Free The Interpretation Of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld Page B

you can squeeze him in
and drop him at the hotel.'
        'Abraham,' Freud replied with
surprising severity, 'I have told you repeatedly how I feel about this. You
must overcome your hostility to Jung. He is more important than the rest of us
put together.'
        'It's not that, for heaven's sake,' protested
Brill. 'I've just given the man dinner in my own home, haven't I? It's his -
condition - I'm talking about.'
        'What condition?' asked Freud.
        'He's not right. He's flushed, overly
excited. Hot one minute, cold the next. Surely you noticed. Some of what he
says makes no sense at all.'
        'He's been drinking your wine.'
        'That's another thing,' said Brill.
'Jung never touches alcohol.'
        'That was Bleuler's influence,' Freud
remarked. 'I've cured him of it. You don't object to Jung's drinking, Abraham?'
        'Certainly not. Anything is better
than Jung sober. Let's keep him drunk all the time. But there's something
unsettling about him. From the moment he came in. Did you hear him ask why my
floor was so soft - my wood floor?'
        'You are imagining things,' said
Freud. 'And behind the imagination there is always a wish. Jung is merely
unused to alcohol. Just make sure he gets back to the hotel safely.'
        'Very well.' Brill bade us good luck.
As we pulled away, he called out, 'But there can also be a wish not to
imagine.'

 
        In the open-roofed car, rattling down
Broadway, Ferenczi asked me if it was normal in America to eat a melange of
apples, nuts, celery, and mayonnaise. Rose Brill had evidently served her
guests a Waldorf salad.
        Freud had fallen silent. He appeared
to be brooding. I wondered if Brill's comments were troubling him; I myself had
begun to think something might be wrong with Jung. I also wondered what Freud
meant when he said that Jung was more important than the rest of us put
together.
        'Brill is a paranoiac,' Ferenczi said
abruptly, addressing Freud. 'It is nothing.'
        'The paranoid is never entirely
mistaken,' Freud replied. 'Did you hear Jung's slip?'
        'What slip?' said Ferenczi.
        'His slip of the tongue,' answered
Freud. 'He said, "America will ban you" - not us but you.'
        Freud relapsed into silence. We took
Broadway all the way down to Union Square, then Fourth Avenue to the Bowery
Road through the Lower East Side. As we passed the closed stalls of the Hester
Street market, we had to slow down. Although it was nearly eleven, Jewish men
crowded the streets, wearing their long beards and peculiar outfits, black from
head to foot. Perhaps it was too hot to sleep in the airless, crammed tenements
in which so many of the city's immigrants lived. The Jews walked arm in arm or
gathered in small circles, with much gesturing and loud disputation. The sound
of their mongrel low German, which the Hebrews call Yiddish, was everywhere.
        'So this is the New World,' Freud
observed from the front seat, not favorably. 'Why on earth would they come so
far, only to recreate what they left behind?'
        I hazarded a question: 'Are you not a
religious man, Dr Freud?'
        It was infelicitous. At first I thought
he hadn't heard me. Ferenczi answered instead: 'It depends on what is meant by religious. If, for example, religious means believing God is gigantic illusion inspired by
collective Oedipal complex, Freud is very religious.'
        Freud now fixed on me for the first
time the piercing gaze I had seen on the quay. 'I will tell you your thought
process in asking me that,' he said. 'I asked why these Jews had come here. It
occurred to you to say They came for religious freedom, but you
reconsidered, because it seemed too obvious. You then reflected that if I, a
Jew, could not see that they came for religious freedom, it must be that
religion does not signify much for me - indeed, so little that I failed to see
how important it is for them. Hence your question. Do I have it