intrusion. Our quarters in the Schloss – my nursery, Lily’s bedroom, our bathroom, the big living room and Papa’s quarters beyond – could be entered only through a single ante-chamber, past which no servant was permitted without a summons.
Once inside the suite, however, one could pass freely from room to room. We could stand naked at the window and watch the sunset-glow over the far peaks of the Tauern Alps; or we could draw the drapes and huddle into the sensuous security of a fairy tale kingdom. What happened in that kingdom was the biggest and most jealously guarded secret of all.
When Papa was at home, he belonged completely to us. We entertained guests – at dinners and to feasts and hunts; but no outsider, man or woman, ever lodged at the Schloss. Equally, I have to admit that neither Lily nor I ever saw the inside of Papa’s lodgings in Salzburg or Vienna. I do not know how many other lives he led; but in Silbersee he had only one and we were the centre of it.
We were, in all but legality, a family. Papa slept with Lily. When he was away she moved back into her own room next to my nursery. I snuggled with them, like any child with any parents. Lily was my first teacher – my only one until I was old enough to be sent to a boarding academy for girls. She taught me reading, writing, mathematics, languages and the rudiments of music and the pianoforte.
Papa always examined me quite carefully on the work I had done since his last visit. He insisted also that I learned to ride; so the studmaster schooled both Lily and me in the elements of horsemanship. All this was normal enough for the girl child of a wealthy physician – a nobleman and a Hungarian to boot! – but the rest of my education was decidedly unorthodox. It was, I suppose, what the French used to call “une éducation sentimentale”. Later, much too late indeed, I began to understand it as Papa’s effort to complete, by fantasy, the shortcomings of his own sentimental career. I believe, for instance, that he was madly in love with my mother, that he truly wanted to marry her and found a family with her. Certainly he wanted a son. What he got instead was a girl child born on the wrong side of the blanket and a wound from which his male pride never recovered.
In spite of the fact that women doctors were rare, and regarded, if not as witches, most certainly as eccentrics, he manipulated me carefully to choose medicine as a career. He encouraged me to ask questions about his work. He told me colourful tales of medical history: of Cos, the healing island, of the arts of the old Egyptians and the magical herbs like digitalis and hellebore. Slowly he turned my attention to his text-books. He used his own body and Lily’s and mine to teach me physiology and anatomy and the glandular functions. Patiently, over many years, he sought out those schools of medicine which accepted women, and established friendships with important members of their faculties. It was only after he died, when I was going through his correspondence, that I realised how much time and labour he had spent to find a school to accept me.
He was obsessed in other odd ways with continuity. When I was quite small I remember his explaining that when a woman married she took her husband’s name. Then he added, “But of course the woman can keep her own name as well. That’s what I want you to do: always keep a Kardoss in the name. You’ll promise me that, won’t you?”
I swore my biggest, most sacred promise. I told him that I would one day give him a grandson. In that, finally, I failed him. But he failed me, too. No! It was not failure. It was something else: misdirection, malfeasance, a lie fed into my childish life. He and Lily changed the signposts; and by the time I was able to read them, I was already far down a one-way street with no exit at the other end. Strange, isn’t it? Zaharoff told me the same thing in other words; but I hated him for it.
It’s very late and I am very tired, but I must try to set down this thought. It has been with me too long, coiled like a black snake just at the threshold of dreaming. Papa was trying to contrive an impossible creature: a son who would continue his name and his imprint on the planet and a daughter in whom he could possess the woman who had deserted him, enjoy her and, in strange and subtle fashion, exact revenge on her.
He accomplished his end not by cruelty but by indulgence. My sentimental education was carried out in the isolation of a hothouse. I was coaxed into sexual life, as I am told the Orientals coax their child whores, by serene seduction. Papa was too good a doctor to submit me to trauma, but every year he drew me more intimately to himself, brought me closer to the moment when he would initiate me – tenderly and beautifully, oh yes! oh yes! – and bind me to him more closely than any young lover could possibly do. My whole life gives testimony to how well he succeeded.
