Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

  —My grandmother had a television just like that one,

  and felt such inadequacy that it almost brought me to tears.

  Descending the staircase again, I let Johannes go ahead of me into the shop and I stood for some minutes in front of a photograph of Sigmund and Anna, taken in 1913, at around the time that Freud began to see in his daughter for the first time the possibility of inheritor, no longer an often-worrying youngest daughter but a potential agent both for the perpetuation and the preservation of his work. In the photograph they walk on grass, the flat scrub of an imperfectly kept lawn, a flecked mass of unidentifiable bushes rising a few yards to their backs. Sigmund wears a hat and Anna, a step behind, her hand in the crook of his elbow, a white apron over a dirndl. Squinting slightly against the sun they have the look of people caught in a moment of unguarded intimacy, and standing staring at the picture hung just too low on the wall I felt as though I were grasping for a memory just out of reach—something to do with grass and with summer, with my grandmother in her garden and my mother, the two of them standing and thinking themselves unobserved—but for all the picture seemed significant I could make no sense of it. My memory refused to resolve into anything concrete and the photograph remained impenetrable surface, glossy, chemically rendered and preserved. I followed Johannes into the shop and found him leaning against the counter talking to the assistant, a very tall woman, younger than me, with a black polo neck and bleached hair cut into a ragged coif. She was laughing at something he had said and in the moment before he turned towards me I saw him as a stranger, and I realised that he wasn’t any more, but had become in some small measure a part of my own life, a knot in that complicated tangle of utterance and experience, memory, thought, which made up my extended self.

  Afterwards, after we had left the museum, we walked in silence north through Belsize Park to Hampstead Village, an aimless wander which we hoped might bring us to a pub, and as we trailed up the hill towards the heath I realised very suddenly that we were standing outside Doctor K’s house. I said

  —My grandmother lived here,

  and Johannes, moving closer, took my hand.

  * * *

  —

  During the summer of 1897 Freud conducted what he described, in a series of intensely felt letters to his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, as a self-analysis. “I believe,” he wrote, “I am in a cocoon, and heaven knows what sort of creature will emerge from it.” Since 1891 the Freud family had been living in an apartment in Vienna, at Berggasse 19, which would remain their home until 4 June 1938 when, forced to leave at last in the wake of Austria’s annexation, Freud, along with Anna and his wife, Martha, would take the Orient Express to Paris and, from there, to London, first to stay in a house at the bottom of Primrose Hill and then, at last, to 20 Maresfield Gardens, where, after the passing of a fine summer and the difficult completion of some remaining work, he would die at the age of eighty-three. By then his followers would regard him as a kind of secular prophet and his pronouncements, handed down through Anna, as absolute; but in 1897 he had few patients and little money, five children already and a sixth, Anna, on the way. Despite an unshakeable belief in the importance of his work he had so far failed to successfully complete a psychoanalytic treatment, and nor could he articulate any sound theory of psychoanalysis. Initially, under the influence of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, with whom he had studied in Paris, he had believed that the solution to those problems of mental topology which interested him might be found in hypnosis, but he had since ceased to trust it; now he sought some alternative but seemed to get nowhere. He had been, for a while, a close collaborator with Josef Breuer but Breuer lacked Freud’s faith in the idea that it was suppressed sexuality that was at the root of their patients’ neurotic symptoms and, in the face of this doctrinal difference, their relationship had crumbled—a pattern which was soon to be repeated with Fliess and then, some years later, with Jung. This pattern of intense collaborative friendship followed by a difference of opinion which Freud felt as a betrayal—finding resolution at last in his relationship with Anna, whose faith in his work was absolute, a form of love, tying him to her as much as her to him—was something which Freud appeared unable either to notice or to anticipate; and I find in this a particular sadness, that a man so concerned with the possibility of understanding might remain in this case so blind. This impending separation, although still some way distant, presents itself in the letters that Freud wrote to Fliess during the summer of 1897 as a kind of weight: the oppressive, headachy closeness of the air before thunder. Freud writes with a noisy fondness, as though the volume of his friendship will keep his doubts at bay, drowning them in the performance of affection, and he allows little space for discussion of Fliess’ own theories, commenting rarely on the other man’s work.

