by David Rakoff
CHRISTMAS FREUD
I am the Ghost of Christmas Subconscious. I am the anti-Santa. I am Christmas Freud. People tell me what they wish for. I tell them the ways their wishes are unhealthy or wished for in error.
I will be sitting in a chair, impersonating Sigmund Freud in the window of Barney’s department store at Madison Avenue and 61st Street every Saturday and Sunday from late November until Christmas 1996. My Freud imitation is limited to growing my winter goatee, being outfitted in the store’s tweediest, most 1930s merch, and sitting—either writing or reading the New York Times or The Interpretation of Dreams. I did not have to audition for the role. I got the gig because I am friends with the store’s creative director. At the same time, I don’t suspect that he was inundated with applicants.
My window is a mock-up of Freud’s study, with the requisite chair and couch. It is also equipped with a motorized track on which a videocamera-wielding baby carriage travels back and forth, a slide projector, a large revolving black-and-white spiral, two hanging torsos, and about ten video monitors that play Freud-related text and images: trains entering tunnels, archetypal mothers, title cards that read “I DREAMED I WAS FLYING” “I DREAMED MY TEETH FELL OUT,” and so on. The other Barney’s windows this Christmas season are devoted to Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King Jr., the Beat poets, and Blondes of the 20th Century. The Freud window, titled “Neurotic Yule,” is the only live one.
When I sit in the chair for the first time, I am horrified at the humiliation of this, and I have no idea how I’m going to get through four weekends sitting here on display. This role raises unprecedented performance questions for me. For starters, should I act as though I had no idea there were people outside my window? I opt for covering my embarrassment with a kind of Olympian humorlessness. If they want twinkles, that’s Santa’s department.
I am gnawed at by two fears: one, that I’m being upstaged by Linda Evans’s wig in the Blondes window next door; and two, that a car—a taxi, most likely—will suddenly lose control, come barreling through my window, and kill me. An ignoble end, to be sure. A life given in the service of retail.
Sometimes for no clear reason, entire crowds make the collective decision not to breach a respectful six-foot distance from the window. Other times they crowd in, attempting to read what I’m writing over my shoulder. I thank God for my illegible scrawl.
Easily half the people do not have any idea who I’m supposed to be. They wave, as if Freud were Garfield. Others snap photos. The waves are the kind of tiny juvenile hand crunches one gives to something either impossibly young and tiny or adorably fluffy. “Oh, look, it’s Freud. Isn’t he just the cutest thing you ever saw? Awww, I just want to bundle him up and take him home!”
There are also the folks who are more concerned with whether or not I’m real—this I find particularly laughable, since where on earth would they make mannequins that look so Jewish?
My friend David wrote down what people were saying outside:
“Hey, he really looks like him, only younger.”
“Wait a sec. That’s a real guy.”
“He just turned the page. Is he allowed to do that?”
“Who is that, Professor Higgins?”
If psychoanalysis was late-nineteenth-century secular Judaism’s way of constructing spiritual meaning in a post-religious world, and retail is the late twentieth century’s way of constructing meaning in a postreligious world, what does it mean that I’m impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday?
In the window, I fantasize about starting an entire Christmas Freud movement. Christmas Freuden everywhere, providing grown-ups and children alike with the greatest gift of all: insight. In department stores across America, people leave display window couches, snifflingly and meaningfully whispering, “Thank you, Christmas Freud,” shaking his hand fervently, their holiday angst, if not dispelled, at least brought into starker relief. Christmas Freud on the cover of Cigar Aficionado magazine; Christmas Freud appearing on Friends; people grumbling that here it is not even Thanksgiving and already stores are running ads with Christmas Freud’s visage asking the question “What do women want . . . for Christmas?”
If it caught on, all the stores would have to compete. Bergdorf Goodman would leap into action with a C. G. Jung window—a near perfect simulation of a bear cave—while the Melanie Klein window at Niketown would have them lined up six deep, and neighborhood groups would object to the saliva and constant bell ringing in Baby Gap’s B. F. Skinner window.
