TRAPPING THE TRAPPER - An Crucial Event from an Analysis

TRAPPING THE TRAPPER

By Michael Roloff

“The gradual passage of time [Lange Weile] is the Dream Bird that Hatches the Egg of Experience.” Walter Benjamin, from the essay on Leskov, On the Writing of Fairy Tales. [1]

DER ERLKOENIG

Wer reitet so spaet durch Nacht und Wind?

 Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind.

 Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,

Er fasst ihn sicher, er haelt ihn warm.

"Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?"

"Siehst, Vater, da den Erlkoenig nicht,

Den Erlenkoenig mit Kron' und Schweif?"

 "Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif."

"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!

Gar schoene Spiel spiel ich mit dir;

Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,

Meine Mutter hat manch guelden Gewand."

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hoerest du nicht,

Was Erlenkoenig mir leise verspricht!?"

"Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;

In duerren Blaettern saeuselt der Wind."

 "Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn?

 Meine Toechter solln dich warten schoen;

Meine Toechter fuehren den naechtlichen Reihn

Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein."

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort

Erlkoenigs Toechter am duestren Ort?"

"Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau,

Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau."

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schoene Gestalt;

Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt."

 "Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt fasst er mich an!

Erlkoenig hat mir ein Leids getan!"

Dem Vater grauselts, er reitet geschwind,

Er haelt in Armen das aechzende Kind,

Erreicht den Hof mit Muehe und Not –

 In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

Reading The King of the Reeds, as I call one of Goethe's richest lyrics, makes me, who once delighted in deciphering the puns of Finnegans Wake, want to hold back/ from the numerous interpretations that this poem suggests; it is a poem which I doubt could be written with equal openness and such seeming naiveté a hundred years into the art of analytic interpretation: it’s wealth of associations speaks too richly, too suggestively to tie it down; and with Franz Schubert's setting in your ear, it will be that much more haunting, or terrifying, as the case may be; and in a translation that here tries to retain some of the atmosphere, tone, bounding rhythm, concreteness as well as vagueness of detail, and the loaded symbolism, in all its surface simplicity, all of which in an analytic situation, which at the point that this dream was dreamt and responded to in astounding fashion, could not have been more drenched with Oedipal and pre-Oedipal material:

Who’s that's riding through the wind at night?/ It’s the father with his child./ Holding his boy safely in his arms,/ he's holding him surely, he's holding him warm.

"Son, why are you hiding your face, are you afraid?"/ "Look father, the king of the reeds, look how near, / the king of the reeds with his crown and his tail?"/ “But that’s just a fog bank, dear.”

"Dear child, come away with me!/ Wondrous games I'll play with thee/ Many-colored flowers grow on my shores;/ mother has many a golden fleece."

"Father, my father, oh don't you hear /what promises the king of the reeds is whispering to me?"/ "Be still, you must stay still, my son;/ it's just dry leaves rustling in the wind."

"Fair boy, don't you wish to come with me? / My daughters will wait hand and foot on thee, / my daughters lead the dances at night/and will rock and dance you to sleep."

"My father, my father, oh don't you see/ the king of the reed's daughters over there by the sea?"/ "Son, my son, I see it all only too well, it's the old willows forever so gray."

"I love you, I'm enticed by your beautiful shape; /and if you won't willingly I'll use force!"/ "Father, my father, he's touching me!/ The king of the reed has done me harm."

Uncanniness seizes the father, he rides in haste, / he clasps in his arm his aching child, / reaches home in dreadful straits/ the child in his arms is dead.

I learned Der Erlkoenig as King of the Reeds is called in German [and as I translate the usual title The Erlking to emphasize the physical setting of this animist, Celtic-Germanic tale] and by heart, plus at least a dozen other Goethe poems, [2] during my senior year at college at the most pleasant coffee and cake evening classes at the nicest, learned but unpedantic professor’s home. One reason perhaps why I learned these poems so easily was that - as opposed to a pedantic father who, despite his misfortunes under authoritarianism, force fed me and my cousins various stupidly bouncy Schiller’s poems - Die Glocke in my instance – that professor represented the sought for "good father," for whom learning beautiful things by heart was more play than chore. On subsequent reflection on why this dream was dreamt at that particular time and in this fashion, it will be apparent that the theme of “good father” had been something like a constant in the analysis pretty much as of its inception approximately fifteen months prior. Much had transpired in the meanwhile, chiefly a regression to an abandonment at age nine month, precipitated by a breakup with a lover, and the inception of the entrancement with Dr. X as a torturously experienced object was in full direness, say, as opposed to the always fascinating if sometimes annoying swing we had been in even during the breakup.

          The time I first heard Schubert’s setting of the poem I cannot recall. However, I expect that if I did not hear it on the radio, it was also part of my father’s voluminous 78 rpm record collection, most of which I played during his near total absence before he and my mother returned, magically, against every odds surviving their respective Gestapo prisons during the Soviet Army’s siege of Berlin in Spring 1945. And I must have also heard it subsequently, though, at that time, in 1983, that Audienz must have lain many years in the past.

