She gave a small moue of impatience.
“Am I?” I insisted.
“Of course.”
“Well then, whose confidence is relevant? That of the trained, experienced physician or that of the young girl?”
Though I waited, she didn’t answer.
More gently, I said, “Nina, my dear. What kind of a physician will you make if you persist in resisting medical advice?”
After a moment she sighed and said, “A poor one, I suppose.”
I am ever so slightly ashamed to admit that I was relieved to have bested her in this conversation. “Exactly. A poor one. Now, let us return to a topic immediately useful to resolving your hysterical pain.” I pulled out my notebook and leafed through the pages. “We’ve addressed the issue of your experience of the menstrual period itself, and I think we both can agree that we did not there discover the site of the initiating trauma.”
I waited for her to agree. When she didn’t speak, I said, “Correct?”
“Correct,” she said.
I resolutely ignored her grudging tone. “I would like to explore further an issue that my colleague Dr. Sándor Ferenczi has found to be present quite frequently in cases such as yours.”
“Cases such as mine?”
“Cases of hysteria.” I hesitated for a moment and then continued as I’d planned. “Nina, I must insist now that you take your place on my examination couch. It is crucial for the next phase of our work.”
I had only in the previous year adopted Freud’s use of the analytic couch. Before that my patients sat in a chair on the other side of my desk or, if I needed to use massage, lay on the examination table. Those patients too ill to leave their beds at home or in the sanatorium I sat next to, in a chair pulled up to the bedside, often holding their hands in my own. But the year before I began treating Nina S., I was invited to hear Freud lecture before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association (to which my application for membership was pending) and became convinced by the good doctor’s argument in favor of the couch. Since following his example, I found that being liberated from eye contact with the analyst inspires greater confidences on the part of the analysand, especially when discussing issues of a sexual nature. Young women naturally avert their eyes when embarrassed and ashamed. Lying on a couch, with the analyst out of sight in a chair behind, they can indulge the illusion that they are alone, which allows them to more freely discuss their sexual experiences.
Nina finally acquiesced to my insistence that she lie down. After the excitement of flouting her father’s authority and of spending the evening in the company of strange young men, I believed, correctly it turned out, that she might be due for a breakthrough, so before taking my seat behind her, I went out and instructed my nurse to release the remaining patients in my waiting room. As I returned to my office, I heard my nurse encouraging my disappointed patients to return after lunch for afternoon office hours.
“Now, Nina,” I said, sitting down behind her. “We are going to discuss something difficult, and even terrifying. I want to assure you that I would not put you through this if I didn’t think it might expose the traumatic source of your pain.”
She inhaled tremulously, her bosom quivering beneath the silk of her shirtwaist.
“Relax,” I said, laying a hand on her forehead and smoothing her hair. “Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.”
She took a few breaths, and I matched my inhalations and exhalations to hers.
“Nina, I’d like to talk now about sexual matters.”
Like all my young female patients, she had a visceral reaction to the word. Her skin fairly trembled beneath my hand. I cupped her cheek with my palm, calming her. A note, here, about technique. Like my mentor, Dr. Ferenczi, I believe heartily in the importance of expressions of affection between analyst and analysand. I have learned from him to think of the traumatized as children in dire need of a parent’s fond embrace. It is for this reason that I often embrace or stroke my patients. I believe it to be conducive to treatment and cure.
“Nina, are you familiar with the work of my esteemed colleague Dr. Sándor Ferenczi?”
“I know who he is. My uncle tried to convince him to treat me before coming to you.”
This surprised me. I had assumed that it was by virtue of our long acquaintance that Dr. S. had beseeched me to undertake the care of his niece. Had I known that I was his second choice, I might not have made such a concerted effort to adjust my calendar to accommodate an old friend. But then I would have been robbed of the opportunity of getting to know such a lovely and lively young woman.
I put aside my wounded vanity and said, “Dr. Ferenczi and I often consult on one another’s cases.”
“Have you consulted on mine?”
“We reserve our consultations for our most dire patients.”
“I’m glad to hear that my case is not dire.”
With a gentle pressure of my hand on her forehead I brought her attention back to the matter at hand. “Dr. Ferenczi and I have had cause to discuss at great length a theory about one of the primary causal factors in the development of psychopathology. It is his opinion, and one that I am inclined to share, that hysterical symptoms are often caused by the trauma of sexual seduction in childhood.”
“Sexual seduction?”
“Dr. Ferenczi has found that many patients, particularly those suffering from narcissistic, borderline, and psychotic conditions, experienced sexual seduction at the hands of a parent or parent figure.”
“Have you found this to be the case with your patients?”
“Perhaps less frequently than Dr. Ferenczi, but then he is quite often the psychoanalyst of last resort. His cases are thus more complex. But even in my own practice I have discovered a disturbing number of cases of the seduction of girls by their fathers.”
Her reaction surprised me. Rather than break down in tears, as other patients have done when confronted with this terrifying truth, Nina began to laugh.
“Are you asking me if my father seduced me? My father? Really, Dr. Zobel?”
