Free Dreaming for Freud by Sheila Kohler Page A

smooth, innocent sleeping face and thinking, “One day he will die and he will be buried, but I will be alive.”
    His ambivalence about his father, which had made him arrive late for his funeral, is rather like his ambivalence about Rome, which he both longs and fears to visit. After his father’s death he had felt strangely uprooted. He was not sure what he wanted or even where he was going. He had been obliged to discover himself anew, to descend into the underworld of his own buried self, to attempt with Fliess to lead him, his Virgil, to discover his own unconscious, in what he came to think of as his self-analysis. It was a difficult time for him. Perhaps his mood swings were also due to his attempts to stop the cocaine he and Fliess had been taking in large doses, and which he now realized was unwise. These objects that he began collecting shortly after his father’s death are in some way related to that wild search for self.
    All this passion to collect, Fliess has dismissed as a waste of time. “Behind every collector there is a Don Juan,” he once said.
    Still the girl says nothing, lying there coughing on his couch.
    “You do not trust me enough to tell me what comes to your mind?” he asks her.
    “Why should I ?” she replies disconcertingly.
    “Well, after all, why would you not? I trust you to tell me the truth,” he replies.
    She sighs and waves her hands and seems to think about his words.
    He goes on, “You think I am like your father, or even Herr Z., both of whom you consider, I gather, untrustworthy?” he says.
    The girl says, “Well, they have both been your patients, haven’t they, and my father is paying you to cure me, isn’t he?”
    He decides not to answer that, taken aback by her rudeness.
    It is possible that he should let the girl settle in for a while longer before bringing up the matter of repressed desire and before explaining how her complaints about her father, their vehemence, are a sure sign of her attachment to him. But he is afraid she might escape without this essential clarification. He is in a hurry to cure her. She is obviously quite perceptive, but just as obviously puffed up with pride, spoiled, and rude. She seems to know a surprising amount about her father’s illness.
    He stares at this sulky girl, who still has something of the child’s glow about her dimpled pink cheeks, her smooth hands, the soft glossy hair, the little ankles he glimpses in her dainty shoes. He cannot help but find her attractive and at the same time infuriating. She is a strange mixture of considerable acumen and childishness. He thinks that children are not the ignorant or innocent beings people like to think they are, though surely they know otherwise. At times he feels he is only discovering what every nursemaid must already know. The truth is, he cannot help finding this pretty, rich girl difficult and disagreeable but also endearing. He is anxious to rein her in.
    Instead he asks, “Are there people you can talk to more easily?”
    She thinks for a while and says she would find it much easier to speak to a woman.
    “A woman? You would trust a woman more than you trust me?” he says, taken aback, offended despite himself. He would like to tell her she ought to be careful with women. She ought to watch out for them, particularly women as intelligent and appealing as she is herself.
    He must not be fooled by this young one’s considerable wiles. He cannot help thinking sometimes of where his career might have taken him if he had not fallen so desperately in love with Martha. What if he had been able to have a full-time research career? What if he could have continued to work in the quiet of a laboratory with a microscope and something like a lamprey or a crayfish and his own fine mind, instead of having to listen endlessly to these querulous hysterics? He remains proud of his early discoveries, which surely bolstered Darwin’s idea that evolution operates conservatively, using the