The poem has a holding quality, and if one wishes to expand the notion of transitional object to something of a greater complexity than it is normally thought of, it would be possible to maintain that the many-sided fabric of the poem – the fabric of language, the fabric in which analysis is conducted - leads to the earliest memories, to the instinctual, the rhythmically haunting and panicky; it's super ego voices, its caringness, its anxieties, its seductiveness, its transgressions, its sensate and sensuousness qualities - are of a very high order, particularly to someone like me who was exposed as of in utero to endless music, recorded and at concerts, which my father, a conductor’s best ear, attended both for pleasurable and representational reasons.

The night before the crucial session during which the trapper of my unconscious was caught into confessing that he knew German, I dreamt that I was conducting Dr. X singing Der Erlkoenig, in all its windswept, eerie, stormy, musical fashion - perhaps the dream of the mad Hugo Wolf that one of Freud’s patients dreamt, and the whole notion of redreaming someone else’s dream, were motivation for its construction on the part of someone who was conducting a no doubt resistant parallel self-analysis with the assistance of The Interpretation of Dreams [FN] : Lieder! Songs! Sing. Liederlich = sloppy; you Luder = you lying bastard were some obvious associations. However Dr. X, above whom this sometimes very much suddenly-out-of-the-nowhere [obviously out of a state of suppression] upstart conductor, who at one time in his life had considered becoming such a one, was standing, was not singing obediently and well enough it appears.        

The dream contained several if not all the stanzas of the poem, in Franz Schubert’s [er schubbert, he’s lying] setting, as Dr. X sang [singing also very much in the kind of “singing” truth-telling that, if you don’t, can land you in the N.Y. State prison Sing Sing], whereupon I raised the baton [bat, bat on] and beat the singing analyst down into a N.Y. City manhole, whence he descended with a kind of “the death of Don Giovanni” decrescendo screech with which I had crashed and now crashed him in a dream of a crashing 747 that had announced the impending crash of my relationship with the now vanished amour disparu. It was a decrescendo acquainted me with the truth of atonal hell, one reason I suspect why everything harmonious is as suspect to me as it was to Adorno who recognized some fierce subjective truth in the disharmonious. [3] Or why I liked the Miles Davis of Witches Brew or the kind of music that Herbie Hancock [4] did in the 70s. I had that kind of atonal experience inside me, from early on it appears. There was what was experienced as a severe abandonment at age nine moths; I had heard planes whine and screech as they crashed during my childhood. One of my earliest complex as opposed to one-note screen memories, of a furious and angry mechanical screech, as a matter of fact goes back to that of two toy train engines colliding in a make believe Alpine papiér maché tunnel, at Christmas 1941, at age four. [5] So as to the matter of over-determination, there seems not to have been any lack thereof in each and every respect. However, the solution to the equation in which this determination can be formulated I expect over-taxes the ability of someone, who some years hence in his analyses, so excelled at interpreting dreams that the dream mine, from one interpreted dream to the next, upped the ante in matters of difficulty, so that I – my sense of reason and time prevailing, eventually conceded defeat to the ingenuity of the dream weaver.

That morning, after I had dreamt what I call the Trapping the Trapper Dream, upon lying down on the couch in my usual fashion and warming up with the usual pitter patter of what had transpired since we had seen each other last, I launched into a recounting of this dream, which had as it were seized me, unanalyzed at that point, and to my amazement Dr. X started to “sing” the very poem-song that I had had him sing in the dream.

Within the first bar I said: "I thought you didn't know German."

So that was what the dream was about.

There was a moment of mutual silence. Maybe there ought to have been a session’s worth of silence.

#

At this point I need to backtrack about fifteen months to the inception of the analysis and then work my way forward through the relevant stages and incidents to that then present moment.

I had come to pick Dr. X as my analyst at the suggestion of Dr. Kurt Eissler who, though he said that we were making a compromise, picked Dr. X because he fit three of the four of my criteria: he was a man, he was thoroughly experienced, and he knew German; the one requirement that he did not meet was that he was not about Dr. Eissler’s age: on subsequent reflection I had asked for a grandfather figure. As a matter of fact, Dr. Eisler I halfway felt after the second of our two meetings would have fit my bill of requirements very nicely. Dr. E. also mentioned that I ought to send him a postcard down the line and let him know what I thought of Dr. X; he wasn't really sure about him. If the purpose of the suggestion was to put a sometimes extremely nonchalant me on an alert, an alert a preferably also sleepy me did not want to be in, that purpose, as well as the puzzlement introduced by the “second take,” to use a term from the recording industry, could not have been better served. I sent Dr. E. his postcard about the time that Dr. X announced to a baffled me that the “transference” had set in. I might [again] have asked Dr. X, what he was talking about, to me who, by then, had been talking away on the couch for some months. The word rapport I would have understood. “Yes, best as I can tell, he seems o.k.” But how and who was a novice such as myself to assess an analyst, as compared to someone who botched an operation?     

