Free Dreaming for Freud by Sheila Kohler

Lake Achensee, when they quarreled bitterly over who had come up first with the idea of bisexuality in human beings and its role in the neuroses. He can see them both clearly walking along the edge of the lake arguing fiercely, waving their hands in the air, rather like an old married couple.
    Not having heard from Fliess for several days and his patient’s tardiness—has she decided already to abandon the treatment?—have brought on a feeling of breathlessness. His heart flutters, and he cannot help thinking again of his young patient’s words about the presence of death in her family. Without his friend’s approval of his work and the promise of his company in the future, life seems without purpose. How will he write anything new if he cannot share it as he did the dream book, chapter by chapter, listening to his suggestions and taking them seriously? And without his writing, how can he continue to live? Without his friend’s approval, how can he bear the constant criticism of the medical world around him? How viciously they have attacked him for pointing out what is obvious! Even Krafft-Ebing had called his lecture on the origin of hysteria—admittedly a theory he has revised—a scientific fairy tale. How that had stung! In the shadows of the late afternoon, looking at the clock, his heart beating irregularly, he feels he is only good at heart-misery.
    He has already, inexplicably, lost two good friends: first the charming and successful Breuer, a man who radiated optimism and who sincerely sought to do good, and now, perhaps, his adored Fliess. It is too hard to work alone. He crumples up the piece of paper before him. He is determined that he will not write to him and complain about this silence—he will not beg.
    When he finally hears the patient’s footsteps in his waiting room, his heart beats hard. He is a hunter stalking his prey. He is an adventurer, a conquistador,
Pisarro, a searcher of gold! He is hunting down the truth of the heart, and this girl must be made to give it to him, whether she wishes to or not.
    But when the girl enters his room, her skin glowing, her perfume like a breath of sweet air, her thick dark hair partly pinned back and partly free around her shoulders, her “Good day” clear, he loses all his confidence. What does she really want of him, coming in, leaning on her maid’s arm? She looks better today, unexpectedly, and she does not cough as she enters the room, though she does still look rather pale and shaky in her white dress.
    He watches her walk across the room to his couch and waits for her to continue her story, but when she finally lies down on his couch in her finery—she seems to be wearing another new and splendid dress—sighing profoundly and waving her hands around dramatically, her gold bracelets clinking, it is in stubborn silence.
    “Well?” he says. “You were telling me about your father’s illness, the deaths in your family, and how that made you feel.” She waves her hands, sighs again, and tells him that she cannot think of how to go on. He would like to tell her she is wasting his time and her father’s money.
    He stares at the dark Etruscan funerary urn he has placed in a corner of the room and thinks of the girl’s words about death and illness in her family, the beloved aunt who was so important to her, and about his own dead father. He continues to miss
him
more than he ever realized he would. He had not been aware how important the man was in his life. During his life his father had often made him think of Dickens’s Micawber, a tragicomical figure, someone who always believed something would turn up. He had borrowed, begged, and who knows, perhaps even stolen so that his boy could study.
    Something he had forgotten comes to him: riding on the train once, sitting opposite his father in the window seat and watching him fall asleep with the sun on his face, his mouth slightly open, a thread of saliva on his chin. He remembers staring at his