Psychology and Other Stories

by C. P. Boyko

  I had begun to suspect masturbation when she had told me of her cousin’s gastric pains, and had then identified herself with her by complaining for days together of similar painful sensations. It is well known that gastric pains occur especially often in those who masturbate. According to a personal communication made to me by Wilhelm Fliess, it is precisely gastralgias of this character which can be interrupted by an application of cocaine to the ‘gastric spot’ discovered by him in the nose, and which can be cured by the cauterization of the same spot. In confirmation of my suspicion, Dora gave me two facts from her conscious knowledge: she herself had frequently suffered from gastric pains, and she had good reasons for believing that her cousin was a masturbator.

  The middle sentence was not actually italicized by Freud, but seemed nevertheless to Devon to be typeset in a special font. He read it through several times but it did not acquire a firmer foothold in the paragraph. It did not belong there. It should have been relegated, at best, to a footnote. (And Freud, Devon had soon discovered, had no antipathy to footnotes.) It was bizarre enough that Freud believed that masturbation had something to do with stomach pains. It was equally bizarre that this Wilhelm Fliess believed that the nose had something to do with stomach pains. But what relation did the two beliefs have to each other? What did the nose have to do with masturbation? Who was Wilhelm Fliess?

  Among the books that Devon had brought home from the McSeutor Library was, he was sure, the complete letters of Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. It took him a minute to find it; the garage was a mess, and he had not improved matters much by rescuing several boxes of Winston’s library from storage. Tomorrow he would go out and buy shelves, and a little table, and a space heater. Tomorrow, after all, was not a hypothetical proposition, but a real place where things got done.

  It gave him a thrill—a cool fluttering in his chest, as if from the wings of some giant moth—to see that the letters to Fliess spanned the critical years 1887 to 1904. He began to leaf through the book at random, allowing his attention to be drawn to paragraphs and sentences that a previous reader had bracketed in pencil and annotated in the margin with a question mark, exclamation point, or both.

  Wilhelm Fliess was an ear, nose, and throat specialist from Berlin who had some strange ideas. According to Fliess, there was “in the nose, as in the cerebral cortex, a specific localization for the individual distant symptoms in other organs.” Swellings of the nasal mucosa and pathology of the turbinate bones and the sinuses were, in his view, responsible for such diverse symptoms as pain in most parts of the body, migraine and other types of headaches, heart problems, respiratory difficulty, gastrointestinal upsets, and, finally, all manner of disturbances in the functioning of the female genitals, causing dysmenorrhea (painful menstruation), miscarriage, and more. In clinical proof of all this, Fliess cited the visible swelling of the turbinate bone during menstruation, the occurrence of vicarious nosebleeding during menstruation and pregnancy, and the fact (Devon had to read this twice) that cocaine applications to the nose were capable of inducing accidental abortions.

  “The number of symptoms adduced is great,” wrote Fliess,

  and yet they owe their existence to one and the same locality—the nose. For their homogeneity is demonstrated, not only by their simultaneous appearance, but by their simultaneous disappearance. The characteristic of this whole constellation of complaints is that one can bring them temporarily to an end by anaesthetizing with cocaine the responsible area in the nose.

  In other words, thought Devon, the “nasal reflex neurosis” was a catch-all diagnosis for any malady whatsoever that seemed to clear up rather nicely when you put cocaine up the patient’s nose.

  This preoccupation with the same drug that Freud had more or less single-handedly brought to the attention of the European medical community must have been what brought the two men together. Even Jones (while airing the obligatory diagnosis of transference and latent homosexuality) had touched on the truth:

  Both Freud and Fliess suffered from migraines, and the two men conjured up various theories, none of them very fruitful, to account for this distressing disorder. Then, as was fitting in his relation to a rhinologist, Freud suffered badly from nasal infection in those years. In fact, they both did, and an inordinate amount of interest was taken on both sides in the state of each other’s nose. Fliess twice operated on Freud, probably cauterization of the turbinate bones; the second time was in the summer of 1895. Cocaine, in which Fliess was a great believer, was also constantly prescribed.

