Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

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  August again, the year of my father’s departure, and after the first week my grandmother abandoned her attempts to get me to talk. Instead, after days during which storms of furious tears took me by surprise, embarrassing me with the evocation of a grief I wasn’t aware that I felt, we would go to her consulting room, each with our allotted drink, and sit in silence, waiting out together the time until my mother might return. Doctor K did not sit straight in her chair as usual and nor did she keep her eyes on me but sat as I did, curled slightly over on herself, looking out of the window. She seemed older, that summer, than at any other time until her death. Her face was creased. She held to the same routines but seemed to do so out of habit, her mind uncharacteristically elsewhere, and during the hour each morning that she sat alone in her consulting room I would at times become aware, like waking to the drum of rain upon a roof, of the sound of her footsteps, pacing.

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  Anna Freud, a sixth and accidental child, was born into a bitter Viennese winter and a world in which all empty space had been already claimed. The apartment was not a small one but in addition to the five elder siblings it already contained there was Anna’s nursemaid, and Sigmund and his work, and there was her mother, Martha, and Martha’s sister Minna. Minna had joined the household a year earlier, taking over from Martha when she did so those tasks relating to travel and to Freud’s work—the entertaining of his colleagues and the discussion of his theories, the journeys to visit the various psychoanalytic societies which had begun to coalesce in European cities—while Martha concentrated on the care of the children and the day-to-day running of the household until it came to seem at times that each of the sisters was half a wife, the presence of one allowing the other’s partial retreat.

  Later, it would be a favourite observation of Freud’s that Anna shared a birthday with psychoanalysis, twins in whom his whole life’s work was made manifest. By then she would be his Anna Antigone, her father’s defence and his support, his better face, and her absolute loyalty both to himself and to his work would be rewarded by inheritance and by their names spoken in one breath, Sigmund-and-Anna, run together like a single salutation. Then, never one to miss a shot at mythologising, he would think of her sometimes—young and strong and faithful when all other aspirants to his seat had proved worthless—as a Cordelia to his Lear, and his hand would creep to the beard that hid his slowly dying jaw; but at the time all that this coincidence of dates meant to either of them was that throughout Anna’s early childhood Freud was absent from the second-floor flat through which the family’s lives tumbled, if not physically then mentally, a fact which he would in time acknowledge, justifying his absence by remarking that such periods of inspiration will come to most of us only once in a lifetime, and even that not certain. Even when the completion of The Interpretation of Dreams and the end of the period of intense productivity which came in its wake left Freud with more time for his family, Anna found herself more often than not left behind, too young to accompany her father on the country walks he would take with his children or the expeditions to the boating lake. She felt herself to be overlooked and the struggle to gain that attention from her father which seemed a prerequisite for love became the defining experience of her childhood. By the time of her birth, roles had been already allotted, shared out between her brothers and her sisters so that it seemed that there was nothing left for Anna but to be pretender. It was her brother Oliver whom their father had initially marked out as his apprentice, a quick boy, bright and confident until in adolescence he began to exhibit what his father described as obsessional symptoms; to Max Eitingon, Freud would write with regret that Oliver had been “my pride and my secret hope,” failing to see the successful engineer his son had become for the analyst he wasn’t. In the end, although at the urging of his father Oliver underwent analysis, it would be distance that would bring him relief: of all the Freud children it was Oliver who broke furthest from their father, leaving Vienna as 1938 washed over them not for London with the rest but for America, where the calm of this completed journey into adulthood would be shattered by the death of his only daughter, Eva, since after all the only certain thing that freedom from our parents can buy us is the right to be alone.

  For Anna’s own intelligence there seemed, during her early childhood, little space. It came out instead as a kind of quickness of spirit, an impish naughtiness which made her father laugh but charmed him only as a clever pet might charm, a passing diversion from more serious business. Intellect was still seen by Freud at the turn of the nineteenth century as a masculine attribute and it was not one he looked for in a daughter until all his sons, both actual and adoptive, had given him cause for disappointment; but nor did Anna feel herself physically attractive enough to aspire to a straightforward femininity. It was Anna’s sister Sophie who was the pretty one, their mother’s favourite and their father’s pet, and her good looks seemed to bestow on her an aura too of good character of which Anna, unable to match it, was deeply envious. This envy—of Sophie’s appearance and of what seemed to Anna to be her unfought-for place in their father’s affections—continued throughout their childhoods until it seemed to tie them together, a falling battle that linked them more closely than any of the other Freud children. Their father watched his two unhappy daughters struggle and although it must have worried him he couldn’t keep the clinician from his gaze, nor help the small hum of satisfaction as he saw played out for him those childish desires the hypothesis of which his work was based on; and if the two girls who clawed so fiercely for their father’s attention sensed this and, sensing it, clung on a little harder to one another, fought a little louder, then who could blame them?

