by D. M. Thomas
The comfortable and mutually convenient arrangement ended when Madame R. unexpectedly decided to remarry. The man in question, a retired naval officer, had become a congenial friend to them both, and Anna had not suspected any special attachment threatening her own tranquil existence. Yet she could not but rejoice at her friend’s well-deserved good fortune. Madame R. and her new husband begged Anna to stay on, but she did not wish to interfere in their happiness. She was uncertain where to go and what to do; but, at just the right moment, an unusually kind fate pushed the young woman towards a new country and a new profession. Her aunt wrote to her from Vienna to say that her father—Anna’s grandfather—who had been living with her for some years had died, and she was alone again. She asked Anna if she would consider coming to live with her, at least for a few months. The young woman did not hesitate to accept the invitation, and left for Vienna, after a sad leavetaking with her kind friend Madame R. and her husband.
Coming face to face with her aunt, for the first time since her mother had been alive, she was overcome by both sadness and happiness. Her first impression was that she was being welcomed by her mother, grown graciously middle-aged.1 For her part, her aunt doubtless found many poignant reminders of her sister in this sensitive and intelligent young woman of twenty. Aunt and niece slipped at once into a warm relationship, and Frau Anna never found any cause to regret her decision to leave her native country.
As so often happens, the change of environment brought about changes in Frau Anna herself. She had been brought up by her nurse to a somewhat half-hearted belief in the Catholic religion, the faith of her mother’s side of the family. During her adolescent years she had drifted away from it, but now, under her aunt’s influence, she became devout. More practically, again as a consequence of being in her aunt’s musical environment, she found an enthusiasm, and a skill, which promised to fill the gap left by the failure of her attempt to become a dancer. Under the tuition of a close friend of her aunt’s, the young woman learned to play the cello; and rather to her astonishment discovered that she was highly talented musically. She made such rapid progress that her teacher was predicting, within a few months, that she might become a virtuoso performer.
Within three years of her arrival in Vienna, she was playing in a professional orchestra and was also engaged to be married. The man in question was a young barrister of good family, deeply attached to music, who had made her acquaintance during a social occasion at the Conservatorium. The young man was well-mannered, modest and rather shy (a combination that appealed to her), and an attachment very soon grew up. He was thoroughly approved by her aunt, and Anna got on well with his parents. He proposed to her, and—after a very brief struggle between her wish for domestic happiness and a professional musical career—she accepted.
They spent a honeymoon in Switzerland, and then settled into a pleasant house. Her aunt, a frequent and welcome guest, was happy in knowing that a grand-nephew or-niece would soon console her for any pang she felt at being alone again; for she knew how much Anna wanted a child.
The only cloud on the young couple’s horizon was the rumour of war. When hostilities broke out, the husband was called to serve in the army’s legal department. Their farewells were sad, but there was the comfort that he would be out of the combat zone and was stationed close enough to be able to return home often. They wrote to each other every day, and the patient was fruitfully occupied with her musical career, in a city hungry for the last remnants of civilized culture. Indeed, as her playing improved with experience, her career began to flourish. She had her aunt and plenty of friends for companionship. Altogether, except for the major drawback of being apart from her husband, she was busy and contented.
Just at this time, as her husband was expecting his first home leave, she suffered a recurrence of the breathlessness that had afflicted her in Odessa, and also developed incapacitating pains in her breast and abdomen. She lost all desire to eat, and had to abandon her music. Informing her husband that she had fallen ill, and that she now realized she could never make him happy, she went back to live with her aunt. Her husband, obtaining compassionate leave, came to plead with her, but she remained adamant. Though he would never forgive her for the hurt she was causing him, she begged him to forget her. He had continued to try to win her back; and only in the past few months had he consented to a legal separation. For the past four years Frau Anna had lived in almost total seclusion. Her aunt had taken her to see many doctors, but none had been able to find the cause of her illness or to effect any improvement.
This, then, was the story which the unfortunate young woman told me. It threw no light on the causes of her hysteria. There was, it is true, a rich soil for the growth of a neurosis, notably the early loss of her mother and her father’s neglect. But if the early death of one parent, and the inadequacy of the other, were sufficient grounds for the formation of an hysteria, there would be many thousands of such. What, in Frau Anna’s case, was the hidden factor which had determined the creation of her neurosis?
What she had in her consciousness was only a secret and not a foreign body. She both knew and did not know. In a sense, too, her mind was attempting to tell us what was wrong; for the repressed idea creates its own apt symbol. The psyche of an hysteric is like a child who has a secret, which no one must know, but everyone must guess. And so he must make it easier by scattering clues. Clearly the child in Frau Anna’s mind was telling us to look at her breast and her ovary: and precisely the left breast and ovary, for the unconscious is a precise and even pedantic symbolist.