The first two weeks’ eight sessions with Dr. X - and never again, except for those instantly formalizing arrivals and leavings at which, turning around for that last look, I caught sight of the same face ludicrously scrunched up into a gargoyle projection screen that tried so painfully not to disclose its feelings  - were spent en face, telling Dr. X earliest remembered dreams and memories [invaluable screen memories they all turned out to be which, so much like my childhood’s compressed Japanese paper flowers, magically expanded when nourished in the placenta of the analytic setting]. This shower of offerings of mine, pretty much tossed pell mell, included an extraordinarily painful event that had cut the evidently so cuttable me to the quick at age seven. It involved habited protestant nurses jokingly accusing me of my passion having killed my [subsequent to my mother of course!] first amour, a German jet fighter's wife who had a heart ailment [and whose husband no doubt flew jet-propulsed Me-261s of the kind that I heard screaming and screeching overhead on the slate-colored sky of my village but never could catch sight off - that fairy tale monster bird element, too, was playing into the animist fairy tale as which I experienced and digested my childhood world [bird in every including the beaked sense of its German word Vogel] and with which luscious beauty I importunately had played patiénce until I was released back into the clutches of my prison keep, leaving the heart patient and her bad ticker behind [just as I had played patiénce with my mother’s mother when she refused to go down into the cellar of our house out in the country during the not-that-remote but invariably exciting bombing attacks] on our bunker-hospital’s patio while recovering from tonsillitis when the weather that summer of 1944 was obliging and Bremen was not being bombed to smithereens, the trembling of the reinforced-cement bunker providing foretaste of deeper tremors to come. Time. The experience has congealed into a metaphor and a real memory screen memory.

At the communication of what the sisters had said Dr. X flinched, and I recall flinching at his flinching – the wounded curing the wounded it was going to be: the man had empathy, too much damn empathy if you asked me! But for that I could trust him, so I assumed. All you need do is show me a scar or tell me of an operation and I flinch, involuntarily. Uncontrollably. I even laugh about it most of the time, because the involuntariness of it is as laughable as Dr. X involuntariness was initially when we had first met.

That shared whatever pain, and whatever deeper pains collected around the flinching was the actual onset of rapport for me, and of too quick trust, [6] from my point of experience, as compared to the baffling announcement about the “transference” having set in that Dr. X would make some months down the road.           I also recall that, before lying down, after the first two weeks, I duplicated the attempt to ferret information about Dr. X, as I had with Dr. E., so as to establish a “normal relationship.” But Dr. X stated that the less I knew about him the better it would be for the analysis – and who was I to quarrel with the expert, puzzling as I found that kind of arrangement between two persons who were going to spend much time with each other. However, in retrospect, I could not be happier, for the sake of this training bra of an analysis, except for one crucial instance, that the projection screen mirror that Dr. X presented remained unmuddied by personal information about him, comical as that gargoyle remained – particularly to someone who had spent much time in the most ancient of castles and in very medieval surrounds during his childhood - as a last sight after the resurfacings from such sometimes volcanic depths. Not that real curiosity as to who Dr. X was aside from my experience of him as ear and voice and a razor-quick consciousness was allayed at any but surface level. The neutrality that his voice expressed, in most instances, proved sufficient reassurance that we were attuned, from which attunement, when we were attuned, I – being someone to who had felt since early childhood that most understanding was “implicit”! – inferred that he understood, however he had arrived at this understanding - through empathy or actual experience or expertise - being irrelevant. The one time I encountered Dr. X outside the consulting room – out on the street - he looked to have one shoulder considerably lower than the other: “Were you wounded during the war,” I asked with genuine concern from the couch, once again seeking to establish a “normal relationship” [between the wounded!], but his rebuff seemed so total as to obviate any further concern I might have for him as a human being, especially during the last stage of the unfolding spells, to which I had scarcely ever had feelings of any kind. Well, yes, when he had a cold – and no matter that at some point, despite everything that transpired, I was immensely grateful for everything I had learned during our probe.        

Also, I recall, asking Dr. X whether he knew German; which he said he didn't, and my saying, “Oh I thought that you did,” whereas, being a bit less polite - “calling him,” to use the poker term - I might have said: “Dr. Eissler said that you did.” And - in retrospect - then what? Or Dr. X might have said: “What gave you the idea?” which certainly would have kept that ball rolling, and might have obviated the coup of the “trapping the trapper” dream that these initial moves were so fatefully setting up. Not that there would not have been a coup attempt anyway, but it would certainly have been of a different kind, perhaps a dream would have sought to elicit the nature of his wound. 