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  At the end of August, during the year of my father’s defection, my mother came as usual to Doctor K’s house to collect me but we made no preparations for departure. She arrived in the early evening and went straight to bed, and when, after I had eaten my supper in the kitchen, I was allowed upstairs to see her she looked pale and tired. I wondered if she had been crying and then the fact that I had thought of it made me feel suddenly and unwelcomely grown up. It frightened me to see her look so unhappy. It had seemed to me until that summer that the crossing into adulthood must be a transformative process, a passage through the refiner’s fire during which one would be rendered down into capability, strength; but seeing my mother blinking and shell-less, her face puffy, it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps my own fears would not be shed along with the plumpness of my face but that I would always be, essentially, what I was at this moment; and not knowing what to do I started to cry myself, and stood there in the doorway weeping until my mother, taking strength from my predictable weakness, came over to me and, carrying me like a child much younger than I was, lifted me into her bed. I lay there, my tears slowed to a comfortable trickle, nestled into her side until I fell asleep; but when I woke the next morning I was in my own bed again and as I went downstairs I saw that the door to my mother’s room was closed. I didn’t try to visit her. All day Doctor K worked and my mother stayed upstairs and—not wanting to go out, to leave the shelter of their orbits in case they ceased somehow to have the power to draw me back—I drifted through the rest of the house, trying to feel myself tentatively backwards towards a place of ignorance or balance, until at last my grandmother finished her work and came to find me.

  Although usually my mother’s arrival would put an end to the time that I spent in Doctor K’s consulting room, that evening, by tacit agreement, we went through the heavy door and we sat opposite one another, silence holding between us like a pact we didn’t expect to break, the only sounds intruding on it those of my mother moving about: the creak of the upstairs floorboards, the running of a tap, a sigh. Later still my mother came downstairs and sat for half an hour in the living room, wrapped in an old dressing gown of Doctor K’
s, and I curled up at her feet with my head resting on her knee. She had begun to sneeze and complained of a headache and I tried to make myself believe that her unwonted vulnerability was the result, not of any change in her or in my perception of her, but only of a summer cold that she had caught, she said, from a woman on the Northern Line who had not used a handkerchief. At dinner time Doctor K took a tray upstairs to her and I sat alone at the kitchen table, unable to summon up much appetite for my plate of scrambled eggs; and beyond the walls of the house, its undrawn curtains and blank windows, the evening faded into darkness, outside obliterated, and we three in our luminous bubble were cast adrift within the night.

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  On Wednesday evenings the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society met in the drawing room of the flat at Berggasse 19, and as soon as she was of an age to remain quiet Anna was allowed to sit on a small library ladder set in the corner and to listen, following as best as she was able the intense and voluble discussion of this earnest group of men who saw themselves, as the days lengthened and shortened through the early years of a new century, as architects of a future in which clarity was assured and all the convoluted crenellations of the mind would be unfolded; and there, perched in shadows, fighting sleep, Anna found an empty space in such a crowded house. It was uncomfortable balanced on the ladder’s wooden top, hard to keep still, knees stiff and feet numbing from the effort to avoid drawing attention to herself, but still the narrow place she occupied gave her at last that closeness to her father which she had so desperately wanted. Sigmund, too, became within the confines of that room, for the duration of the Wednesday meetings, the father that she wanted him to be: not the easily distractible paterfamilias who gave the children rides on his back up and down the corridors of the flat or herded them through their Saturday-afternoon walks, but a man deferred to, forceful and assured, his words bearing the weight of strictures, a suitable object for her love.

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  August became September and the date passed that I should have returned to school, but still we remained in Doctor K’s flat. It was as though we had found a way to stretch out indefinitely the moment between our injury and the onset of pain and so we stood, shock confusing us, hands clasped across the place we had been wounded, still uncertain of the damage; and I wonder now which outcome my mother dreaded most: that we should find ourselves unravelling or the opposite, that there would be no marks on us at all and, everything just as it was, the thing she had worked so hard to hold on to would slip from her grasp and become like ice in water. Each moment preceded the next in an orderly round but I had no sense of progression, and that things were not as they ought to be unsettled me, and it unsettled me more that this difference went unmentioned. That aimless procession of days which makes holidays so pleasant when carried beyond their set limits became a kind of near-intolerable, stifled tension. I had never been in Doctor K’s house beyond the end of summer before and as the evenings began to smudge earlier into darkness and the air started to chill, I became increasingly aware of my displacement. In the garden leaves drifted and rosehips hardened on the bushes that the downstairs tenant had so carefully staked. On the heath, no longer crowded with picnickers, the blackberries turned. Each afternoon I stood at the kitchen window and watched as other children walked home from school, their uniforms wearing daily from sharp newness into an accustomed shell; but still inside the house we remained stuck, and could find no way to move.