  The previous year Freud’s father had died and, in the aftermath of loss, he found himself suffering through a period of depression. Jacob Freud had been an easy-going and rather shiftless man, cheerful but lacking any particular strength of character, his belief in the brilliance of his son certain but also lazy, a general pride often standing in for specific interest, and Freud’s love for him had been tinged with the wish that he might have been a stronger and more powerful man, less biddable and easier to respect; and in the wake of his father’s death Freud’s awareness of this edge of near-disdain which had bounded his affection left him troubled. It was as though at the moment when Freud’s father had at last passed out of life, after hovering for so long at its edge that he had begun to seem, paradoxically, invincible, Sigmund had himself been shaken, and now all the settled silt was once more muddy water. Memories, long ignored, began to surface: the sight of his mother naked in the sleeper compartment of a train when Freud was two and a half; the younger brother whose birth was the cause of jealousy until his death at the age of nine months; the adult half-brother, product of his father’s first marriage, who in some barely perceptible way supplanted Sigmund in the affections of his mother; and behind all these, in shadows, the figure of his father. On 12 June he wrote to Fliess, “I have been through some kind of a neurotic experience, with odd states of mind not intelligible to consciousness—cloudy thoughts and veiled doubts, with barely here and there a ray of light.”

  Freud spent the early part of the summer travelling, first to Salzburg, where he visited his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, then to Reichenhall to see his mother, a difficult woman, dominating and egotistical, who, in contrast to his father, Freud loved uncritically. From there he returned briefly to Vienna to deal with some administrative details regarding his father’s tombstone—and all the time he felt growing in himself a manifestation of those symptoms to which he was more ordinarily an observer, reliant on second-hand experience, on imperfectly communicated half-truths, so that while still trying to construct a theory of mind he must also attempt to understand the significance of omission; and all the time he must remember that his patients were also his patrons, and he must not push them. He was listless, lacking concentration. He was unable to work even when there was occasion to do so, and he had developed a tendency to disturbingly vivid dreams; but slowly, emerging from his undeniable unhappiness, came the thought that he was also being presented with an opportunity: that in himself he might find at last that willing subject whose study would bring his disordered theories into sharper focus—and so, arriving finally at the alpine resort of Aussee, where the rest of the Freud family was holidaying, he began in earnest that formal iteration of his self-analysis which would result, at last, in his theory of the unconscious. It was, at least in part, a work of mourning: an outcome of the necessary disinterment of the past that comes in the wake of loss, the going through of attics and of drawers—the process of imposing order, understanding; and, in understanding, the jettisoning of what is unimportant. To Fliess he wrote that “the chief patient I am busy with is myself…This analysis is harder than any other.”

  Beyo
nd what can be inferred from his letters to Fliess, Freud left little information about the methodology of his self-analysis. That he recorded his dreams in some detail is clear from the fact that many of them, disguised in places and alongside his partially truncated interpretations, would appear as the basis of The Interpretation of Dreams, a work which, despite its largely unnoticed initial publication in 1899, would form the foundational text for what would become the psychoanalytic movement. In addition the struggle involved in the undertaking, which left him at times distracted and at others distraught, gave him, he claimed, a new order of sympathy for his patients—

  I imagine Freud sitting all through the bright, clear summer, a middle-aged man in the mountains, grieving, the work of himself before him, and doing so I find myself fitting to the lines of him the figure of my grandmother, straight-backed at her desk each morning, hands resting on either side of her open notebook and her mind turned inwards, concentrated on those phenomena accessible only to herself. Then sympathy comes like a bloom on fruit, sudden and unlooked for, and I find that she seems softer and more human, and those morning hours no longer appear to be the execution of a grand task but only an attempt to live an ordered life. This is what we all do, after all, this striving to make sense. We bow to the drive to fit our sharp-edged pieces into a smoother shape, we clutch at agency; and perhaps my grandmother’s would be the most honest way to do it, the daily effort of accounting and the acknowledgement it brings that this task can’t be shirked but can only be done badly, or done well.

  Despite the creative productivity of his own process of self-analysis, Freud was not convinced of its general applicability. Analysis, he felt, required the analyst to act as a blank screen onto which the analysand’s desires might be projected so that what was unconscious, unrecognised in an individual’s own mind, might be made visible. To Fliess he wrote, “True self-analysis is impossible, else there would be no illness.” Where he saw a prohibitive impossibility though I think that my grandmother saw hope: that by applying the methodology of analysis to herself she might make her own mind clear, a thing of glass in which all desire, all motivation, want, might be seen and measured. This is the promise that with effort we might be disentangled, a straight-coiled skein, and that we might find ourselves in balance; and seeing this, as I lie resting through exhausted afternoons and choke down terror at the thought that through some act of unwitting negligence my daughter might become anything other than buoyant, whole, I think that after all it is not so strange that my grandmother should have sat down each morning at the breakfast table and, like the casting of a protective spell, asked her tiny daughter to relate her dreams.