  It was prescribed, apparently, not only by Fliess to Freud, but by both men to their patients. In May, 1893, Freud wrote to Fliess: “I am now making this diagnosis very often and agree with you that the nasal reflex is one of the most frequent disturbances. Unfortunately, I am never quite sure what to do then.” So he sent his patients to Fliess for operations, who returned the favor by sending his own patients to Freud for psychoanalysis; and in the meantime both prescribed cocaine for a host of problems.

  Devon dropped the book on the concrete floor, stirring up a little cloud of sawdust. Absentmindedly cracking his knuckles in precisely the way he had trained himself not to do in court, he stood and began pacing.

  How much cocaine had Freud himself really been using? It was impossible to tell. There were few direct references to his personal use, and the gaps between these few were wide enough to accommodate any theory. At any rate, an absence of proof was not proof of abstinence.

  All Devon, or anyone, knew for sure was that in May of 1893 Freud was writing to say that he had interrupted a migraine by applying cocaine to both nostrils. In January of 1895 he was “keeping the nose under cocaine,” that is, repeatedly painting his nostrils to prevent renewed swelling. In April of the same year he was pulling himself out of some kind of “miserable attack” with an application. In June he was admitting quite bluntly, “I need a lot of cocaine.” Then, abruptly, in October of 1896—the day of his father’s funeral—he was claiming to be done with it: “Incidentally,” he wrote, “the cocaine brush has been completely put aside.” And that was all he wrote.

  Devon twisted a kink out of his neck with a loud crack and padded into the kitchen. What he needed, he decided, was a timeline. Yes! He could already see it: a luminous ruler into which he would drive the key dates like posts, after which the gaps would become as clear and well-defined as missing puzzle pieces. The procedure was so straightforward that it would be less like noting up a case than solving an engineering problem, less like connecting dots than fitting tongues into grooves. In his imagination he could hear the oiled ball bearings rolling against one another as another piece of the mechanism fell into place.

  About three and a half hours later, he realized that a timeline was not, after all, a useful idea. The chronology was not what mattered. It was not the objective but the subjective, not the outward appearance but the secret inner life that he was after. He did not care when Freud had needed a lot of cocaine or when he had put the cocaine brush aside; he wanted to know why Freud had needed a lot of cocaine, and how he had put the cocaine brush aside. He wanted to know what it had been like for Freud, being Freud, at that time of his life.

  And this, Devon realized, was what he could never know. It was not just that all his source material was translated from a language he did not understand, or that so many letters and other documents were inaccessible to him, or that the pertinent letters he did have were written to Freud’s fiancée or closest friend and therefore drew on a private stock of idioms and anecdotes. It was not just Freud’s secretiveness (he had set the tone in 1885 when he had burned all his papers and boasted to Martha, “let the biographers worry, we have no desire to make it too easy for them!”) or the frequent inscrutability of his prose that made Devon despair. He would have been in no better a position if Freud had been here in the garage with him and feeling talkative.

  Because there was, around every mind, every inner life, an impenetrable wall. Most people never invited you in, and
even those who did did not have keys to half the doors in their own houses. A year ago Devon had spent fifty hours interviewing Rodland Miller—the most willing and forthcoming affiant imaginable—and still he hadn’t been able to foresee what would happen when they put him on the witness stand. There came a point in every interrogation and in every line of research, no matter how deep you went or how meticulous you were, when the information simply dried up. The more closely you looked at anyone, alive or dead, the more distantly they looked back.

  The only way to get into another’s life was to project yourself there, imagine yourself into them. He remembered now why he had given up reading the biographies of great and famous men. It was because every life was, viewed from the outside, more empty space than dots, and every biographer had therefore no choice but to connect the dots in his or her own individual, imaginative way. Most historians and biographers were too timid, however, to speculate much. But speculation was the only road to truth. A line, however it was arrived at, said more than any number of dots. Fiction, because detailed, would always be truer than fact, which could only ever be partial.