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  Anna’s analysis by her father, begun when she was twenty-two years old, was the culmination both of that interest in her father’s work which had started during the Wednesday evenings in the Berggasse drawing room, creeping as close to her father as she dared, and of a persistent, indeterminate ill health from which she suffered throughout her adolescence. In 1907, taken to the hospital by her mother without being warned of the reason, Anna underwent an appendectomy, and although the operation itself was successful and she seemed at first to recover well she was afterwards unable to regain the weight that she had lost. She succumbed easily to colds and to chest infections and she began to be anxious, taking on a hunched, defensive posture that she struggled to overcome, and those symptoms which had at first been physical became increasingly nervous: she tended towards a periodic retreat into meticulously worked-out fantasies which would occupy her for hours, but the playing out of these narratives left her exhausted and unable to concentrate. Learning how to weave, she found in the shuttle’s run a hypnotic loss of self which at first appealed but afterwards, when for whole afternoons at a time she had sat hunched over the loom until her back and fingers ached, she would reproach herself for such time lost to unawareness. Spending regular periods in sanatoria she tried to rest, enjoying fresh air and freedom from the confines of Vienna’s crowds and cold weather, but felt instead cut off, apart from her family and from her father, lonely and cast out. Freud, for his part, worried that without careful management the introspective fragility that his youngest child exhibited could easily become hysteria. This sense he had of her as subject, his belief that her well-being depended on his good judgement, became another tie between them, until at last it would seem that her mind was half his own creation.

  In the spring of 1913, finding himself once more bereft in the aftermath of his final break with Jung, his acute disappointment in the younger man’s wilful apostasy and his grief at the loss of their friendship leading to a period of despondency which bordered on depression, Freud began for the first time to be aware of his growing practical reliance on Anna, and of the extent to which the idea of her eventual departure—into marriage, probably, since what other option might there be?—disturbed him. Sophie’s recent engagement meant that soon Anna would be the only one of the children remaining at home and Freud began to feel that it was only her continued presence in the flat that staved off old age. Anna too was troubled by the implications of her own impending adulthood, feeling herself to be an uneasy fit with the world: what she would think of throughout her life as the masculine quality of her intellect sat uncomfortably with those desires she characterised as feminine—the desire for family, an interest in children. She didn’t want to leave her father but as yet could not see a way of remaining with him as anything other than a dependent daughter; and although such arrangements were not unusual neither she nor Freud considered such an outcome particularly satisfactory. She spent the months approaching her eighteenth birthday and Sophie’s marriage at a sanatorium in Merano, in northern Italy, troubled both by her jealousy of her sister and by what she saw as her own exclusion from the preparations for the wedding, which she would in the end be judged too unwell to attend. She wrote her father fervent letters, telling him of each half pound of weight gained, each incremental advancement towards health or peace of mind; and she wrote too that “I have read some of your books, but you should not be horrified by that, for I am already grown up and so it is no surprise that I am interested.” By the spring, although her future still felt to her both uncertain and uneasy, she had decided to start the training necessary to qualify as a teacher, successfully sitting in early summer the exam which would allow her to begin an apprenticeship in the autumn of 1914; and in the intervening weeks, by way of a rest before her training began, she travelled to England, where she hoped to develop her language skills to the point where they might be useful to her father. There she stayed with one of Freud’s former patients, Loe Jones, who lived in Sussex, and together they took regular trips to London where another Jones, the unrelated Ernest, was working hard to set up and maintain an English psychoanalytic society. Ernest soon began to visit Anna, taking her on sightseeing expeditions and assuming the role of language tutor, and as a result, alerted to the relationship by Loe, Freud exercised for the first time his influence over Anna, and although he told himself that it was for her benefit, that she was both young and naïve, that she was not strong and might easily be damag
ed by such a relationship, he must have felt too how her marriage would have been another loss to him. To Anna he wrote, “I have no thought of granting you the freedom of choice that your two sisters enjoyed.” For her part she said that she had never had any intention of taking the relationship further, and she felt the pull against the cord that ran between her father and herself and found for the first time both the surety of his love which she had sought since childhood and the balance of power that there is in sacrifice.

  Anna returned to Vienna with the outbreak of war and began, as well as her teaching apprenticeship, a closer collaboration with her father. The continuation of the psychoanalytic movement in the face of conflict required considerable effort, with those who had been close colleagues now split by lines of allegiance. Travel between those cities where societies had sprung up became virtually impossible and mere communication only slightly less problematic. In an attempt to keep the various journals running through which the work of Freud’s followers was made available, Anna spent much of her spare time in translation work, trying to ensure that language, at least, would not be a barrier to the dissemination of psychoanalytic thought. During this process Anna began to ask her father for clarification of technical terminology or of concepts that she felt herself to imperfectly understand, and out of this discussion came both the foundations for a working relationship and the first advances in what would stand between them as a kind of preliminary analysis. In the letters Anna wrote to her father when her teaching work took her away from Vienna, she began to describe to him her dreams, his own figure winding through them, as though by doing so she might tell him also something which she otherwise had no way of saying, an extra burden of content to the lexicon of their emerging discipline—something about her loyalty and her love, and how, apart, she missed him: the gradual incorporation of care into their shared language.