by D. M. Thomas
I interrupted to inquire if there was not something of her childhood in the comparison she often made of falling stars to flowers.
“How do you mean?”
“I remember you said the jelly-fish looked like blue stars under the water.”
“Oh yes! I used to run down to the beach in the morning, first thing, to see if any more jelly-fish1 had swum in during the night. Yes, of course, there’s a lot of my past mixed up in it. We had a little Japanese girl as a chambermaid, in Odessa, and she used to quote haiku—little verses—to me while she was dusting and polishing. I somehow thought it would be nice if she made friends with the English major staying at Gastein, as they were both lonely and fond of poetry. The major looked so sad, trying to persuade people to play him at snooker. It’s a mixture of the past and the present, like I am. The Russian, for instance—he’s my friend in Petersburg as I imagine him now. He’s risen quite high, I’ve seen his name in the newspapers.”
I remarked that her portrayal of him was very satirical.
“He abandoned me, you see. More to the point, he abandoned himself, because there was a lot of good in him when we first met; he could be affectionate and tender, even shy. That was why I loved him.”
Frau Anna paused to gather her breath, then continued:
“There were an awful lot of selfish people in the hotel. They really would have carried on writing their cheerful postcards if the hotel had burnt down, so long as they weren’t in the fire.” (A reference to that part of her journal written in the form of postcards, of the banal type so often written to friends when one is on holiday.) “There was a gypsy band, and a whey-faced Lutheran pastor, and a nice little man everybody laughed at, because he was only a master baker and spoke roughly; and a large Dutch family. But the old Dutchman wasn’t a botanist. The mountain spiderwort was a little gift for you.” She blushed, smiling. “I know how you love finding rare specimens. I looked it up in a book of mountain flowers, and it seemed the rarest.”
“And how about the retired prostitute?” I asked. “Was she at the hotel?”
“No. Or rather, yes. Myself.”
“How is that?”
She paused before saying, “I have unruly thoughts.”
I remarked that if the possession of unruly thoughts constituted immorality, all of my patients, indeed all the respectable ladies of Vienna, were prostitutes likewise. I respected her, I added, for the openness of her confession, which had taken much courage.
Two or three weeks after our resumption of analysis, Frau Anna symptoms returned in full force. The blow was a hard one for her to bear. I told her I was not surprised, and she must not despair. As I had warned her, remissions were common, but the symptoms would always come back unless we got to the root of her hysteria; and I assured her, with more confidence than I felt, that we were moving closer to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Rereading Anna’s journal, I was struck afresh by the rank and shameless energy of the sexual products. I asked her if she had had any other relationships beside the student A. in St Petersburg and her husband, and she replied with an emphatic negative. Her sexual life, then, had been limited to a brief liaison in her eighteenth year and a few months at the beginning of her marriage. I could not help suspecting that this woman who was clearly so passionate and so capable of strong feelings had not won her victory over her sexual needs without severe struggles, and that her attempts at suppressing this most powerful of all instincts had exposed her to severe mental exhaustion.
It was time to grasp the nettle of the central, narcissistic love affair described in her journal. For, to use the analogy of her favourite art form: within the theatre of her mother’s body, there were really only two important characters on stage singing their love duet, however many supporting figures there were behind them. That, at least, was how it struck me.
Always she spoke of the husband from whom she was estranged in a manner that made it certain she still loved him. She blamed him not in the slightest degree for the estrangement; he had been good to her in every way: faithful, considerate, generous and gentle. The responsibility for the break was entirely hers, but the reason she consistently offered was clearly an evasion: that she desired to give him children, more than anything in the world, but had become convinced that for her ever to have a child would bring nothing but misfortune. Though she felt remorse at having caused her husband unhappiness, it would be far worse to deny him his right to a family. It was fortunate, she said, that at her insistence they had practised coitus interruptus; for this meant he could have the marriage annulled, and marry someone who could make him happy. She would not, or could not, explain further, and needless to say I was not at all satisfied with her explanation.
In the belief that the narcissistic phantasy of her journal must relate very strongly to Anna’s nuptials, I asked her one day who she thought the lovers represented. “Apart from the young man’s being my son!” I added.
However, her barriers were still erected. She insisted that the lovers were modelled on a honeymoon couple staying in the hotel at Gastein. Their lack of modesty in public had made them notorious. The chambermaids complained because they slept late in the morning; and they had behaved scandalously on an excursion, right under the noses of Anna and her aunt: though admittedly not as scandalously as the lovers of her journal. Their behaviour had both shocked and amused her; but also the young couple had touched her heart, for her Cassandra-like gift told her the young bridegroom would not live for many years.
“you are not present in the young lady?” I asked, with irony.
“Naturally, yes! I’ve told you as much.”
“With your husband.”
“Not specifically. I was mainly thinking of the honeymoon couple.” She was fumbling with her crucifix.
“Come now! You will be telling me next that your honeymooners made friends with a corsetière and invited her into their bed!”