For many weeks I was able to make very little progress in my attempt to help her. Partly the circumstances in which we worked were to blame; it was difficult to create an atmosphere of confidence, in an unheated room in winter, with patient and physician dressed in coats, mufflers and gloves.1 Also the analysis had often to be interrupted, many days together, when her pains became so distressing that she was forced to take to her bed. There was, however, some remission of her anorexia; I was able to persuade her to take solid food—in so far as nourishing food was obtainable at all in the city at that time.
A much more decisive factor in the slowness of our progress was her strong resistance. Though not as prudish as many of my patients, the young woman was reticent to the point of silence when any question of her sexual feelings and behaviour rose in the course of the discussion. An innocent inquiry, as for example on the subject of childhood masturbation (an almost universal phenomenon), was met by blank denial. I might, her attitude implied, have been asking the question of the Virgin. I found I had good cause to doubt some of the superficial memories she had related; which did not bode well for any deeper investigation. She was unreliable, evasive; and I became angry at the waste of my time. To be just to her, I should add that I soon learnt to distinguish her truth from her insincerity: if she was hiding something, she fumbled with a crucifix at her throat, as though asking God’s forgiveness. Thus, there was in her a propensity for truth, even if only on the grounds of superstition, which made me persevere in helping her.1 I was forced to lure the truth out of her, often by throwing out a provocative suggestion. As often as not, she would take the bait, offering a retraction or modification of her story.
One of her retractions related to her affair with A., the student whom she had loved in St Petersburg. So far, she had told me only trivial facts about him: such as that he was a student of philosophy, of wealthy and conservative background, a few years older than she, etc. She stuck to her story that it had been a “white” relationship. I was struck by the adjective she used, and asked her what she associated with the word “white.” She said it conjured up the sails of a yacht; and it seemed reasonable to suppose that she was recalling her father’s yacht. But one should never jump to conclusions in psychoanalysis: she said she was thinking instead of one weekend in Petersburg when she and other members of the political group, including of course A., went out sailing in the Gulf. It was perfect summer weather, and a relie
f to her to be sailing again and to have a break from the “serious” discussions which were beginning to bore her and even frighten her. She had never felt so much in love with A., and he was tender towards her, and respectful as always. They had to share a cabin, but he never once tried to touch her; their consciences remained as white as the sails, or as the white nights.1
She was nevertheless fumbling with her crucifix, and her face wore an expression of sorrow. I told her, sharply, that she was not telling me the truth, and that I knew there had been a sexual affair. Frau Anna confessed that she had slept with him a few times, towards the end; he had begged and begged her, and at last, almost in weariness, she had “fallen.” “She used the English verb; our discussions were in German, but it was not unusual for her to interject foreign terms now and again. I had learned to be alert to their possible significance.
I decided to “chance my arm,” as the saying goes. “I’m glad you’re being honest,” I said. “There’s nothing to feel ashamed of. And why, while you’re about it, don’t you confess that he got you with child but you lost it in a fall downstairs?”
The poor girl struggled with her feelings, and then admitted that I was right; not downstairs, but from a bad fall in the dance studio. No one had ever known of this, except Madame R., or even suspected it, and she was astonished that I had found out her secret. She asked me how I had been able to tell.
I replied: “Because your story of putting on weight, and so having to stop dancing, didn’t ring true. I should guess you would find it difficult to gain weight, at any time, much though it would improve you. It was an obvious way of telling me what happened, indirectly—for you really wanted me to know. You probably went on dancing too long, in your condition, and were worried sick about beginning to put on weight; and generally wondering what to do in an impossible situation.”
The young woman’s silence told me I had struck home all too truly, and I was glad I had not taken my interpretation to its logical end—that by continuing to practise energetically, she had been secretly hoping for just such a consequence; indeed, may even have precipitated it. She was sufficiently disturbed by the bringing to light of her youthful sin.
From this point, however, she became a little livelier and more frank, as though relieved that her burden of unreal perfection had been lifted. She even revealed, shortly afterwards, a flash of sly humour. She was describing to me one of her recurrent hallucinations, of falling through the air to her death. Her eyes twinkled for a moment and she said, “But I’m not having a baby!”1
She came one day with a dream. Normally she slept poorly and dreamt little: itself an aspect of her resistance. So a complete dream was a welcome rarity, and I expended a good deal of effort in trying to make sense of it. Here is the dream as related by Frau Anna:
I was travelling in a train, sitting across from a man who was reading. He involved me in conversation, and I felt he was being overfamiliar. The train stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere, and I decided to get out, to be rid of him. I was surprised that a lot of other people got out too, as it was only a small place, and completely dead. But the platform signs said Budapest, which explained it. I pushed past the ticket collector, not wanting to show my ticket, because I was supposed to go on further. I crossed a bridge and found myself outside a house which had the number 29. I tried to open it with my key, but to my surprise it wouldn’t open, so I went on past, and came to number 34. Though my key wouldn’t turn, the door opened. It was a small private hotel. There was a silver umbrella drying off in the hall, and I thought, My mother is staying here. I went into a white room. Eventually an elderly gentleman came in and said, “The house is empty.” I took a telegram out of my coat pocket and gave it to him. I was sorry for him because I knew what it contained. He said, in a dreadful voice, “My daughter is dead.” He was so shocked and sorrowful I felt I didn’t exist for him any more.