“I assure you, Nina, that it is far from uncommon. I cannot tell you how many young ladies have confessed the very thing that you find laughably unimaginable.”
“Confess? Why should they confess? They committed no crime. Surely if any confessing was necessary, then it was on the part of their fathers.”
“A bad choice of word. Nina, I wonder if your attempt to distract me from my question doesn’t indicate a fear of the answer.”
“My father never seduced me, Dr. Zobel. I should think he was far too busy seducing his various mistresses to think about me in that way.”
“Your father has mistresses?”
“Of course. Don’t you all? My mother says that a mistress is as necessary to a man of our class as a decent pipe stand or frock coat.”
“You and your mother have discussed your father’s indiscretions?”
“We don’t make a habit of it. But there was a small scandal a few years ago when my father took up with my younger sisters’ governess. You might have heard about it.”
I had not, and this surprised me. My own wife, secure in the attentions of a husband who found her as sexually compelling at age forty-nine as he did when she was but nineteen, was fond of sharing such gossip with me. I was surprised that this morsel had not caught her attention.
“Did you perhaps catch your father and the governess in flagrante? The witnessing of such a scene might be just the traumatic source we have been looking for.”
“No. I found out at school. Miss Lanier, the governess, was a distant relation of one of my classmates, and it was to this family that she retired once her condition became unmistakable. Greta, my classmate, and I were competing at the time for first place in arithmetic, and there was no love lost between us. She told the entire class about my father and Miss Lanier. I still bested her, though, at that week’s mental-arithmetic competition. Small comfort, I suppose. At any rate, all of this happen
ed long after my crippling menstrual cramps began.”
“Her condition? Was there a baby?” I’m afraid there was no therapeutic reason for this question. I just knew that when I told my wife the story she’d expect to hear what happened in the end.
“Miss Lanier lost the baby. As to whether my father still sees her, that I can’t tell you. He has others, though. Or at least I assume he does. Perhaps that’s why he’s so horrified at the thought of my going to the New York Café. That might be where he meets his paramours.”
“There certainly are young women of that sort at the New York,” I said. “Though I imagine that he’s less concerned with you meeting a young lady like that than with you being taken for one.”
Nina laughed. “Are you so very scandalized by me, Dr. Zobel? Do you worry that people might think I am of easy virtue?”
“I worry that you seem inclined to take your virtue for granted. Once lost it is unrecoverable.”
“Now you sound like Mama.”
“Again you’ve distracted me from the issue at hand! What are you afraid of discussing, Nina? Why run from this conversation? If not your father, then was there another who seduced you when you were a child, your uncle perhaps?”
“My uncle! Good Lord. What a horrible thought. No, Dr. Zobel. No one has seduced me. I am still pure.”
I had no choice but to smile at the archness of her tone. But still I pressed her. “You are very sure that you have had no childhood sexual experience? None at all?”
She cast her eyes down at her hands.
“Nina? Did you have a sexual experience as a child? With a caretaker, perhaps? Or a sibling?”
“No. Or, rather, there was one thing that happened, but I didn’t know the man.”
Victory! At last! It took all my will to compel my voice to maintain its dispassionate tone. “Indeed? Tell me more about this.”
“There’s nothing to tell. It was at a picnic. I was perhaps six or seven years old. I was paddling in a stream with some other little girls. I remember our mothers had warned us not to get our dresses wet, so we had stripped down to our petticoats and drawers. I believe one of my older cousins was meant to be watching us, but she’d gone off somewhere. I looked up and I saw the father of one of the other girls standing on the bank, just a few yards from us. He had unbuttoned his trousers and was holding his … his thing in his hand.” For all her forthrightness, for all her frank interest in the scientific and the medical, Nina S. was still a young, innocent, and cosseted girl unable to bring herself to speak the terrifying word.
“You saw his penis?”
“I don’t think I knew what it was. Only that it was strange. He was strange. Now of course I know. But I’m not sure what I knew then.”
“What happened?”
“I shouted for Mama. By the time she got there he was gone. I told her what happened, and she got very angry.”
“Did she confront him?”
“I don’t think she believed me. At any rate she berated me for having gotten undressed, packed me up right away, and took me home. I remember being particularly outraged because we missed the fireworks. I think it was the king’s birthday, perhaps? Anyway, there were to be fireworks that night, as soon as the sun set, and because Mama was so angry, she didn’t let us stay for them.”
As traumas go, this one was hardly as dramatic as I’d hoped. I would have thought that a girl like Nina would have required more in the way of incident to inspire a lifetime of such terrible pains and cramping. However, I knew at that moment that we had discovered the source of her hysterical ovarian neuralgia.
I explained to Nina that as we had now identified the traumatic source of her pain, it would dissipate if not disappear. Some of my learned colleagues will perhaps dispute this notion as overoptimistic, but all will grant me that the power of suggestion is a necessary tool of the analyst. It was important to me that Nina understand that we were well on our way to a cure.