And Lily? My Lily whom I still love and miss at times so terribly? She was my first madam! Why did she do it? At first I think she saw little harm. She was a healthy lusty girl, to whom a tumble in bed was as natural as dancing. But later, when I began to replace her as Papa’s bedfellow, she had to know what she had done. She had tried to use me to hold him. In the end she lost him and we all lost each other.
Now I find myself at the end of that one-way street, with my nose rammed hard up against a brick wall. I cannot go forward. If I turn back, I walk straight into the arms of Basil Zaharoff. Perhaps the only solution is to jump right over the wall.
There now! The thought is out, written in my own physician’s hand. I have released others from life’s prison-house. It would not be too hard to contrive a tidy and painless exit for myself. What say you, Papa? Lily, what say you?
JUNG
Zurich
I am bedevilled now, haunted day and night by my conflicts with Freud over the interpretation of the incest taboo. I dread what will happen at our Munich Congress in September, when this and all our related disagreements will be chewed over in the most partisan fashion and when our personal relationship will be finally and publicly destroyed.
Freud sees the incest wish, as he sees every other psychic phenomenon, as rooted in the sexual impulse. I see it as a symbol of something deeper and more primal, related to the sun myths. It is not intercourse which is desired, but rebirth, which can only be accomplished by re-entry into the mother’s womb. . . Similarly, I disagree totally with Freud’s concept of infantile sexuality. It seems to me . . . But why go over old ground? Freud is obdurate. He is wedded to authority and not to truth. The respect I had for him has been eroded. I can no longer sustain our relationship.
And there precisely is the personal problem. I cannot sustain the relationship – but I cannot destroy it either. It is too strong, too complex. It is like a tropical vine whose roots spread everywhere and whose tendrils thrust and twine though every crevice of my psyche.
First he was my mentor; then, very quickly and very easily, I adopted him as the father figure in the construct of my adult life. I was flattered by his slightest word of praise. He was flattered too, I think, though he would never admit it in so many words. He liked the deference of a man who had many more years of clinical experience than he. After all, Freud’s institutional experience was minimal; while I had worked years in the Burgholzli, with a thousand or more patients under daily observation. I had devised and applied clinical tests and procured valuable statistical evidence which still stands.
But our relationship went further. I developed a “crush” on him – a strongly erotic attachment – coloured by my youthful experience of homosexual rape by an older man. I was open with Freud about this. He confessed to similar feelings for me and for another colleague. This made our relationship more open, but no less difficult.
When we began to diverge radically on matters of theory, Freud begged for my support to preserve his authority as leader of our circle and to provide at least a visible doctrinal consensus for our infant science. But when he invoked our friendship, I felt put upon. It was almost as if he were blackmailing me with confessional material. I felt – and I still feel – that the only remedy is the biblical one: lay the axe to the root of the tree and chop it down.
I wish to God
it were as easy to do as to say! Whom do I kill first? The teacher, the father, the lover? And when, if ever, I have extirpated them all from my psychic life, what will be left? With whom can I share the experience of shame and loss?
Emma understands something of what ails me. She has become a reasonably good analyst – though not as acute or brilliant as Toni. She has also maintained a friendship and a correspondence with Freud; I deprecate this, but I cannot forbid it. However, Emma knows nothing of the homosexual element in my relations with Freud and is much more concerned with our family situation. My rages upset her and the children. She is still resentful about early episodes with women patients. She is jealous of Toni and is plagued by her constant presence in our house. She finds that my new existence as a scholarly consultant is very hard to explain to our neighbours and friends. It was much easier when she could use my titles: Clinical Director at the Burgholzli and Senior Lecturer at the university. We Swiss need very precise categories if we are to live comfortably together!
