Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  Thoughts of mortality were at the forefront of Freud’s thoughts in 1923, and not only because of his cancer. Freud had lost his daughter Sophie to Spanish Flu in 1920, shortly after writing his famous book about death and trauma, Beyond the Pleasure Principle . Even more crushingly for Freud, not long after his initial surgery, Sophie’s four-year-old son, Heinerle, Freud’s favorite grandson, died of a fever. Freud was devastated, and the depression he endured for the rest of his life was as much over this loss as about his own greatly diminished quality of life as a result of his illness. In short, Freud was thinking about death, and he was specifically thinking about pediatric illness and the death of children. (Freud really lost two grandchildren since Sophie had been pregnant at the time of her death.) The pediatrician “Otto” (Dr. Rie), who had cared for Sophie and his other children decades earlier, would thus also have made sense as an association to the tragedies he was enduring in 1923, if only as a figure standing in for a general theme.

  Through the catastrophe of Freud’s initial diagnosis and surgeries, and for the remainder of his life, his youngest child, Anna, was a nearly constant companion, acting as his nurse in addition to being his psychoanalytic protégé (the one individual among his followers who could literally carry forward “the name of the father” of the psychoanalytic movement). Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, writes that Freud “made a pact with [Anna] at the beginning [of his illness] that no sentiment was to be displayed; all that was necessary had to be performed in a cool, matter-of-fact fashion with the absence of emotion characteristic of a surgeon. This attitude, her courage and firmness, enabled her to adhere to the pact even in the most agonizing of situations.” 47 So Anna too would have been much on Freud’s mind in this period, and it is conceivable that Anna Hammerschlag was, in addition to standing in for Freud himself, also a kind of precognitive dream stand-in for his daughter, her namesake. Anna Freud was born five months after the “Irma” dream and may even have been consciously named after its central figure, perhaps as a kind of commemoration of Hammerschlag’s importance in Freud’s life as a result of that dream. Hammerschlag, who as Gerhard Fichtner puts it, was the “secret godmother of The Interpretation of Dreams ,” 48 was also godmother to young Anna.

  While it would be difficult, even in a life so thoroughly documented as Freud’s, to identify a single experience in 1923 or after that might definitively have been the target/source of Freud’s dream, one episode in Jones’ biography highlights Freud’s dependency on his daughter and the nature of his infirmity, and it readily calls to mind the dream scene of trying to get “Irma” to open her mouth and calling for the assistance of another physician:

  The huge prosthesis, a sort of magnified denture or obdurator, designed to shut off the mouth from the nasal cavity, was a horror; it was labeled “the monster.” In the first place it was very difficult to take out or replace because it was impossible for him to open his mouth at all widely. On one occasion, for instance, the combined efforts of Freud and his daughter failed to insert it after struggling for half an hour, and the surgeon had to be fetched for the purpose. 49

  Most importantly, I suggest that in 1923 and after, Freud would have been reminded of the role of his specimen dream in his life and career. How could he not have been struck, precisely as he had been on receiving the medallion in 1906, by the uncanny closeness of a significant, ominous turn of events in his own life to something he had dreamed/fantasized years earlier? Would he have secretly recognized that dream in hindsight as a premonition? I find it hard to imagine he would not have at least harbored some thoughts on this coincidence, although admitting them would have been unthinkable at that point. It would have been, so to speak, hard to open his mouth about any private doubts he may have had about the adequacy of his dream theory in hindsight. 50

  Let’s suppose for a moment that, on some level, Freud did recognize that the dream had been premonitory and thus that his wish-fulfillment theory—at least as he had formulated it in the book that put him on the scientific map—was not, after all, a complete theory of dreams. The dream would have caught him in a Catch-22. He would have recognized his theory was inadequate, that it missed a whole prophetic dimension of dreaming, but he would have nevertheless reflected that, had it not been for his premature interpretation of the dream as fulfilling various wishes he had had at the time of the dream, he would not enjoy the stature he was coming to enjoy late in life. His fame—in fact, nothing less than his immortality —rested in no small part on the confidence that this one dream interpretation had given him. The sentiment Freud had conveyed to Fliess, that a marble tablet should commemorate the house outside of Vienna where “the secret of dreams was revealed” to him, was thus quite appropriate in the context of his life and career. But reflecting on it after the fact, from hindsight dominated by the encroaching reality of his death, how can there not have been a sense of hubris followed by nemesis, the law that governed the Greek tragedies? Maybe he didn’t answer the sphinx’s riddle, as he so confidently claimed to have done. Was his whole theory thus a kind of malpractice ?