• 36 •
I CONFRONTED MY NEXT SESSION with Nina in a state of discomposure not easily overcome. My normally pleasant midday meal had been disturbed by an unusual family altercation. The afternoon previous, my wife had taken both Erzsébet and Lili to call on the mother of the young man whom the matchmaker had presented to us for consideration. The appointment was intended as an opportunity for the lady to meet Erzsébet, to take the girl’s temperature, so to speak, as a potential daughter-in-law. And to take, I imagine, the temperature of my wife, though the two ladies had long known each other, fellow members of the Israelite Women’s Organization of Pest. The young man himself was not supposed to be there, busy as he was with his medical studies. However, the day’s lectures had been canceled as a result of a demonstration by a nationalist students’ organization—a foreshadowing, we now know, of the ugly protests that would eventually culminate in the imposition of limitations on the numbers of Jewish students allowed to matriculate at Hungarian universities—and the young man was not only home when my wife and daughters called but spent the hour in the parlor with them. Under different circumstances, this might have been an ideal opportunity for the two young people to converse under their mothers’ watchful eyes. However, the unanticipated encounter proved to be a disaster, and my normally sweet-tempered daughter spent the next day’s luncheon haranguing her mother and me with her objections to András Nordau’s suit. After much wailing and knotting of damp handkerchiefs (on Erzsébet’s part, not mine), I was made to understand that her objections amounted to a globule of white saliva that attached to the young man’s upper lip, connecting periodically in a string to his lower.
“So he’ll wipe his mouth,” I told my hysterical child.
My sense fell on deaf ears, and nothing was accomplished beyond Erzsébet rushing away from the table, leaving behind an untouched plate, which, as one who abhors waste of any kind, I had no choice but to finish myself.
I was thus not merely distressed but also mildly dyspeptic when Nina arrived in my consulting room, and though I had intended to spend our session going over her memories of the traumatic incident at the picnic, I was unprepared to withstand the assault of yet another young girl with an agenda of her own. When she entered the consulting room I could not help, despite my unusual state of mental and physical discombobulation, but to smile at her attire. She wore a coarse khaki coverall with pantaloons rather than a skirt, tight at the ankles, revealing a full two inches of pale stocking above the top of her low-heeled boot. The coverall was paired with a middy blouse with a wide navy-blue silk tie. On her head was perched a small straw boater, also trimmed in navy blue.
Indicating her dress, she said, “I’m afraid I didn’t have time to change.”
“Did you spend the early part of the day working the barges on the Danube?”
“Very funny. The Feminist Association held a boating excursion this morning.”
“Hence the nautical attire.”
“Do you like it?”
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.”
“They’re called overalls. They’re quite popular in America, especially among women laborers. They’re very comfortable.”
“They look very comfortable. How, might I ask, did you come to adopt the fashions of the American proletariat?”
“I bought the pattern at the bazaar at the Suffrage Congress exhibition hall and had our seamstress make a pair for me and a pair for Gizella. Mama nearly had an apoplectic stroke when she saw me wearing them. But I think they’re marvelous.”
“And Gizella? Does she look as marvelous in hers?”
“Gizella won’t wear them. She’s very particular about her clothing, and she said they’d make her look like a little boy. But all the younger women at this morning’s outing wanted a pair.”
“Did you enjoy your excursion?”
“Very much. We boated along the river for a while, and then we had lunch and heard a lecture beneath the oaks on Margaret Island.”
“A lecture?”
“It was quite fascinating. All about reforming the social and legal status of domestic servants. Did you know, Dr. Zobel, that our maids are utterly defenseless against the advances of their male employers? You would not believe the stories Mrs. Grossman told.”
“Indeed? Who is this Mrs. Grossman?”
“Janka Grossman. She has written on the subject of the rights of domestic servants for Women and Society. I’m sure you know that the young boys of Pest are encouraged to use their maidservants for … for sex.” The disgust with which she said the word did not, I fear, bode well for Nina’s future husband.
“Shocking!” I said, recalling with fondness my own dear Marta, the young kitchen servant whose attentions both culinary and sexual formed such an important part of my early life.
Nina said, “And when the maids fall pregnant, they’re simply sent back to their villages to fend for themselves.”
A wise and experienced girl, Marta used to rise from our nest beneath the warm eiderdown of her narrow cot in a corner of the pantry and clean herself inside and out with a solution of sodium bicarbonate and warm water. She remains to this day in the employ of my mother. The wasp-waisted, capacious-bosomed Marta of my youthful nights has long since turned into a squat and big-bellied old woman, her mouth devoid of all but a single tooth, her vast quantities of luxurious blond hair reduced to a gray braid no thicker around than my pinkie. But still the merry eyes remain, and she is as fond as ever of this overgrown boy to whom the years have hardly been more gentle.
“You found this lecture very interesting,” I said. “Exciting, even?”
“Inspiring. Infuriating.”
“ ‘Infuriating.’ ” I considered this. “In one of our last appointments you told me about your father’s sexual indiscretions. Did the lecture remind you of this? Did he or does he have liaisons with the family servants in addition to the governess? Have you witnessed such an encounter?”
“You seem so sure that my fury must be a result of my ‘witnessing’ something. Can’t I just be disgusted at this kind of outrage without having to witness it personally?”
Love and Treasure Page 31