“No, of course not! I think she must have been Madame R.”
This was not unexpected, for she had always spoken of her Petersburg friend and mentor with exceptional warmth. I inquired why she had made Madame R. into a corsetière. “Because she always stressed discipline, if we wanted to succeed in the ballet. Self-discipline to the point of pain.”
“So the white hotel—”
“It’s just my life, you see!” she interrupted in some irritation; as if to say, with Charcot: “Ça n’empěche pas d’exister.”1
“And was your friend given to light adventures?” I asked.
“Most certainly not! She’s a Jewish convert to Orthodoxy, and you know there’s no one more devout!” Frau Anna went on to say that she had been thinking of her friend’s marriage (hoping they were well and happy in these dark times), and of the mystical imagery in the Song of Songs. “They made an ideal couple. She was fortunate to find such a handsome, distinguished man to marry her. He was no longer young, of course, but some men seem to grow handsomer when they’re older.” She stopped, flustered; and I asked her whether there might not have been some rivalry between her and Madame R. As she denied the suggestion, her breathlessness and hoarseness increased; her hand flew involuntarily to her bosom. I reminded her that their attachment had taken her by surprise. “You never thought his interest was directed at you, Frau Anna?” She did not answer, but shook her head as she struggled to find breath. “Yet are you not pushed to one side by this lady, in your journal?” I persisted. “Your bed is invaded by a rival, is it not?”
“It’s nothing to do with that!” she replied, in tones of great distress. Then, in her troubled state, she let slip a surprising admission. “If you must know, it’s about my honeymoon with my husband—you are right. That part of it is, at least. The two women are really one. You see, I thought if I had only been blessed with my friend’s liveliness and optimism, in spite of all she’d gone through, I wouldn’t be so dreadfully tense.”
“Why was that, Frau Anna?”
“I was afraid I couldn
’t live up to his expectations.”
“I see. He believed you to be a virgin, naturally, and you feared discovery?”
“Yes.” She touched her crucifix again.
I told her she was wasting my time; that I could no longer tolerate her lies; that unless she would be completely frank with me there was no point whatever in continuing the analysis. Eventually, by such threats as these, I managed to drag from her the truth about her marriage. Its intimate side had been, not a disappointment, but a complete disaster—a nightmare, at least from her point of view. What made it so were the hallucinations, from which her life had never been completely free, but which during this period pressed upon her constantly. They rose before her eyes whenever sexual intercourse took place. They were of the obsessional kind described in her journal, and varied only in details. The flood, and the hotel fire, could be related to her mother’s death; the other two hallucinations, of falling from a great height and of mourners being buried by a landslide, were inexplicable to her; the last was the most frequent, and also the most horrifying, because she suffered from claustrophobia.
She did not think her husband had suspected anything. Could I not imagine what torment it had been, she said, to see those pictures before her eyes while pretending to transports of happiness? And would I not agree that the marriage could not have been sustained, without doing her husband a great wrong?
She excused herself from having confessed all this earlier in the analysis, by saying that she had no wish to seem to be blaming her husband. And she was adamant that no blame existed. He had been tender, patient and skilful; she had loved all the intimate caresses leading up to coitus; or had done, until the knowledge of the inevitability of hallucination caused her to dread even these preliminaries. Besides, she said, it was not important, for she was sure the hallucinations only arose as a warning to her of what she had already told me: that on no account should she bear a child. Even coitus interruptus carried an element of risk.
At Gastein, she had come to terms with childlessness, and that was why she had regained her health. She had felt able to sublimate her desires and needs; but in the fetor of Vienna they had come back to plague her, and so her symptoms had returned.
I must now agree, she concluded wryly, that the happiness she had described in her journal could not possibly refer to her own marriage; only the catastrophes were “autobiographical.” She remarked also that if anyone had been intended for her husband, it was the German lawyer she had called Vogel. I expressed astonishment, and Frau Anna said she did not know why she had depicted him in such black colours, and she would give anything to call it back. True, her husband and his family sometimes expressed moderately anti-Semitic views; but less often and more moderately than most people. It had not occasioned any unpleasantness between them, for the simple reason that she had not felt it necessary to tell her husband of that unimportant aspect of her background.1 She was very troubled by her malignant caricature of a fine young man. I had to reassure her that it was perfectly understandable: she had been compelled to hurt him; which was extremely painful to her, and therefore she was angry with him for causing her to feel that pain.
Shortly after her disclosure of the sexual problems she had encountered in her marriage, I was able to evoke another unpleasant memory from her past. I had given her to study a recently published case history,2 and she had been pressing me to discuss with her that particular patient’s obsession with coitus more ferarum (usually with servant girls and common women). It seemed to interest her excessively; and of course it reminded me of an incident towards the end of her journal. A propos of that, I suggested it was surprising that a form of intercourse not commonly practised in polite circles should lie within her experience. The patient thereupon appeared distressed, and found it difficult to speak; but when she had reasonably recovered she revealed an incident relating to A., the father of her miscarried infant in St Petersburg.