  * * *

  —

  At the opposite end of the year to my visits to Hampstead, Doctor K would come and stay with us, spending Christmas in our house, ten days during which we tried to articulate our uncooperative bodies into attitudes of familial affection. From 21 December each year until the thirtieth, when she returned home to begin preparations for her New Year’s Eve bridge party, Doctor K would sit at our dining room table and continue by letter those analyses which she considered to be at a crucial point, writing to her clients pages and pages of densely worded argument before returning to the routine of her own self-analysis. Her continual, unavoidable industriousness, her refusal to abandon even for such a brief time her attempts at understanding, made my mother and me uncomfortable. She filled the house with the almost-audible sound of pen on paper until we felt ourselves become periphery, ousted from our own comfort and routine, forced to deviate from those paths which habit trod for us across the carpet of the living room. My mother, ordinarily a lazy sort of cook with a tendency towards one-pot meals and the frequent provision of pasta, took refuge in the kitchen, baking parkin, peeling chestnuts, cutting tiny crosses into the bases of innumerable Brussels sprouts—food that the pair of us would eat for weeks afterwards, our mouths chewing stolidly until all reminders of our attempts to represent ourselves as something better than we were had been consumed. While my mother cooked I undertook enormously elaborate art projects, making out-of-scale nativity scenes from half-dried modelling clay and cards from paper and tinsel, or sewing as presents toys which ended up misshapen, bulbous, all these projects ill-planned and ill-executed, ill-conceived, and in the gaps necessitated by the drying of paint or glue I would make cups of tea, presenting them fresh to my mother and grandmother while the dregs of the last were still warm in the bottoms of their mugs; and in the evenings, when we sat around the gas fire eating spiced biscuits, carols on the radio, I felt myself compelled to enact a version of furious good cheer I had learned from books, a dumbshow of Christmas spirit through which my mother and grandmother might be relieved of some part of the silence of their relationship, forcing them to play games of consequences until at last, exhausted, I could go to bed.

  From these winter holidays I remember with unequivocal fondness only those afternoons, Christmas Day itself and Boxing Day, when the absence of any post at all let us off the hook and we would go out into the woods behind the house and walk, bare branches like the blueprints of a church above us, black lines against the winter sky, and beneath our feet a shingle of beech nuts and the soft, crumbling litter of that year’s half-rotten fall of leaves. Snow, sometimes. Frozen mud. Ice in sheets across the puddles at the bottoms of the valleys where the sun barely reached during those shortest days. Without the need to face one another we became, for the duration, three independent figures amongst the trees, released from the thrall of that complicated set of forces which inside the house defined our paths. My mother and I climbed onto fallen trees and played balancing games or searched for mushrooms, vast shelves of fungi that grew like ethereal tumours from rotten places in the wood. We told jokes, horrible old saws which made us laugh, our relief at our brief release making our voices ring. I ran ahead, testing how far into the trees I could go before sudden terror at the thought of being lost overwhelmed me; but then, circling back on ourselves and climbing the shoulder of the last ridge before home we began to quieten and still, our bodies narrowing, muscles contracting, and I felt the weight falling down on me again until we reached the front door, and, locked back into our positions, went inside.

  I used to wish, during each of these Christmas holidays, that my grandmother would stop working so that we could all relax. I imagined, at the time, that this would be all it would take for our habitual selves to be returned to us, for us to meet as we did in the woods, uncompensating, not understanding then how complicated the currents are that hold us to our paths, nor how compulsive can be the tracing of them. Watching my grandmother sitting each morning at our dining table, her notebook open and expectant in front of her, I had no understanding of the drive to exhume that now turns my quiet moments into imperfect acts of reminiscence: how it is to feel that one must note each detail of one’s thoughts in case that thing should pass unseen which might otherwise provide the key, laying out the shadows of the bones which rib and arch and hold the whole together. It strikes me as extraordinary, now, that we should be so hidden from ourselves, our bodies and our minds so inaccessible, in such large part uncharted; but there is a thrill to it, too: that same mixture of terror and quickening which confronts us where underneath the sea the light gives out and unnamed creatures float, eyes huge or non-existent, spines and scales unseen, or in those vast and empty tracts of space where rusting shuttles float, unmeeting. Perhaps this is what Freud felt, all through the summer of 1897, as his children played their complicated games in the shadow of the Austrian mountains and his wife, pregnant with the daughter who would become both his work and its protector, moved around him, finding things to do elsewhere—this sense of yearning outwards into darkness, the prayer for understanding that is nothing but a silent thought in a vast and vaulted space—and Röntgen, two autumns earlier, at that moment when he saw his bones laid bare: perhaps it was some version of this same desire to marvel that moved him to place his hand upon t
he screen, his fingers open as if waiting for an unknown gift—but the price of sight is wonder’s diminishment. This was Bertha Röntgen’s fear—and perhaps, after all, her refusal to look was neither stubbornness nor failure of vision but only an intuitive grasp of what a death the loss of mystery might be.