But then, impulsively, it didn't seem all that important to make that much of an issue over whether Dr. X knew German or not! I would take a chance! Yet another chance! I wanted for the adventure to begin. So I would have to translate. Big deal! Half of my life had been spent translating, some of it the kind of work that required the most delicate of ears, deep musicality and sense of rhythm. Yet another instance of so many chances taken. Perhaps there had been a mis-communication between the two doctors? But for the very reason that the first doctor had asked me to be alert to Dr. X, my preternatural alertness had now become doubly honed; it would become even more sharply honed as time passed. I suspect that Dr. X decided to take “his chance” of lying about not knowing German somewhere during our first eight face to face encounters: “You don’t know your story.” [I didn’t then.] I knew too little, I could be trusted to be fooled, and to mutual advantage at that!                                                             

I recall that upon lying down on the couch I knew the fundamental rule, though it was of course reiterated, and I very much knew what it meant, and knew it to the point of being sometimes socially obliviously impolitic; and knew its steely value, which was to be adhered to to such a degree that you reserved that one lie for that one moment that you needed it to save your skin, something I had needed to do - it had been with a partner at the firm - only once, and which I had learned from my mother whose savoir faire had saved her skin in that fashion when she, a dashing counter espionage agent, had been entrapped by the Gestapo; a maternal figure, the only one I really listened to in my childhood, who detested lies, laugh as she might about my father’s lying even when he did not need to, something that made him grin idiotico-charmimgly and self-consciously when he was caught yet again. Within the day of being on the couch I stated - subsequent to a confession of something important that I had until then concealed - in these very words: "This will only work if I am completely honest." Not that I, much later, during a truly torturous stage of the analysis, when Dr. X was experienced as a torturing Gestapo agent, didn’t learn to clam up at times, offering only the most minimal information. That stage, when everything turned into a NO despite the fact that Dr. X said, quite accurately, that he was not saying no to anything, was just then setting in. Dr. X and his indefinable, central European, slightly nasal accent [a feature amplified by the answering machine which so sheared his voice of its pleasant cushioning] had ample opportunity for the compromise solution of: "Well, of course I heard a little German in my childhood," or, "I know some Yiddish, but it would be pushing it to say that I know German" so as to get himself out of what turned out to be, obviously and the more so in the dream that caught him, the most dreadful of fixes of his own making; and I might have said; “Yes I know some Yiddish and there was a time I knew Middle High German;” the cake I assumed being to trap what I wanted to catch myself, the conscience of the king, to catch it in the discrepancy between the original and the translation – to which the doubled consulting with Dr. E. had alerted me. Entry into the adventure, thus, already had its own prehistory, and so it had been “off into uncertain waters;” especially so for the person who found refugio on his couch in the early 80s who might well have come in from some years at the front lines [“The Spy who came in from the Cold” was the title of one dream during the analysis.]; as tomcat, this person was a bit chewed up; he’d been a bit through the mill; and that he would arise of the experience like a phoenix, at least for a while, though also deeply puzzled, who could have anticipated that?               

 I had been in the process of transitioning even before entering analysis, I had begun to survey my involvement in a large incestuous clan, the darlings and monsters clan I called it, extricating myself from it while ascertaining its intricate landscape. I had finally decided to take head-on a partner at a firm that was just going down in flames, and who, on looking back, had driven me nearly as insane I had seen him drive a previous partner of his – one of the major themes early on in the analysis.                 

Moreover, I was just recovering from a case of anemia, with the amusing result that upon my frequent slips I would say: “Oh, my anemia” – anemia as involuntary amnesia, what could be more appropriate! Or vice versa. However, the nice thing about such slips is that you know that you really know and that eventually the word will spill and that you will find out why your lips resisted!

#

To return to the moment that Dr. X, after all these months, admitted that he knew German; and did not avail himself of the lie that he just happened to know a few Lieder: this particular Trapper dream did not come out of the long ago blue of the initiation of the transference. On reflection on one of the dreams immediately preceding the tolling of this bell, I concluded that there had at least been one other dream that had tested him. Not only had there been the penultimate testing dream, but my chief way of communicating with Dr. X was to speak in what, the briefest elaboration of his reminded me, were metaphors, out of a trance, or to deliver up my dreams.         

The work, initially, had begun to have traction once I acknowledged the empirical fact that I was talking over Dr X’s voice, trying to shut out things he had to say - I evidently wanted to retain entirely my own view of matters - while delivering myself of my New York novel’s worth of tails and details and all their very many sometimes very dirty tails: thereupon I made the effort to hear him out, finding his observations quickly fruitful; nonetheless, many of his right on the nose observations must yet have proved irksome no matter that “facing it” quickly became my way of dealing with them – except for an exploration of the most powerful denials at the inception of the breakup.      

Dreams, very much underground for years, had quickly begun to resurface: “Some good, some bad”: Dr. X’s enigmatic comments fostered curiosity. I had been curious all my life about my first remembered dream of “teasing a Billy goat,” [Bock, the adjective being bockig, stubborn-[5] who thereupon had chased this anxious four year old also farmyard me of that dream up a forest clearing [Schneise in German where it sounds much like schneide, to cut] - and then for the unicorn to pin me at the V of two intersecting fences in the farthest part of the forest on our property as I woke in terror. Remember that and don’t forget it is what such dreams say, indelibly! Predispositions, prior traumas. Ambiguous, conflicted and multiple spells even then. The opposite of that dream then was dreamt during the course of the twenty-four dreams that charted the course of the breakup, from inception to blank slate dream: in one of those dreams I turned into the Billy Goat of my childhood. 