The incident occurred on what she had previously spoken of as a singularly happy memory of her relationship with him: a weekend of cruising in the Gulf. They had been seeing each other for about three months, and had formed a deeply romantic attachment—but still a “white” one, to use Frau Anna’s descriptive term. There were perhaps a dozen young people on the yacht. The weekend started harmoniously enough. They enjoyed themselves, mixing serious discussion with an overindulgence in spirits, provided by A.’s wealthy father. Then, on the second day, Anna and her friend had a serious quarrel. It concerned Madame R., in fact, who had taken to inviting Anna and a few other pupils to her home, for more informal discussions and cultural activities. A. accused Anna of selling her soul to aestheticism. Their quarrel was exacerbated by the fact that he and his friends were beginning to accept the need for political violence; and Madame R.’s late husband had been killed by a bomb intended for a statesman. Anna, having seen at first hand, in her teacher’s sorrow and loneliness, the consequence of violent acts, told A. she was withdrawing from the group.
Intoxicated, and in a rage against her, A. became unrecognizable as the young man she loved. The delightful yachting party turned sinister in her eyes, took on the nightmarish tone of Dostoevski’s Possessed. Her friend singed her hair with his cigar, and made other aggressive gestures. She told him their relationship was over, and went to her cabin to cry and, eventually, to fall asleep. Some time later she was disturbed, and awoke to the horrifying and degrading sight of A., and another young woman, lying on the bunk opposite, engaging in sexual intercourse.1 Far from being ashamed of his behaviour, he abused Anna with coarse, jeering remarks, and had obviously intended her to be awakened. Anna did not wait for the end of the yachting trip but, being a strong swimmer from childhood, jumped into the sea and swam ashore.
To her sorrow she let him persuade her, a few weeks after, that he was repentant and still loved her. He blamed the spirits he had drunk, the overwrought atmosphere of the times, and their sexual abstinence. She took him back and became, for a short while, his mistress. As with her husband later, painful hallucinations occurred. She moved into his apartment. She became pregnant. She discovered that he had taken a train for the south, accompanied by the young lady of the yachting party. At this dreadful time her life was saved by Madame R.’s friendship, for Anna had begun to haunt the Neva bridges, debating whether to put an end to her miseries; and she was convinced that following her miscarriage she would have done so, if she had not confided in her teacher and been welcomed into her home.
So painful for the patient was the experience of reinvoking the images of that period in her life, that I scarcely had the heart to demand why she had talked of the yachting trip, some months before, in glowing terms. When I eventually put it to her, she pretended that I was confusing two different weekends.
Her symptoms continued to be severe; she was sleeping badly, and had lost all the weight she had regained, being once more on a self-imposed diet of oranges and water. She said on one occasion: “You tell me that my illness is probably connected with early events in my life that I have forgotten. But even if that is so, you can’t alter those events in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?” And I replied: “No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But much will be gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”
It was at this moment in the painfully slow unravelling of my young patient’s mysterious illness that I began to link her troubles with my theory of the death instinct. The shadowy ideas of my half-completed essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle,1 began, almost imperceptibly, to take concrete shape, as i pondered the tragic paradox controlling Frau Anna’s destiny. She possessed a craving to satisfy the demand of her libido; yet at the same time an imperious demand, on the part of some force I did not comprehend, to poison the well of her pleasure at its source. She had, by her own admission, an unusually strong maternal instinct; yet an absolute edict, imposed by some autocrat whom I could not name, against having children. She love
d food; yet she would not eat.
Strange also (though too many years of psychoanalysis had partly blinded me to its strangeness) was her psyche’s compulsion to relive the night of the storm when she learned of her mother’s death in a hotel fire. I have said that at certain moments Frau Anna’s expression reminded me of the faces of the victims of war neuroses. It is still not clear to us why those poor victims of the battlefield force themselves again and again to relive in dreams the original traumatic events. Yet it is also the case that everyone, not only neurotics, shows signs of an irrational compulsion to repeat. I observed, for example, a game played by my eldest grandson, who kept carrying out over and over again actions which could only have had an unpleasant meaning for him—actions relating to his mother’s absence. There is also the pattern of self-injuring behaviour that can be traced through the lives of certain people. I began to see Frau Anna, not as a woman separated from the rest of us by her illness, but as someone in whom an hysteria exaggerated and highlighted a universal struggle between the life instinct and the death instinct.
Was there not a “demon” of repetition in our lives, and must it not stem from our human instincts being profoundly conservative? Might it not therefore be that all living things are in mourning for the inorganic state, the original condition from which they have by accident emerged? Why else, I thought, should there be death? For death cannot be regarded as an absolute necessity with its basis in the very nature of life. Death is rather a matter of expediency. So ran the argument in my mind.