I am in an even greater dilemma with Toni. She is very well aware of the father-son aspect of my attachment to Freud. She knows my need of a strong parent figure to replace that of my father, whom I loved but could never wholly respect because he would not confront with me the issues of faith and doubt. All this I can discuss freely with Toni. But the other, no! Our sexual relationship is rich and passionate. I shudder to think of what would happen if suddenly I confronted her with the base and brutal image of rape per anum.
So, I am left alone with this demon. I must grapple with him in secret. As my self-disgust grows, so does my resentment of Freud. My resentment extends to that little circle of lick-spittle cronies who cluck and cavort around him like courtiers around King Sun. “The master disagrees. The master is offended. The master this, the master that!” You’d think sometimes he was the Lord Buddha himself, instead of a Viennese Jew whose best ideas are tainted by delusions of grandeur!
This is another issue between us, which for obvious reasons, neither of us wants to put into words. Freud is a Jew who has been able, quite comfortably, to dispense with the religion of his race. For him all religion is man-created myth – a crutch for the ailing psyche which must be thrown away before a final cure is pronounced. I am a Swiss German, bred in the Lutheran Church. I have abandoned the religion of my father, but never my search for a deity who makes sense to me and to whom I can pledge myself as a rational man. I do not see man’s myths and fairy tales and diverse religions as a crutch. I see them rather as sacraments of healing, as symbols by which man expresses his perception of mystery and adjusts his psyche to its burden.
I know that certain of Freud’s diehards dismiss me as a mystic or some kind of failed poet dabbling in the science of the mind. Some of them have even spread malicious rumours that I show symptoms of dementia praecox! They forget that my clinical experience is much longer than theirs and that I have written what is, so far, the most authoritative work on the subject.
But these rumourmongers have done me much harm. My practice has fallen off. A number of patients have deserted me. I am forced to indulge in the sordid little game of exploiting rich patients who are not neurotics at all but who are simply bored or at odds with their circumstances.
I am ashamed of this. I am angry that I am forced to degrade myself for money. I know that I am reaching far beyond Freud’s frontiers, and I am convinced that one day I shall touch a truth beyond the stretch of his imagination. I am being drawn to it as the moth is drawn to the candle flame; though I cannot yet see the light or plot the way towards it.
Toni arrives late, still pale and coughing from the grippe. I scold her and tell her she should have stayed in bed. She protests.
“I’m better working. In bed I get myself into a fever, wanting you, hoping you’ll come to see me.”
I explain a little impatiently that Emma and the children wanted to go sailing and I cannot refuse these simple family requests. Toni accepts the argument with reluctance. This is where the shoe pinches. Her standing in this affair is always one step lower than mine. Professionally she is still an apprentice. As a mistress she takes second place to the wife and the family. When I assure her that she is first in my heart always, she reminds me that my heart is a strange country, sometimes harsh and unfriendly. There is a brief bitter moment when it seems as if we will quarrel again; then she surrenders. We kiss and the bitter taste is gone. She tells me of a dream she had during her afternoon nap.
“My head was full of you and my body was aching with the need of you. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a seagull flying over the lake. I saw you sitting on the beach, crosslegged like an Oriental. You were naked and alone. I flew down to join you; but when I came closer there was another man with you. He was embracing you and fondling you in a sexual way – the same way as I do. When he saw me he waved his arms and motioned me away. I flew off, but I hovered in circles high above, watching the love-play. Then Emma came down to the beach and began hitting the man with her umbrella. I flew away because I didn’t want her to see me.”
As I listen to Toni unfolding the dream, I feel a surge of emotion, like a rush of floodwaters, muddy, turbulent, full of strange debris. Has she guessed the dark secret that plagues me? Have I, by some mechanism of the unconscious, communicated it to her? This dream came to her while I was in reverie about the same matters, on the boat anchored in the quiet cove. This is a situation which presents itself more and more often: coincidence, synchronicity, things happening at the same moment in time, without causal connection, but still closely related in nature. The connection merits a closer examination in the context of psychic experience. I do not trust myself to comment on the dream immediately. I sit down at my desk, make brief notes of its content and then, in the formal fashion we adopt for clinical discussion, I question Toni.