All this seemed to the good, or certainly not to any degree of such serious disagreeability that I might have thought of quitting the procedure [though at one time I considered, projectively, changing analysts], and the asked-for postcard that I then sent Dr. E., saying that Dr. X seemed to be o.k., did not cite his apparent lack of German; that theme had been put into abeyance; in that grotto it hibernated, its sensors put on subliminal alert, a slightly frustrated wish, I think I was right in thinking that the language of childhood would play a role. - Not that I, who had no basis for comparison for such evaluation, could really tell how well the analysis was going, despite the fact that I did a kind of monthly run-through, just as I did with all my projects, of where we stood - though my successfully standing up to the partner, without the least ambivalence, if belatedly, having totally turned the tables, indeed might have. However, that standing up had begun prior to the analysis, upon the discovery that the partner had stolen a close friend’s life work; that had been the decisive trigger to eliminate all ambivalence to a single-minded degree. I did not consider that, being in so many ways pleasurably recumbent while floating off in this particular bathysphere down to the fault of my being, I might eventually find the entire situation ignominious, and worth revolting against, if only in a dream.  

Dreams, as I have said, had come back to life within a few weeks of analysis, but were not thoroughly analyzed at first, puzzling productions of the unconscious whose meaning I however was delighted to be able to catch fairly rapidly through fascinated observation of the process of associating involuntarily; one side of me was producing – the other was fascinated by the productions! I called its source the flim-flam mine, also because each dream was like a filmstrip. The world told as a series of puns as in Finnegan’s Wake had always struck me as one proper response to existence. Moreover, such producing was not all that different from the time when I had written my first fairy tales in German class at age twelve; all you needed do was give me the name of a site, say Duevelsberg [Devils Mountain] and the imagination, within a school hour, produced a story explaining how the hill had got its name: an angry fire-breathing Zeus had rolled wagon wheels wrapped in burning straw down the hill to terrify the brother horde besieging teasing him, at the Winter solstice, a nordic imprecation and celebration for the sun to arise again, perhaps from the Wolf that had swallowed it. - Located not far from a heath [Devils Moor] what little contact I had during my early years with the village and the farmers of the surround had been stuff for an imagination that thrived on my father’s large unread collection of all the world’s fairy tales and sagas.   

The teacher was happy too, made me read the story to the class, and then pulled my ear for my disregard of the rules of punctuation. The class seemed awed, and giggled at the baldheaded Prussian professor’s sadism. I myself was astonished at what I had produced as I read it out loud; was pleased at the surprising response of my schoolmates; annoyed at having had my ear pulled.          During the sequence of the analysis that focused on the breakup there had been one dream in particular that had elicited wonderful spontaneous laughter from Dr. X. The girlfriend disparu’s parents had brought tin after tin of chocolate vanilla cookies up to our loft aerie: it was a reparative, obliging wish on my part. Thus I knew that Dr. X, this unknown being, responded to dreams in a more personal fashion than with accurate enigmatic pointers. At heart, the guy had a sense of humor. Moreover, he had a heart, a couple of times he had attempted to be, as far as I was concerned, unnecessarily and wrongly helpful as a matter of fact! And, in no end of instances, the little noises, guffaws, sounds of surprise, groans of despair or the laughter emanating from behind me were as important as Dr. X’s interpretations; if only for reasons of maintaining some spontaneous living contact within what, at times certainly, seemed like going down four thousand feet into the Guaymas Trench in a bathysphere - something that I, whose dream metaphors were drenched with maritime imagery and who had spent time at sea, would actually do about ten years later in that kind of utter slightly rustling stillness, child’s play compared to an analysis, nor in the instance of that adventure entirely by my lonely self; although, with time, and in some many respects entirely egotistical, I began to have an inkling that the experiment was a mutual one, that we were in the bathysphere together, as I would be in the future with a different kind of expert whose attention, however, hovered on very different kind of exotic fauna and flora and possible difficulties, at 4,000 feet under sea.

          The only technical term – aside Dr. X’s one-time use of the word transference - he ever used in a communication was his pointing out, once, that my having spent the entire previous week [“Oh, have I really?”] preoccupied with the analysis of dreams – I had just started to read that royal road, the Interpretation of Dreams – constituted a form of resistance. Utterly fascinated by dreams at that point, I had thought not only that I had worked as hard as I possibly could, and been more than obliging – definitely a resistance as was pointed out to me over and over! - following “the master’s” suggestion - but had entirely indulged what you might call a bent of mine that could focus fanatically on one subject to the exclusion of all others: This way of going whole hog, as I was told, did not correspond to the usual way of doing analysis, which was meant to be: yes some dream discussion, the pitter patter about how the previous day or days went, on-going problems of a lesser or greater extreme outside the analysis, how I was handling them, in other words, a kind of daily reporting of my daily Bloom’s day, and which, once my sense of smell was as pristine again as upon my birth, of my frequent disgust with foul odors in sulphuric N.Y. 