There is an unspeakably handsome man outside the window right now, writing something down. I hope it is his phone number. How do I indicate to the woman in the fur coat, in benevolent Christmas Freud fashion, of course, to get the hell out of the way? Then again, how does one cruise someone through a department store window? Should I press my own number up against the glass, like some polar bear in the zoo holding up a sign reading “Help, I’m being held prisoner!”?
I come up to the store for a photo-op for a news story about the holiday windows of New York. It is my thirty-second birthday. I am paired with a little girl named Alexandra. By strange coincidence, it’s her birthday as well. She is turning ten. She is strikingly beautiful and appears in the Howard Stern movie. She is to be my Dora for the photographers. (Alice Liddell to my Lewis Carroll is more like it, she is so dewily alluring.)
In true psychoanalytic fashion, I make her lie down and face away from me. I explain to her a little bit about Freud, and we play a word association game. I say, “Center,” she responds, “Of attention.” I ask her her dreams and aspirations for this, the coming eleventh year of her life. Without pausing, she responds, “To make another feature and to have my role on Another World continue.” She sells every word she says to me, smiling with both sets of teeth, her gemlike eyes glittering. She might as well be saying, “Crunchy!” the entire time. But she is lovely. I experience extreme countertransference.
I read a bit from The Interpretation of Dreams to her.
“Is this boring?” I ask.
“Oh no, it’s relaxing. I’ve been working since five o’clock this morning. Keep going.”
Even though her eyes are closed, she senses the light from the news cameras outside. She curls toward it like a plant and clutches her dolly in a startlingly unchildlike manner. The glass of the window fairly fogs up.
I’ve decided to start seeing patients. I’m simply not man enough to sit exposed in a window doing nothing; it’s too humiliating and too boring. My patients are all people I know. Perhaps it is because the patient faces away from both the street and myself that the sessions are strangely intimate and genuine. But it’s more than that. The window is, surprisingly enough, very cozy. More like a children’s hideaway than a fishbowl. Patients seem to relax immediately upon lying down.
S. begins the session laughing at the artifice and ends it crying on the sofa talking about an extramarital affair. Christmas Freud is prepared and hands her a handkerchief.
K. has near crippling tendinitis and wears huge padded orthopedic boots. The people watching think it’s a fashion statement. She wears a dress from Loehmann’s, but I treat her anyway.
H., a journalist, likes to talk with children and write about them. Perhaps that is why his shirt is irregularly buttoned.
I. is not happy in his relationship. His boyfriend stands outside among the watchers in the gray drizzle, his face a mask of dejection. It’s quite clear he knows exactly what we are talking about, although he cannot hear a thing we’re saying.
In fact, the real transgression, in this age of tell-all television, is not that the therapy, no matter how sham, would be conducted in a store window. It is that its particulars remain private and confidential.
I’m told that a woman outside the window wondered aloud if I was an actual therapist. I suppose there must be one in this town who would jeopardize his or her credibility in that way. I’ve scheduled our next session for the window at Barn
ey’s, I hope that’s okay. . . . Huh . . . you seem really resistant. Do you want to talk about it?
A journalist is doing a story on the windows for the Times. He asks me if this is a dream come true. “Well, it is a dream. It’s logical,” I reply. “One of my parents is a psychiatrist, and the other is a department store window.” He doesn’t laugh at my joke, but it’s half-true. One of my parents is a psychiatrist, and the other is an M.D. who also does psychotherapy. I’ve been in therapy myself for many, many years. The difference between seeing a shrink and being a shrink is not only less pronounced than I imagined it might be, it feels intoxicating. When my own therapist says to me, “I have a fantasy of coming by the window and being treated by you,” I think, Of course you do. I feel finally and blissfully triumphant.