  A short story or film about Freud as a young man experimenting with cocaine or grappling with addiction would be more telling than the most assiduously researched biography, because the facts could never puncture the wall, could never push through to the inner life. Devon, however, had always disliked so-called literature, with its unabashed irrelevances, its cloistered melodramas, its idiosyncratic ways of slicing up and presenting the universe. Stories and novels seemed to him both obscenely private and obscenely trivial, like the dreams a stranger insists on sharing with you. For this reason, as he moved down the bright hallway towards the bathroom, the floorboards creaking explosively beneath his feet, as he crept past Clyde’s black room and the sure sense of eyes upon him, as he closed the door delicately behind him and stood before the mirror, Devon imagined he was watching a movie: The Story of Freud and Cocaine.

  Freud, deep in thought, walking through the streets of Vienna, the four fingers of each hand slotted primly into his waistcoat pockets.

  Freud in his office, persuading one of his fidgety patients that she was hypnotized. He retreated behind the desk to write a letter while the woman pretended to be asleep.

  Freud seated before the fireplace, reading aloud, with sonorous pride, his son Martin’s latest poem.

  Freud in his study, carefully, but with an air of nonchalance, tapping his last remaining crumb of cocaine onto a piece of brown paper. He hesitated, thinking perhaps of Martha’s silent disapproval—or of his dead friend Fleischl.

  Freud in his study, putting a pinch of the white substance on his tongue, thinking with self-satisfaction that when the supply of one’s vice was limited, using it was a kind of virtue, for one was also thereby using it up, getting rid of it.

  Devon corrected his picture of Freud, remembering to cast him not as a sour, shrewd, bespectacled old man clutching a cigar who unaccountably spoke English with a lisping Austrian accent, but as a pudgy thirty-five-year-old in a shabby suit who spoke gruff but eloquent German (and French and Italian and English) and who suffered from migraines and a propensity to bleed from the nose into his thick, lustrously oiled moustache.

  He saw this Freud seated on a train, red-faced and sweating, eyelids lowered like shutters against a coming storm, afraid that his screaming heart would explode or seize up in his chest.

  Freud at Charcot’s, gauche, unsure of himself, hungry to make a good impression. He wondered if anyone was laughing at his French. He wondered if anyone could tell that he had taken a bit of cocaine before stepping into the carriage with Richetti. He glanced in a mirror and decided that no one could. The light from this lamp was peculiar, that was all. He looked the same as ever.

  Freud, at 2:00 A.M., creeping through his apartment, moving almost on tiptoe, afraid to disturb Martha or the children.

  Freud, seated behind a patient, struggling not to fall asleep.

  Freud going through a period of depression—not that he called it that. There were simply good days, when work was a joy and an adventure of perpetual discovery, when the words flowed effortlessly from his pen and he marveled at his own perspicacity; and there were bad days: “Fathomless and bottomless laziness, intellectual stagnation, vegetative dreariness. I have never before even imagined anything like this period of intellectual paralysis. In times like these my reluctance to write is downright pathological. Every line is torture.” On bad days he sat at the window, fingering his bust of Aristotle like a lecturing phrenologist, despising himself for ever having thought himself worth something, capable of something great. Sometimes, on his bad days, if there was work to do, he took a little cocaine, and felt almost normal again. There was, of course, no evading altogether the bad day; it could only be postponed. Indeed, the next day he would probably feel even worse. But it was a universal truth, he felt, that humans would always elect to pay for a present pleasure with a future pain. It soothed him to think that he was only acting in accordance with intransigent human nature, as everyone must do.

  Now here was Wilhelm Fliess: short, barrel-chested, wide-eyed, bursting with health and confidence, yet holding something back, like a tightly coiled spring. Fliess came bounding up to Freud, pumped his hand up and down, cracking his arm like a horsewhip, and congratulated him effusively on an excellent lecture.