I had been competitive, too, I expect, with my exclusive focus on dreams; at least wanting to be Dr. X’s equal; I was doing it – self analysis in this instance - once again on my own, yet I was also doing it for Dr. X. - Freud’s having done so, its whatever completeness beyond imagining and knowledge at the time, with his Interpretation of Dreams, was motivation as well: that it could be resistance, too? This empiricist eventually allowed himself to realize that at the very least it had been a fruitful if grandiose resistance compared to some of the other entirely unconscious unproductive ones, discovery of most of which defenses, especially of the derivative of a nearly monumental capacity for denial, except for what is called “turning against the self,” would take me by some surprise. However, Dr. X merely blurting out the word “resistance” so thoroughly rebuffed and slighted me that - that is what counts in this instance - for some considerable time, a very non-dream-reporting me did not proffer a single dream, not until Dr. X got me back into collaborative efforts on dreams - no, not by stating, with equal unartfully blaring bluntness, that my dream reporting had ceased entirely, but by insinuating the query whether I had any idea why dreams came in several acts; as they nearly invariably did in my case. “Oh, so the guy [the insinuator!] is interested!” That indeed had the effect of allowing me to pay attention to dreams in analytic sessions again – outside the analytic situation, especially during vacations, no one was going to stop me from reading analytic material, if only to keep purchase on the analysis.               

After our tracking down the makings of one especially powerful three act dream, [7] I thought to myself, becoming more and more puzzled about whose vehicle I might be, and awed, also in a dream - where I first encountered and realized the vastness of that realm – the metaphor was maritime - “the unconscious.” –‘Whoa! And what dark shape is looming there?” Occasionally I would try following, naively, what I took to be a suggestion of Dr. X’s, only to discover that matters were not as simple as that, which taught me to be wary of my preference for being a robot.       

What, as a matter of interesting fact, was it that alerted me who must have subliminally lain in wait for some considerable time - as I now shifted away from the amazing openness at the vent at which I had been during the breakup, to foisting the severest of governess spells onto poor Dr. X. It was not Dr. X’s voice on the answering machine, amplifying his accent, stripping his voice of its modulations and so providing the trigger for the girlfriend to so express her envy. Who knew where in Europe he had spent his childhood and how? No, it was the way he pronounced a certain word; and during yet another particularly spooky moment.

Inevitably perhaps, particularly at this stage in the analysis where the re-experienced abandonment had thrown me back into a state of childhood-like loneliness, the subject of the German writer of boyhood adventure fantasies Karl May had come up; and as I was describing a scene how I had crawled Indian-spy fashion on the ground in our forest, and while I was describing how I did this, I acquired the strange deja-vue-like conviction that Dr. X was very noticeably trying, but evidently not succeeding, to be my anaclitic companion in the forest and to hug the ground just the way he empathically felt I was hugging the ground while describing the activity; the earth to which I was so close. He seemed to want to become my mechanical double, that was one matter that spooked me, it was too close, too adhesive, probably homosexually as well, and the very much more so perhaps since this happened to be one of those times where I was merely reporting, not speaking out the metaphoric depth whose significant location he was so good at pointing out for me: we seemed not to be in, or only half, in the kind of metaphoric sync we had been in so frequently; or the awkward ineptness of his attempt brought me out of my reverie. And I use deja vue very much in Jakob Arlow’s sense, of a state of great fear, but ultimately overcome, and not in the so delightful sense it has acquired at the noggin of one of America’s great primitifs.

 He, the analyst person, as which he was experienced at that moment, as compared to a disembodied consciousness, the pure phantasmal other, seemed to feel that I was speaking deeply out of my metaphoricality on the couch dream; he, the physician, was more deeply, or trying to get into the dream, it seemed, than I myself was.

It was an eerie moment, also in that he seemed to be assuming a role, and had been caught assuming a role; something I suppose I might have conveyed to him – yet it also seemed too ineffable for that.

I could catch him in our cat and mouse game must have been a conclusion that the unconscious reached, where he was doing, had done all the catching until now. “Doesn’t he know that I am only reporting?” I thought to myself. But look what depths I am drawing him into must have been another less articulated discovery. The moment passed, unanalyzed as it were, but alerted me to, as had his many instantaneous right on the money dream interpretations, that indeed, much of the time Dr. X was very much of a hand in glove companion to the depths of my being. Yes, I could trust him, more deeply than I perhaps had ever wanted to trust anyone? The variation on good father was closest friend, longed for brother; as I had had one as of age eight during my boyhood. The moment was nearly incestuous.