When I sit there with a patient on my couch, my pipe in my mouth, listening, it feels so . . . perfect. Like any psychiatrist’s kid, I know enough from growing up, and from my own years on the couch, to ask open-ended questions, to let the silences play themselves out or not, to say gently, “Our time is up,” after forty-five minutes. The performance feels real, the conclusion of an equation years in the making. And more than that: it is different from being in a play. The words I speak are my own.
The press coverage for this escapade is extensive and strange. There is such desperation for any departure from the usual holiday drivel they have to churn out, the media come flocking. Yet the public doesn’t particularly want to read about Christmas in the first place. It’s like trying to jazz up a meal nobody wanted to eat anyway. People from newspapers and television are asking me these deep questions about the holiday, the nature of alienation at this time of year, the subtextual meaning of gifts, things like that, as though I actually were Freud. In a moment of odious pretension that is extreme even for me, I can hear myself actually saying the word Durkheim to the fellow from Dutch television. A stringer for a London paper arrives late for his interview—his third wife gave birth to his first child the night before. When Marlene Dietrich’s rendition of “Falling in Love Again” comes up on the repeating tape loop that plays in the Blondes window next door, he stops midsentence, and says, “Oh, this is the song I always sing when I start to have an affair.” It’s a disconcerting moment for me, not only for his inappropriate disclosure, but also because with very little effort, I could be drunk with the power of my Freudness and advise this stranger on his serial infidelity problem.
I get a call from the store that Allen Ginsberg might be persuaded to stand in the Beats window on Sunday and, if he wants to, would I speak with him? “I have no sway over Mr. Ginsberg, but if he has something he’d like to talk about, I’m certainly available,” I reply. Not entirely true—I’m pretty well booked.
The whole Allen Ginsberg thing depresses me a bit, though. Then again, if he can see it as some cosmic joke, why can’t I? I feel indignant and very territorial. Impostors only! No real ones in the window! Fortunately, it’s moot; he doesn’t show. When he dies the very next year, I am relieved all over again that he didn’t succumb.
A street fair outside seems to have brought a decidedly scarier type of spectator. They are a crowd at a carnival sideshow and I the Dog-Faced Boy. A grown woman sticks her tongue out at me. Later, during a session, a man in his fifties presses his nose up against the window, getting grease on the glass, presses his ear up to hear, and screams inaudible things.
When I leave after each stint, I put up a little glass sign that reads “Freud will be back soon.” It’s like a warning. The postmodern version of “Christ is coming. Repent!” “Freud will be back soon, whether you like it or not.” “Freud will be back soon, stop deceiving yourselves.” In the affluent downtown neighborhood in Toronto in which I was raised, someone had spray-painted on a wall, “Mao lives!” to which someone else had added, “Here?”
My window is a haven in midtown. I can sit here, unmindful of the crush in the aisles of the store, the hour badly spent over gifts thoughtlessly and desperately bought. As I sit there, I can hear the songs that play for the Blondes display. Doris Day singing “My Secret Love” and Mae West singing “My Old Flame.” As I listen, I feel that they’re really referring to my window; to Freud. Every time they come up, I find them almost unutterably poignant, with all their talk of clandestine love, erotic fixation, and painfully hidden romantic agenda. But they might also just as easily be referring to this time of year, with the aching sadness and loneliness that seems to imbue everything. Where is that perfect object, that old flame, that secret love, that eludes us? Unfindable. Unpurchasable.
Coming up to my final weekend as Christmas Freud, I start to feel bereft in anticipation of having to take down my shingle. I began as a monkey on display and have wound up uncomfortably caught between joking and deadly serious. A persona that seems laughable at times, fated for me at others. I know this will fade, but for the moment I want nothing more than to continue to sit in my chair, someone on the couch, and to ask them, with real concern, “So tell me. How is everything?”
