by Morris West
Now I know, though I can never reveal, who my patient is. In Hungarian, of which I know a little from my contacts with Ferenczi, Kardoss means a fist. In Austrian dialect, the word “Gams” means a chamois. In German, a “Hirsch” means a stag. Her pseudonym is based on a simple switch of names, easy to decipher. Subconsciously, too, she is scattering small identity clues for me to follow: her father’s coat of arms, the name of his estate, Silbersee, the fact – or is it a fiction? – that her mother was an English duchess. This is encouraging. She wants me to follow the paperchase. She wants to lead me to the truth. But then, as Hamlet says, then what dreams may come! Ah, there’s the rub!
I put everything back in the reticule, take down from my shelves a copy of Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbols and Mythology of Ancient Peoples, and settle down to read until she has finished her meditation and – please God – is ready to tell me why she likes hurting people and why she has no concept of guilt.
MAGDA
Zurich
This time I take my promenade under the orchard trees in the front garden The apples and pears are ripening. There is a scent of roses and honeysuckle and a bourdon of bees, drowsy in the still air. My head is buzzing like a hive, with a multitude of thoughts for which I cannot find words. I have never been under this kind of inquisition before, and I understand now what a large step it is to surrender your privacy to another person.
Somehow, at least for me, physical privacy hardly matters any more; but since childhood ended with my virtual banishment to the International Academy for Young Gentlewomen, I have guarded my inner life like the secrets of the Signoria. It became something of an obsession with me that only I should know the whole logic of my affairs. Indeed, the success of my adventures depended on-secrecy. Now this Carl Jung is dissecting me like a corpse on the slab and I am powerless to complain.
I have hardly made my first circuit of the lawn when Emma Jung comes out, with basket and gloves and shears, to cut roses for the house. She greets me agreeably and asks:
“How is it going?”
“I don’t know. Suddenly I began to feel confused. I came out here to compose myself.”
“That’s good. The first session is always an ordeal. You mustn’t let Carl push you too hard.”
“So far he’s been very considerate – though I think I’ve made him angry a couple of times.”
She makes a little shrugging gesture of resignation.
“That’s his way. You just have to get used to it. I tell him it doesn’t work with all patients. I’m an analyst myself. Carl trained me and I correspond a lot with Freud. I work mostly with women. Since the children came, of course, I’ve been very much the Hausfrau.”
I am drawn to her immediately. She is open and warm and unassuming. I offer to hold the basket while she cuts the blooms. She seems glad of my company. I explain that I have practised as a physician and I am interested to know how the analytic procedure works. I am struck by the simplicity of her answer.
“For my patients, I liken the formation of a character to knitting a garment. You know what happens when you make a mistake? The whole pattern is spoilt. Then you have a choice: you can finish the garment; but it will always be botched and ugly; or you can unravel the knitting right back to the first mistake and start again. That’s basically what analysis is about. It’s a tedious job. The patient is scared and sometimes hostile. The analyst has to lend patience, honesty and courage. Now, remember, I’ve dealt only with fairly simple cases. Carl handles much more difficult ones than I would dare to attempt. Sometimes he adopts a very stern approach. I tell him that’s like chopping parsley with a meat cleaver. He snorts and tells me to mind my own business. He’s a brilliant man.” She smiles, a small, tolerant, woman-to-woman smile, and adds an afterthought: “Difficult to live with at times, but full of concern for his patients. May I ask who recommended you to him?”
It turns out she knows Giancarlo di Malvasia, had sat next to him at lunch during the Weimar Conference, was charmed by his elegance and wit, and could make no headway at all against his Florentine snobberies. I tell her I had exactly the same experience. We laugh together. She snips a yellow rosebud and hands it to me.
“It goes with your dress – which, I must say, is beautiful. You have very good taste.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you let me offer you a word of advice?”
“Please! I should welcome it.”
“I have found that there are two danger points in every analysis, especially for a woman. The first is when transference occurs.”