  Freud, reading a letter from Fliess, frowned.

  Freud, writing a letter to Fliess, smiled.

  Freud on his way to meet Fliess for their annual “Congress.” This time, it was not just the train causing his anxiety: Fliess had threatened to “take another look at that Shnoitsl”—which meant another operation. Freud did not like going under the knife at any time, but there was, he felt, something uniquely terrifying about having the soft, sensitive tissues of the nose pierced and peeled apart by cold surgical instruments. (Years later he would write to his friend, “I find it very expedient that surgeons never take the pain they cause into account; if they did, they obviously would not find the courage for many a thing. I still shudder—an echo—at your heroism in the early period of our friendship. I could tolerate nothing at all.”) It was, he told himself, the nature of the operation itself that caused his grief and trepidation, not the surgeon or his methods. Indeed, he felt sure that he could never have put himself under the hands of anyone but his good friend Wilhelm.

  (In fact, though Freud would hardly admit it, he had good cause for anxiety. One of his own patients, Emma Eckstein, had nearly died following one of Fliess’s operations. The good surgeon had, it turned out, left half a meter of gauze behind in her nasal cavity; when, two weeks later, Freud’s colleague Dr. Rosanes found and removed it, the poor girl had a near-fatal hemorrhage. The “flood of blood” made Freud woozy; he had to leave the room. But then again, as he’d swiftly reassured his friend Wilhelm, and as he now reassured himself, that ordeal had not been Fliess’s fault, but Rosanes’s, for pulling out the gauze so recklessly. Freud also could not entirely discount the possibility that the poor girl was bleeding hysterically in order to monopolize his, Freud’s, fatherly attention. The mind, after all, was a mysterious place.)

  Freud settling himself, with heroic nonchalance, into a suitable fauteuil in Fliess’s crisp, lavender-wallpapered hotel room, while Fliess chewed on a crust of bread and went about the room without haste, patting his pockets and laying out his gleaming instruments on a nearby armoire.

  Fliess took his friend Sigmund’s head firmly between his rough, dry hands and tilted it backwards. He bent over from the waist, his back as straight as a well pump handle, and peered, unblinking, down into Freud’s nose. He made a satisfied gurgle in his throat and murmured, “Just so.” Then, without another word, he reached for the cocaine bottle, withdrew the brush, and generously spackled the inflamed, bright red interior of both nostrils. Within a minute the blood vessels had begun to constrict and the swollen tissue visibly to subside. Within five minutes, as the drug, unbeknownst to
either man, passed through the Schneiderian membranes, into the bloodstream, then percolated through the blood—brain barrier and into the brain, Freud began to feel much better indeed: it was as if all the doors and windows in his head had sprung open at once and all the dark corridors in his mind had been flooded with sunshine, and he could see that they went on forever, corridors upon corridors, rooms adjoining rooms, and he realized that he could move as far as he needed to in any direction, at his own pace, in his own time. It was not too late. Someday he would do something great. He did not even notice when Fliess made the first incision—though some time later he did notice that Fliess was spending a lot of time fussing about in the wrong nostril. But he would have been a fool to worry: his friend Wilhelm was a great man, a genius, the best of all doctors.

  *

  Devon remained in bed, or rather on the bed, for several minutes after he heard Barb arrive home. Then he got up, changed his clothes, and went down the hall to the kitchen, turning off lights as he went. At night, having every room lit made the house feel open and institutional, like a museum or an office. In the morning, however, as the first blue glow began to ooze in through the windows and render the lights superfluous, the house felt exposed and sterile, like a waiting room or a morgue.

  Clyde was a bluish swath of fuzz protruding from a chink in his cocoon of blankets.

  Barb was at the stove, hunched over a frying pan, with her usual undecided look of attending to everything at once. Devon sat down at the table with an involuntary groan, for he knew the sausages were for him. He resented the assumption that he would be awake, let alone hungry.