Incest, too, had begun to play a conscious role in the analysis around that time. Subsequent to the breakup, my confidence somewhat on the mend, the reviving tomcat happened to fall into a conversation, at one of my neighborhood venues, with a young woman whom I described to Dr. X the following morning as “the most beautiful woman” I had ever met; and what a good thing, too, that he did not avail himself of his occasional, invariably inappropriate, capacities for the sardonic and say: “Once again!?” Not only was that young woman exceedingly beautiful, also in the cool judgment of acquaintances, but she happened to bear my mother’s first name. Within minutes of the inception of the conversation with this blonde beauty she fugued, first, into saying “Oh, an involvement” and, within a few further seconds, into telling me that “I and my brother we always know what the other one is thinking.” She had just gotten divorced. And if I had not been in analysis I would have gone on fugueing with her in no time.       

The following day, Dr. X, counselor to the lovelorn, dropped the word “incest” into our conversation, and terribly regretfully I faced the fact that an “involvement” with this newest edition would be a case of “from the rain into the gutter.” I withdrew in such a way as to make myself utterly unattainable, not that such realistic and painful sacrifice did not leave a reservoir of resentment: subsequent to my departure from Dr. X some months later, the “most beautiful woman I have ever set eyes on” was passionately consumed in a dream! Better that I suppose than nothing! And safer it turned out too. Farewell My Lovely –Raymond Chandler’s totally multiply overdeterminately “forgotten” name, over and over for years, kept needing to be retrieved.

I have mentioned the sharpening of senses, which influenced Dr. X’s and my interaction subsequently, I believe, especially of my sense of smell which was reborn to the days that Baby Tuckoo could be seen sniffing no end of flowers. But the most novel part of the experience until then was the discovery –that too a displacement - that I had been bi-handed, whereas by the time I came to the U.S., at age 12, I was so emphatically right-handed that it allowed me to use pitching a baseball as part of my Americanization - my seemingly vestigial left arm acquired the strength of a very strong right arm! What greater proof of the wages of repression can there be? However, it seemed a little late in life to become a novelty - one way of putting it – in the majors; or to take up boxing again.  

Shortly after that eerie forest floor interlude, inquiring about that very subject matter, claiming not to know how to pronounce the name of Karl May, the author of these adventure stories [which is that of the pronoun my and how the German month of Mai - May - is pronounced] Dr. X had intentionally mispronounced that name, not just mispronounced it, but equivocated over it in such a way as you would only if you really knew its correct pronunciation. That intentionality and mispronunciation – an ineptness that paralleled the interlude in the forest - must have been something that my ears, which had sharpened perhaps to the degree of my totally revivified sense of smell, picked up; at any event, this too registered; and was tucked away – where could it be tucked away into? Although a cop might have said, “Hey, I know you know German!” the moment was not enough to convict him. Polite me was lying on the couch, the alerted and playful cat was ready to strike and do so on the very ground it appears on which we were conducting our hide and seek: the grounds of the dream work. The now seemingly confirmed doubt was tucked away into what I call the “dream mine,” there it cooked and stewed where dreams are fashioned, about whose fashioning – by what? the entire self - we know not all that much more than when Freud so curiously claimed that we really knew very little about dream psychology at the beginning of Chapter VII of The Interpretations of Dreams. [8]        

Evidently, the now seemingly confirmed doubt as to Dr. X’s claimed inability to understand German led to the following dream, the first dream I remembered, on trying to figure out how we had gotten from X to Z, that was dreamt to catch the conscience of the king. 

This dream, dream Y, the Maquis Dream let’s call it - of which I became subsequently certain that it was at least one, but certainly the penultimate of a series of test dreams - concerned my cousin Ditloff and myself, both eight years old, lying on an embankment, very much as Karl May’s Old Shatterhand and Winnetou might have – which pairing I of course hoped to duplicate with Dr. X! and he in that strange interlude with me? at a time that I – who was aggrieved, say, that he, like the original governess, had been unable to repair my relationship with the lady disparu - had already withdrawn again? an uncertain analytic couple? – whence we had rushed to see, from our perch at the embankment, our very first real Americans [aside the one dead airman I had seen in his B-17 or B-29 that had screeched over our house before crashing a quarter of a mile off about a year before], in Jeeps and personnel carriers, driving on the slightly rounded, finely cut shiny, polished granite pavement of the Leuchtenburger [Glistening Castle] Chaussé, just north of Bremen, in those long ago sunny, halcyon days of early May 1945 at the end of World War II.     

Ditloff and I were like baby resistance fighters, among Oak trees, in an Oak maquis. Approximately fifty yards off – in the kind of complete clearing that acrid beech nuts create beneath these leaf shedders - there stood about as immense a beech tree as you can imagine, or any other kind of tree aside Redwoods that I have seen in my entire life; even then that giant was eight feet in diameter; it's trunk grew straight [be straight with me, let’s not fight like guerillas in the thickets of analytic brush warfare: The Spy Who Comes in from the Cold had been another wishful and self-state dream during the breakup – and I, at Dr. E’s suggestion was of course tester and spy on Dr. X] and smooth and beautifully beech-tree-light-gray up into the air, not one branch stuck out of its embraceable, smooth roundness, until at the very top a huge 100 foot wide umbrella crown of entwined branches spread to keep you safe from lighting strikes and from the rain: "Eiche weiche [avoid the Oak ], Buche suche [seek out the beech]" was the ancient musical proverb that went with this constellation, which I had sought for Dr. X to pronounce, to check whether he knew it, and if the so frequently so immediately responsive Dr. X uttered the proverb in its original tongue….     I had offered up a screen memory in the form of a dream.