This is a new word to me. I ask what it means. She explains:
“It is a process, unconscious at first, by which the patient identifies so intimately with the analyst as to become completely and sometimes morbidly depen dent on him. Sometimes the analyst, too, is caught in the same trap. He – or she – becomes deeply attached to the patient, who is as dependent as a child. It’s really very much like falling in love. Indeed, Freud is quite definite about it. He told me once, ‘The cure is effected by love.’ Be that as it may, the next danger point is when the patient is brought to see clearly the defect or the incident that has caused the neurosis. That’s always a terrible shock; because it’s never quite what you expect. It’s rather like losing someone you love. You know it happens to other people. You never expect it to happen to you. And you have to face it alone. You cannot turn back to the guide who brought you to the moment of revelation. Forgive me! I know you’re a strong and intelligent woman. You’ll come through all right. I’m just trying to prepare you a little.”
She is also warning me: “Keep off the grass.” Normally I bristle when a woman does this to me. It’s like a challenge to a duel, and I am instantly on guard. But not this time, not with this one. I find her wise and gentle and well meaning. I try to tell her so. She refuses the compliment:
“No! It’s just that I’ve seen so many casualties in this profession. It’s full of clever and dedicated people; but they’re dealing with highly flammable material: the human psyche. Not all of them know how to handle it. In our group we’ve had two suicides and a lot of near breakdowns. Carl himself is under great stress just now. We all are in this household.”
She is clearly inviting a response. I ask, gently:
“What are you trying to tell me, Frau Jung?”
“The moment I met you, I felt that you were a quite unusual woman. I was instantly attracted to you. Under other circumstances, I should ask you to be my friend. Now, I simply tell you: be careful! Be careful of yourself; be careful of my Carl. I fear you may be dangerous for each other.” She takes the basket from my arm and gives me a gentle push in the direction of the house. “Now you should go in. You are paying for every minute of time!”
I still have the rosebud. I wonder if I should make an entrance wearing it between my teeth and clicking castanets like a gypsy. Jung is reading. He closes the book and gestures at me to sit down.
“Rested and ready again? Let’s move along! You were telling me you didn’t understand guilt. Do you ever disappoint yourself?”
“Often.”
“What do you do about it?”
“Put it to the back of my mind and get on with the business of living. Sometimes when I remember it, I curse myself for a fool.”
“That’s guilt; whether it is you, or the woman next door, or God himself who passes judgment on the act. Why did you have to make such a mouthful of it?”
“Because I still think there’s more to it than that – and I wonder why I haven’t felt it. You’re patronising me, doctor! Please don’t do it. I’m paying you to help me.” I take out the envelope full of francs and wave it at him. “You see! There’s the fee. Do you want it now or afterwards?”
I know it is an insult, but I think it is time to trade blow for blow. He is surly and combative. He slams his hand flat on the desk.
“Money doesn’t buy my services, Frau Hirschfeld.”
“And bullying doesn’t command my co
nfidence, doctor.”
He stares at me in silence for a long moment; then he laughs, gets up, takes my hands and raises them to his lips. There is no hint of gallantry in the gesture. I find it simple and touching.
“I’m sorry. These are tricks of the trade. With a new patient one goes through the repertoire, looking for the right approach. May we start again?”
“Yes. I know I need help; but I’m not the village idiot.”
“You might be safer if you were. They don’t execute idiots for murder. And that’s what could happen to you if you continue these bizarre exercises. Tell me what happened that scared you so much.”
I gave him a terse description of the affair of my colonel at Gräfin Bette’s house of appointment. He is not satisfied. He wants more.
“I need to know what goes on in your head before, during and after such an episode. Take your time. Try to step back and take a clinical view.”
It isn’t easy; but I manage to set it out for him.