I’LL TAKE THE LOW ROAD
The very unshaven young priest from Italy on the train up to northern Scotland has the handsome, tormented look of a defrocked cleric from a De Sica neorealist flick. He wears the uneasy countenance of a man made to question his beliefs, having tasted the apostate joys of, say, carnal love with a beautiful widow. Or perhaps his anguished expression is the result of the egg mayonnaise sandwiches in the dining carriage. To avert just such a crisis of faith, I’ve brought my own sopresatta and cheddar on rye, much to the delight of the Seeing Eye dog who immediately goes rooting through the bag of food I have placed at my feet. “He’s not nicking your lunch, then, is he?” asks the dog’s owner, seated beside me. Well, he would know if his dog was nicking my lunch, because he turns out to be one of those very special blind men who can actually see. Whatever his visual impairment, it must be minimal because, no joke, he spends the entire train journey reading and writing voluminous notes on the rules of conduct for some sort of tournament. His handwriting is better than mine, so it makes me wonder if perhaps I am witnessing an Easter miracle, right here on British Rail.
It has been sixteen years since I was on a train moving northward through Britain. The last time was at age nineteen when I was on my junior year abroad in London. Sitting across from me then had been a beautiful young American with a backpack. We made pleasant if not fairly stultifying conversation. He was from the Bay Area and let me listen a bit to his Windham Hill tape, Colors or Songs for the Road Within or something. Music that, if you’re not buying a futon at that very moment, is essentially aural torture. With little to talk about, the subject turned to movies, as it does. Amadeus had just come out in the States, and I asked him how it was. “Well, if you like Bach, you’ll love it,” he told me.
A dog’s head is far heavier and generates a great deal more heat than you might imagine. After three hours my feet are crushed and very warm, but it seems like bad form to kick a Seeing Eye dog. Perhaps this is to be my penance for having skipped Passover in favor of coming instead to Britain to see friends. The significance of my actions still weighs upon me, however. I experience no small amount of guilt about not celebrating at least in some way a holiday that I’ve never been crazy about. To be sure, I’ve had some lovely Passovers past with family both blood and fictive, but Pesach’s extreme levels of human contact, group activity, and plate clearing also make me a little claustrophobic. Me, I like Yom Kippur.
Still, I find myself in need of some spiritual succor at this holiday time, with my mind full of thoughts of visitations of plagues, of waters pulled asunder for the safe passage of a persecuted people, and an eternal code of ethics handed down in the desert. Going off in search of like-minded people who have placed their faith in the unseen, the metaphysical and intangible, I take my leave of my friends in both London and Glasgow and embark upon my journey. Humming the songs of my road within, I am making my way up to Loch Ness.
The medieval Life of St. Columba te
lls of how the early Christian, when traveling up Loch Ness to the Highlands to convert the heathen, comes upon a monster with a man in its jaws. Invoking the name of almighty God, Columba subdues the beast and frees the man. Taming a chimera and mastering the godless forces of nature is basic PR for the holy, like St. Patrick and the snakes. Given the harsh, rocky landscape I am riding through, it must have been a miracle only too easily swallowed by an ancient pagan populace.
Things get pretty quiet after Columba, monster sighting–wise, until about 1933, when the first road was built around the Loch. That’s when all manner of eyewitness accounts and photographs (including “the surgeon’s photograph,” that most famous picture of the goosenecked silhouette rising out of the water) helped to make the Loch an international locus of phenomenology and, from the looks of the tourist shops in Inverness, the city immediately to the north, clearinghouse for the world’s supply of green plush dinosaurs.
Inverness is storybook pretty, most especially along the road that winds along the river Ness, with its castle looming high over the water, facing a row of churches and handsome stone hotels. But I am not staying here. I am headed to a small town some thirteen miles southwest on the shores of the Loch proper. I kill the few hours before my bus ride eating a rather ancient piece of fried halibut, walking about the streets, and wandering in and out of the many whiskey shops, kilt makers—where I am assured that, even though my people were necromancing, chicken-plucking Jews from deepest Latvia and Lithuania, we, too, have a tartan—and shop after shop selling countless items featuring the smiling, three-humped green creature, seemingly all of it printed with the slogans “Och, Aye, It’s Nessie!” or “I’m a Wee Monster.”