  Remember that the famous “snake eating its tail” dream of August Kekulé seems to have provided a kind of precedent and template for the role the Irma dream was set to play in Freud’s life. 51 Although Freud did not pick up on it in his own analysis, the Kekulé story seems to be vividly indexed in his dream by terminating in the formula for an organic molecule, highlighted in bold type as though for special emphasis. But this indexing of the Kekulé story may also take on a more equivocal meaning if we view the dream from the standpoint of hindsight.

  In the published text of Kekulé’s speech at the 1890 Benzolfeier event, the chemist followed his dream narrative with an admonition: “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall find the truth . . . but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding ” (my emphasis). 52 Freud would not have been in a position, either in 1895 or later in his life, to know that Kekulé probably had an ulterior motive in telling his dream story: to shore up his own priority in making the discovery of benzene’s ring structure in light of the uncomfortable fact that three other chemists had actually published on it as much as three years before he did. 53 Belatedly saying “it came to me in a dream” at a fest in his honor was a way of asserting he had not plagiarized 54 … and implying that through great scientific caution he had not rushed to publish his insight until he was sure it was true was a way of accounting for the strange discrepancy in publication dates. But to the 67-year-old Freud, Kekulé’s famous words about not rushing to publish on the meaning of our dreams before we really know what they are about might have taken a different meaning: an admonishment for his hubris and prematurity in publishing his thesis that dreams are only the fulfillments of repressed wishes—in other words, an admonishment for “not waiting for the sugar to melt.”

  So, I suggest that it may have been exactly Freud’s belated ambivalence or doubt about the nature of dreams as wish fulfillments (versus premonitions), in light of the Irma dream seeming premonitory , that could be the most important latent “meaning” of his Irma dream. If there was a single overriding wish in Freud’s life during the terrible year 1923, it would have been precisely that the dream had in fact been (just) a wish fulfillment, just as he had asserted all those years ago. It was a wish that he had been right about dreams being (just) wishes . Talk about fractal spirals of self-reference—or snakes eating their own tails! It would not only “wish away” his cancer but reinforce his own correctness about his own great dream “discovery,” putting him beyond any professional reproach. Displacing his own illnesses—all of them, past as well as future—onto another figure (Anna/Irma) not only fulfilled his wish but also made it possible to disavow the dream as a premonition, creating the ambiguity that necessarily typifies refluxing information in a post-selected universe. The dream’s choice of this particular patient as a “brick” to represent these future thoughts als
o enabled him to deflect his deeper anxieties over prophecy onto something more acceptably “Freudian”—that is, sexual—in nature.

  Freud’s dreaming brain might have seen a “transference” of his illnesses onto Anna Hammerschlag as an acceptable compromise. Committing the malpractice of failing to notice an organic lesion in a patient (and friend)—perhaps symbolically his own daughter/nurse—was “less than” having to endure it himself. Maybe some guilt for overlooking the illness of a patient—exactly the kind of guilt that was “going around” at that point in his circle of medical men—would have been preferable to the depression he was now suffering, and also preferable to the malpractice of getting the world to believe (wrongly) that dreams never referred to future events other than in the straightforward Newtonian way that they may point us in a certain direction (i.e., “By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future.” 55 ). And, placing the blame for his patient’s treatment on the family pediatrician (who in the dream delivered a bottle of pineapple brandy, Ananas —remember that Anna would be born a few months later) would have been a kind of reproach against fate, and perhaps the limits of medicine, for the death of his grandson and Sophie, whom Rie had treated as a child. (Sophie would have been two years old when Freud had the Irma dream.) Later commentators like Didier Anzieu argue we must consider Freud’s dream-interpretation to be part of the dream-work, 56 so we might see not just the dream itself but the whole complex of interpretation surrounding it as premonitory.

  What is so striking is how very like Oedipus Freud really seems to have been. As a young man he treaded boldly into a fresh new kingdom ready for a leader, the kingdom of dreams and the unconscious, all the while batting away the buzzing gnats of experiences that seemed prophetic, using various evasions, denials, and rationalizations why that can’t possibly be true. And his most famous dream, the dream that launched his career and for which he imagined a marble monument in his honor—equivalent to his answer to the sphinx—turned out to have a vastly different meaning than he had claimed. In hindsight, that dream became like the blind prophet Tiresias at the end of Sophocles’ tragedy, pronouncing Oedipus’s guilt. It leveled a guilty pointing finger.

  This is what makes Freud’s medallion episode also so deeply wyrd. The denial of prophecy by the hapless prince-cum-king was the real meaning of the Oedipus story that Freud had so centralized in his personal myth and the theory that immortalized him, and he reenacted this denial and displacement (i.e., “focus on the incest”) in his own life and works. More than that, he himself seems to have been a precog—if only because he paid more attention to his dreams and parapraxes than most people. The truth of prophecy, and the truth of his own prophecies, was staring him in his face his whole life, but he could not squarely face it.