“First, it always happens when I’m bored, lonely, depressed – when I feel ugly about myself and the world. I begin to make fantasies about sexual acts. All of them – except those with women – involve violence, and I am the aggressor! The fantasies become obsessive until I must absolutely do what I am dreaming. That’s why I use the houses of appointment. There are lots of wealthy amateurs like me who pay for the accommodation but not for their partners. Of course, if there are no amateurs available, then I hire a professional. By the time the game begins, I am in a high state of excitement, rising rapidly to frenzy, and turning abruptly to black rage. In that instant, I could tear my partner to pieces. I don’t love him. I hate him. If he is strong and battles with me, we fight each other to climax. If he’s weak and submissive, I beat him without mercy until I come to orgasm. Until that moment, I am quite out of control. Afterwards, I am exhausted, affectionate, grateful, the best of company. I bathe and dress in my finest clothes and go out to dine.”
“With your partner?”
“Never! That’s a closed world. If we meet outside it, we meet as strangers.”
“Or as enemies?”
“Sometimes, perhaps. Blackmail is not unknown.”
He is silent for a while, studying me over the tops of his interlaced fingers. Then he takes a new tack.
“Something puzzles me about your story.”
“What in particular?”
“First, you have this enchanted childhood, this magical and beautiful awakening to womanhood. Then comes a gap – which you’ll have to fill in for me – your unmarried years as a student at university. Next we have a wonderful, tumultuously happy marriage which ends, sadly, with the premature death of your husband and the alienation of your only daughter. It’s a shame, but at the time of your husband’s death you were thirty years old, rich and beautiful. I should have laid odds on an early remarriage for you. Statistically and psychologically that’s the pattern. Instead, you launch yourself on a sordid and promiscuous sex life, sado-masochist in character and so disreputable that it has brought you to the attention of the police. Can you tell me why? What set you off on this long walk on the bad side of town?”
That, I tell him, is a long and tangled story. He will need to be very patient with me. He asks if he may smoke. When the pipe is drawing well, he uses it like a pointer to gesture to me. He orders me, curtly:
“Go ahead! Go ahead! You’re wasting my time and your money!”
I snap back at him instantly:
“Don’t talk to me like that! You hack at me like a butcher. Leave me a little dignity.”
He shakes his head in weary resignation. It is clear that he does think I am the village idiot.
“Dignity, Madame, is a thin cloak in a black winter. Please do go on!”
JUNG
Zurich
Finally, I think I have her launched on the crucial part of the story, the one which should take us to the graveyard where the bodies are buried. I use the words in a metaphorical sense; but I have the uneasy sense that the metaphor is very close to fact.
I am not well acquainted with the demi-monde. When I was young in Paris, my poverty, my Puritan upbringing and my fear of infection kept me tolerably chaste. In my better years I have managed to find some diversions from monogamy; but I have never had enough money to indulge in the diversions or perversions of the rich – which in any case are not widely available in Zurich! However, I know enough of the gilded world to understand that it protects its privacy very well, and that Magda Liliane Kardoss von Gamsfeld may be exaggerating her risky follies to conceal a far graver matter.
There is another possibility which I must not dismiss: that she is suffering as I am from a progressive fragmentation of the personality, so that it seems that all the beasts of the subconscious are set free to threaten her. In this case, it is quite possible that all I am hearing is an elaborate fairy tale.
We have not even begun to analyse her dream. I am hoping that what she is about to tell me will illuminate some of its meanings. As she begins her narrative, I notice a distinct change of style. She is no longer reliving the sensuous joys of childhood and trying to make me a vicarious partner. Now she is a young adult – sharing her delight in travel and intellectual discovery.
