Free Dreaming for Freud by Sheila Kohler Page B

same basic building blocks in more and more complex arrangements. What if he had not followed von Brücke’s well-meaning suggestion to enter the clinical practice of medicine? What if he had not had to support such a large family and spend his time listening to patients like this one, he thinks, looking at this spoiled girl shifting around on his couch.
    He remembers writing to Martha in the early days of their courtship and referring to women as sorceresses. Her power was such that it seemed almost magical to him in those days. He recalls how he blamed her for preventing him from achieving fame in the cocaine affair, of going to visit her and failing to pursue his findings fast enough, allowing Köller to step in and get the prize for his idea.
    “The French fräulein you spoke of, for example? You feel you could trust her?” he asks, aware of the hint of sarcasm in his voice, thinking the girl would have preferred to confer with an ignorant servant girl rather than with a learned medical man, and wondering at the same time what happened there and why the girl had her dismissed.
    He is suddenly aware that this girl, with the glow of her youth, her splendid dress, her odor of wildflowers, and her bright mind has somehow brought out his fear of women, their ability to harm and even to destroy. He thinks of his clever old Catholic nurse, the thief, who was always taking him off to church to listen to sermons about hellfire and scolded him for his clumsiness.
    “Indeed, I liked her so much. We had so many interesting conversations,” she tells him enthusiastically. “We discussed the meaning of life, who we were, and a woman’s role in society.
She
encouraged me in my studies and even accompanied me to concerts and to the art galleries,” she mentions again loftily. She admires the painter Klimt, whom she saw exhibited with the Secessionists. “I love the frescoes he did at the new Court Theater on the ceiling. Have you seen them?” she asks in her airy way, as though they were at a dinner party. He avoids the question. He says, “I’m not particularly an admirer of modern art, it is ancient art that I find so intriguing.” He thinks that it is Rome he would like to visit, not a Klimt exhibition.
    He brings her back to the fräulein who has obviously been important in her life.
    “Why was she dismissed? What did she do to offend you?” he asks again.
    She only says that the fräulein gave her so many interesting books to read.
    “Molière, you said. What else?” the doctor asks, recalling what the father told him about the unsuitability of the texts and how they had led the girl astray.
    She tells him, sounding rather proud of herself, that she has read Mantegazza’s
Physiology of Love
. “All three volumes, which we read in Italian—killing two birds with one stone, my fräulein said, all about the perversions and about men’s and women’s bodies,” she tells him without shame, shifting around on his comfortable couch, smoothing down her skirts over her legs, running her fingers through her soft ringlets, her gold bracelets chinking. “And we discussed them at length.” He has obviously struck oil here, he thinks, surprised by this revelation.
    With her fräulein, too, she read other advanced books, even foreign ones which she shared with her, she goes on, showing off her erudition, listing them: Flaubert’s “Simple Heart,” and Dostoyevsky—“I do love Dostoyevsky!” she gushes, “his characters are all so very miserable they make me feel happy in comparison.”
    “A great writer, Dostoyevsky,” he admits.
    “And I read
Anna Karenina
by Tolstoy—and even Walt Whitman. My brother gave me von Hofmannsthal—what a good-looking man!” she says. “I caught a glimpse of him in a café in Vienna one evening and almost fell in love with him immediately—and my brother encouraged me to read him.
    “My brother does encourage me to learn but when I
do
study, Mother scolds me and says I spend too