At my first hearing of the dream, I became alarmed, for it told me that the dreamer was quite capable of ending her troubles by taking her life. Train journeys are themselves dreams of death; and in this case all the more so, since she had got off “before her stop” and “in the middle of nowhere.” Avoiding the guard was an obvious allusion to the proscriptions against suicide; and the bridge was yet another symbol of dying. In a sense, Frau Anna’s dream could not have been clearer; yet I was also sure it contained many other elements of a more personal nature. I therefore asked her to take the dream bit by bit and tell me what occurred to her in connection with it. She had already had some training in dream interpretation from having previously analysed a few minor specimens; furthermore, since she was intelligent, I had encouraged her wish to read up some of my previous cases.
“Something occurs to me,” she said, “but it cannot belong to the dream, for it happened a long time ago, and really was of no importance in my life.”
“That makes no difference,” I said. “Start away!”
“Very well, then. I suppose the man in the train reminded me of someone who pestered me when I was travelling from Odessa to Petersburg to try and make a life for myself. It’s—what?—twelve years ago and I had forgotten it completely. It wasn’t particularly scaring, because there were plenty of other people about. But he leaned across and kept talking to me, in a rather obvious way; asking me what I was going to do when I reached Petersburg, and offering me his help in finding somewhere to live. It just got annoying, and in the end I had to move to a different compartment.”
I asked her if anything had happened to her recently to make her dream of the experience; and prompted her by recalling a few details, such as the book her companion had been reading in her dream.
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I remember the young man in the Petersburg train was a nuisance because he was talking when I wanted to get on with my book. It was a copy of Dante, which I had to concentrate on to understand because my Italian was not very good. And now you mention it, I suppose my brother comes into the dream.”
I should interrupt at this point to say that Frau Anna had recently experienced a rather disturbing event. Her brother, with his wife and two children, had decided to leave Russia, because of the revolutionary turmoil, and emigrate to the United States; and they had stopped off in Vienna to say, as it were, hello and goodbye to Anna and her aunt. The patient had not seen her brother for several years, and now might never see him again. Although—or even because—they had never been very close, the reunion and parting had depressed Frau Anna still further.
“When we were saying goodbye at the station, my brother covered the awkwardness by taking his time in choosing books for the journey. I recall thinking that Dante’s A New Life would be appropriate; except that my brother is not interested in the classics, he’s a very practical person. He bought himself some thrillers. It was absurd to think you could buy Dante at a station bookstall anyway.”
I was beginning to see the way the dream was going. I recalled to her the numbers of the houses, and asked her if they were of any significance.
She thought hard, but admitted bafflement.
“Could it be that you yourself are twenty-nine years of age?” I suggested. “And your brother is—how many years older? Five?”
Frau Anna agreed, surprised by her dream’s mathematical logic.
“You stopped first at the door of your own house. It should have been the right key but it wasn’t. Instead, you were able to walk into number 34—your brother’s residence, so to speak. You’re only a guest there, so you see it as a private hotel.” I asked her if she recognized the man who came into the room. I called to mind his words, “The house is empty.”
After a time, she was able to summon up the association. Her brother had rather tactlessly remarked how upset his father was at their going; for he had gone into his father’s business and continued to live near by, after his marriage. Frau Anna remembered thinking rather bitterly that now her father would feel lonely, in his empty house; whereas he had never expressed mor
e than conventional regret at her leaving home, nor any keen desire to see her again.
At this point my impressions of her dream became a certainty. Her brother’s departure, complete with wife and family, en route for a new life, contrasted with her own sense of having reached a dead end, or rather, of being on a pointless journey. Her brother had always had the assurance of being his father’s favourite, and he knew where he was going: unlike Anna’s girlhood journey to a distant city, which had clearly been a last desperate attempt to make her father take notice of her existence. He had been quite willing to let his innocent daughter battle with physical or moral dangers—foreshadowed by the pressing young man on the train.
Two phantasies, I suggested, mingled in her dream. If her father should receive a telegram saying she was dead, then at last he might be sorry. But side by side with that wish, not contradicting it so much as reinforcing its tragic thought, was the wish that she might never have been born—as a girl, as Anna. If only she could have taken her brother’s place! She quits the train journey which is her own destiny, to enter an impossible existence as her brother. In the private hotel, the white room stood for the womb of her mother, which awaited only the coming of Anna’s father to conceive the male child. The drying-out umbrella in the hall was symbolic of the discharged penis. Her father brings the new life, because without a son his “house is empty.” Anna was dead—by suicide or prophylaxis; it did not matter which, and he did not care. His shocked and sorrowful reaction was the product of her wish-fulfilment. Her dream knew that too: she “did not exist” for him.