“Papa gave me Padua as ancient princes gave territories and domains to their sons. He made me aware that the gift was a precious one, a share of his own youth. He had studied medicine at ‘Il Bo’ when Padua was still a Habsburg city, where Austrian police patrolled the alleys and Metternich’s spies mingled with the plotters of the Risorgimento at the Caffè Pedrocchi. Because Papa was young and Hungarian he had no time at all for Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks or Croats, and gave all his sympathies to the Italian cause. Because he fell constantly in love with Italian women, married and unmarried, he became an assiduous and practised plotter. He had a fund of tall stories about hairbreadth escapes from jealous husbands and zealous agents of the Emperor. We arrived, the three of us, just after Ferragosto, to find an apartment and complete the formalities for sojourn permits and my admission to the university. Papa lodged us in the best hotel, hired a coachman to attend us every day and set out to display my new inheritance: Venice, Vicenza, the Euganean hills, all the summer splendours of the Lombard plain – and Padua itself, the city of St. Anthony the Wonderworker, of Livy and Petrarch, Boccaccio and Tasso and the greatest names in medical history.
“Papa boasted that he could walk the city blindfold and recite all its glories like a litany: ‘Giotto and Mantegna painted here. Erasmus lectured in philosophy, Vesalius taught anatomy, Fracastorius proposed the first valid theory of contagion, Morgagni described renal tuberculosis and hemiplegic lesions, Leonardo da Vinci made anatomical drawings for texts by Marcantonio della Torre!’”
She breaks off, embarrassed by her own eloquent recitation. I encourage her eagerly.
“Please go on! You are wakening to a wider world. The experience is important and exciting. So, you fell in love with Padua?”
“With the city – and all over again with Papa. The room in my heart which had been closed since the day he forced me to go back to school was opened once more.”
“And once more you were lovers?”
“No. I had a new role now. I was the son with whom he could share the experiences of his own youth.”
“And you enjoyed that?”
“Of course. It seemed to complete things between us.”
“Did your father prescribe the role, or did you just adopt it instinctively?”
She thinks about that for a while and then admits reluctantly:
“I would say Papa prescribed it – not in so many words, he never did that – but by indirection, yes.”
“How, exactly?”
“Well, first there was the question how I, a woman, would fit into the rough-and-tumble of medical school. Not that women students were unknown in Padua. There’s the statue of a woman at the top of the main staircase: Lucrezia Cornaro, daughter of a noble family, who
defended her thesis as Doctor of Letters in the great hall. But medical school was something else! So, Papa grinned at me in that funny way of his and said: ‘Personally, I’d suggest a mannish look, a la George Sand! This is the age of the dandies. You’ll look damned attractive in trousers. They’ll think you’re odd of course; but after a month you’ll be part of the scenery – and you won’t have their hands up your skirts at inconvenient moments. As a matter of fact, I know just the woman who can fit you out. She’s the wardrobe mistress at the Fenice in Venice. She designs clothes for Duse!’ So that was how I came to wear my first trouser suit, to understand how much Papa had wanted a son – and how complicated was the love he bore for me.”
“Did you feel comfortable in male clothes?”
“They weren’t male clothes. They were mannish in cut. That’s all. But yes, I felt comfortable; I still do – but now of course I’m in fashion.”
“Did you enjoy the masquerade?”
“It wasn’t a masquerade. It was – how shall I say it? – an expression of attitude. I wanted to work on equal terms with male students. I wanted to be as much of a son as I could to Papa. Does that sound so strange?”
I wish I could tell her that to me, Carl Gustav Jung, it is not strange at all but disturbingly familiar. She who faces me at this moment is my Salome to the life: daughter, lover, protector – son too, perhaps. Is that what the snake means in my dream? I press my patient for more details.
“How else did your father prescribe your role as a son?”
This time she gives a small laugh of embarrassment.
“Again it was by indirection. He was worried, he said, about my physical safety. Paduan students were traditionally a rough and roistering lot. In the old days they had a pleasant custom called ‘Chi va li’. Literally it meant ‘Who goes there?’ It was a challenge to any stranger who passed by the wine shops or brothels near ‘Il Bo’. The passer-by had either to pay a tax or be beaten up by drunken scholars. So, Papa decided I had to learn to protect myself. He took me to a salle d’armes run by a Piedmontese called Maestro Arnaldo who taught me the elements of fencing and how to fire a pistol.