“Before you fell asleep, did you know I was going sailing?”
“No. But it was such a beautiful day I thought you might take the boat out.”
“Was there any other trigger to the dream?”
“Oh yes. A white bird dipped past my window and I thought ‘Lucky you! I wish I could fly like that.’ Then I must have dozed off.”
“Tell me now.” I take a peremptory tone. “Tell me, without reflection, what the dream signifies to you.”
“Oh it is very clear!” She answers with that limpid innocence which so easily disarms me. “It was clear even while I was dreaming it. We have talked so much of the anima and the animus: the female element in every male, the male element in every woman. Well, the you I saw on the beach was your anima, the female part of you. The Buddha in meditation never displays any male sex organ. The male who was soliciting you was the male me, my animus. We were loving each other like that because in real life our roles are reversed. Because of our situation, I have to pursue you. You are passive and female until I present myself to excite you. Then, of course, you are wholly male. But whichever role we assume, Emma always comes to separate us. It’s really quite a banal dream, no mystery in it at all.”
“Let’s not dismiss it so lightly. Were you excited by the female me?”
“Oh yes.”
“Could you in real life tolerate such a reversal of roles?”
“That’s what the dream says, Carl: I have to tolerate it all the time. You don’t pursue me like a courting lover. I have to pursue you, grasp at every moment of your company. Oh yes, you desire me; but you wait here until I come to you. Of course you’re the active one when we make love, but before and after – yes the roles do reverse themselves. I’m not complaining. I’m stating a fact, interpreting my dream.”
“Suppose I tell you, Toni Wolff, that you’re lying to me, that you never had such a dream, that you’re playing games and inventing clinical evidence. What’s your answer?”
“There are three answers, you grouchy old bear! I’m lying. I’m telling the truth. I’m offering a dream construct that fits our situation. You make the choice!”
I am very te
mpted to accuse her of lying and vent all my fears and frustrations in anger. In the same instant I am aware that Toni expects just that. She is looking at me with the same expression, half amused, half threatening that I used to see on my mother’s face when she looked inside my head. I know that if we quarrel I shall end by having to apologise, to explain myself – and this time the cat will pop out of the bag! I shall have to reveal the sordid little story of my rape and my erotic attachment to Freud. Toni senses the truth. The dream is her strategy to force me to reveal it.
So, I do what I always do. I lie. I take her hands and draw her to me. I kiss her on the lips and fondle her breasts and tell her:
“I make bad jokes because I’ve missed you so much. Of course I believe the dream. It tells the exact truth about you and me. We’re so close that we’re one person – all our parts are mixed up together like fruit in a pie.”
The words are hardly spoken when we hear Emma calling the children in the garden. We draw apart hastily. Toni retreats to her desk, I to mine. I am angry because I feel ridiculous. Toni is still in her teasing mood. She smooths the blouse over her out-thrust nipples and giggles at me: “I wonder if Emma’s carrying her umbrella.”
MAGDA
Paris
I woke this morning in a quite suicidal depression, convinced that I must either mend my life or end it. Clearly there was no way to mend it in an association with Basil Zaharoff; so I must deal with that situation immediately. But how? It could only be by yea or nay. Zaharoff would tolerate no games. He was too practised a pimp to be deceived by feminine by-play. If I wanted to refuse, I had to confront him and convince him of my unfitness for the role he had written for me.
I forced myself to bathe, bundled up my soiled clothes, locked away the material I had written during the night, then summoned the maid to bring me camomile tea and an ice pack. I had a blinding headache, against which even the new German aspirin tablets gave little relief. When I looked at myself in the mirror I was shocked. My skin was pale as milk; my lips were bloodless; the crow’s feet were etched deep around my eyes, and the fear I read in my face – a fear of imminent disaster and future threat – was plain for all the world to see.