  The belated doubt I am suggesting Freud must have felt about his dream theory may also provide a new light in which to see his late “conversion” to telepathy, which his skeptical friend Ernest Jones found so baffling and regrettable. This softening toward the occult may have been a kind of compromise formation, a concession protecting himself against cognitive dissonance. Telepathy enabled him to navigate cunningly between the possibility he could not face—that the unconscious could be prophetic—and a humbler idea he could more easily accept, and indeed that had motivated him even as a young psychiatrist developing a radical new theory of the psyche: the idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

  Where All Royal Roads Lead

  In his late masterpiece Civilization and Its Discontents , Freud metaphorically likened the unconscious to the Eternal City, Rome, in the way that it preserves the past layers of its history. A visitor to Rome, Freud wrote, would see traces of the earliest stages of the city’s history still in the landscape, and shaping the modern city that has grown amid the ruins. “Except for a few gaps, he will find the wall of Aurelian almost unchanged. In some places, he will be able to find sections of the Servian wall where they have been excavated and brought to light.” 57 Some periods are represented by ruins, “not … ruins of themselves but of later restorations made after fires or destruction. … There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings.” 58

  This resolutely, even desperately past-oriented psychological pioneer wanted to believe—indeed needed to believe, for his theory to work—that the human psyche goes well beyond this level of preservation, that “nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.” 59 He thus conjured a remarkable image of the psychological Rome almost as a kind of augmented-reality or virtual-reality experience, with every period flickeringly superimposed: “Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. …” 60

  But even if the universe can be characterized as a glass block where everything in the past still exists and everything in the future already exists, such a picture does not reflect how information is retained in our heads. Science has long since demolished Freud’s picture of human memory as a place where everything is preserved whole and intact. The brain’s preservation of information is in a constant tension with its need to revise and update itself; thus memory, it is now argued, is much more like the real Rome, with bits and pieces of the past here and there but mostly ruins that, while they look authentic, are in fact reconstructions made at some later date. Most of the past is gone, the stones and bricks of old experiences having long since been reappropriated and rearranged to make edifices serving more recent needs. Dreaming, as it is coming to be characterized by today’s neuroscience and psychology, is the nightly activity of modernizing this old city, making facelifts and repairs and building new structures, slowly obliterating the more distant past to make way for episodes and concerns that are more contemporary and pertinent.

  But if anything like the hypothesis I am developing in this book is true, one’s personal Rome may be even stranger than this, and stranger than Freud’s flickering virtual-reality tour through perfectly preserved layers of the past. Some of those ruins that seem like they belong to the past are really future temples, future Coliseums, belonging to a kind of science-fictional Rome where buildings are constructed for purposes that can’t be anticipated or imagined yet, but confusingly using the “bricks” of our past experience. How much of the “symbolism” of our dreams really reflects our as-yet-unfathomable future purposes and future thoughts remains an open question. And what about our inscrutable neurotic behavior and parapraxes—might those also issue just as often from our future as from our past? How many of the traumas that shape our lives might really be, as in Freud’s own case, catastrophes that lie ahead of us?

  10

  Prophetic Jouissance — Trauma, Survival, and the Precognitive Sublime

  It is right it should be so:

  Man was made for joy and woe;

  And when this we rightly know

  Through the world we safely go.

  Joy and woe are woven fine,

  A clothing for the soul divine.

  Under every grief and pine

  Runs a joy with silken twine.

  — William Blake, Auguries of Innocence (1803)

  I t was September 23, 1955, and the actor Alec Guinness had just arrived in Hollywood to film the movie The Swan . He was 41, and it was more than two decades before he would become a household name in America for his portrayal of the wise Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars , and still four years before being real-life knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his achievements on the British stage and screen. And it was the very first time he had
set foot in California. Unfortunately, the 16-hour flight from London had made the famously cranky actor doubly cranky, and events of the evening—including the gender-bending attire of his dinner companion—conspired to magnify his displeasure.

  An American screenwriter, Thelma Moss, wanted to buy Guinness a meal, but she was wearing trousers—something women didn’t often do in those days. After being turned away from three different respectable establishments as a result of this unfortunate wardrobe choice, Moss drove her increasingly hungry and grumpy companion to a more liberal Italian place, Villa Capri, that she knew would admit them. Except, she had no reservation … and there were no available tables. 1

  By this time, Guinness was desperate: “I don’t care where we eat or what,” he told Moss. “Just something, somewhere.” Guinness wrote in his 1985 memoir Blessings in Disguise that as they left the restaurant to continue their search for food, he “became aware of running, sneakered feat” chasing them down, and turned to face a handsome young man in a sweat-shirt and jeans.

  “You want a table?” the man offered. “Join me. My name is James Dean.”