Upon reporting the Maquis dream I – who, by then, delivered himself of one or the other immediate analysis or comment on his dreams as he recounted them soon after becoming recumbent on the couch - recall expressing tempting and seductive puzzlement with the naïve but also genuinely puzzled query: "Hm, I am wondering why I am dreaming this now?" Dr. X didn’t know either, or if he did, refused to communicate what he knew; which, normally, didn’t bother me that much when he didn’t since, by then, I had very much caught on to the fact that one major aspect of analysis was for part of me to learn to listen and absorb and reflect upon what frequently so surprisingly and sometimes shockingly spoke out of me. 

I associated to this dream, translated the German proverb into English, was glad that my first real childhood friend – this was his first direct appearance in the analytic setting - had thusly reappeared, a true example of the master race: freckled and with a touch of red hair, just like Huck Finn, fleet as a greyhound and tough as Krupp steel as German boys osmotically absorbed the military-animist ethos of their elder propagandists! A descendant of a family that had produced a hundred Prussian generals for every poet!

Surprising too, was that, subsequent to being so trapped, Dr. X did not apologize as he had frequently and usefully apologized before for sins of omission and commission that only the most delicate of souls, such as myself, would take umbrage at; for example, thinking that something was wrong in our relationship from one day to the next and inquiring whether I had taken offense at being called an idealist, something I suppose I ought to have gathered from his voice had been meant as a compliment. The impossible profession indeed! But I fancied myself an eminently practical idealist, no matter how misguided I may have been also in that self-appellation, and so he had hurt my self-image: to call me an idealist pure and simple was like calling me a fool! The narcissistic dimension [s] have the funniest ways of slipping in. No, I thought of myself as perhaps as practical an idealist as my mother, the charming, gregarious, secretly very private and probably unhappy, but if need be, steely Joan of Arc of the resistance against Hitler, the counter-spy for Canaris, who, too, had been entrapped, and briefly broken in one of the Gestapo's tiger cages. And who in fact, had no doubt been perhaps over-idealized, as Dr. X suggested, by being at such great, idealizable remove; just as I seemed to have some kind of pink sunset in me as a final product of an otherwise strictly melancholia-inducing and blues-singing abandonment.       

Nor did I hear Dr. X’s mind rustle through its filing cabinet subsequent to this moment of his being caught out as it did when something was off in our relationship, and frequently finding the source of the glitch – it was those few seconds and his changed breathing and a certain lisping that made me infer the “checking the mental filing cabinet” metaphor. Perhaps he was totally stunned. Being shoved down into a manhole will do that, if the dream in its entirety was transmitted-injected at that moment, as it may well have been. I was stunned at the violence I had perpetrated, if only in a dream. I might have been immediately vainglorious. I might have immediately expressed my outrage at the betrayal: “and in what other matters can I trust you, then?” He might have offered the proper explanation.

I never asked, and he never offered - perhaps Dr. X was too shocked at what spoke out of himself, and more likely than not, at being caught by another’s dream; as I was shocked, the more so on contemplation, at the confirmation at how stupendously intimate he was with my dreams, with the depths of my being. Or it was all simply too much to fathom at that point.

Now let us reread the poem not merely mindful of the deep knowingness that resides in animism, but also as a symbolic re-enactment and comment on this particular analytic situation in which Dr. X and I found ourselves: the disavowals, the attempts at disphantomization, the wanting to be held and the fear to be held too closely by a joined mother-father figure, the symbolism of flowers, which is also a reference to part of Dr. X’s name, the conflicted seductiveness, the prohibition against masturbation, the panickiness; and, moreover, the German word Wind is not merely cognate but means fart: as in the ancient “to break wind,” and a plethora of allusions to dreams and anxieties of the past.

Who’s that's riding through the wind at night?/ It’s the father with his child./ Holding his boy safely in his arms,/ he's holding him surely, he's holding him warm.

"Son, why are you hiding your face, are you afraid?"/ "Look father, the king of the reeds, look how near, / the king of the reeds with his crown and his tail?"/ “But that’s just a fog bank, dear.”

"Dear child, come away with me!/ Wondrous games I'll play with thee/ Many-colored flowers grow on my shores;/ mother has many a golden fleece."

"Father, my father, oh don't you hear /what promises the king of the reeds is whispering to me?"/ "Be still, you must stay still, my son;/ it's just dry leaves rustling in the wind."

"Fair boy, don't you wish to come with me? / My daughters will wait hand and foot on thee, / my daughters lead the dances at night/and will rock and dance you to sleep."

"My father, my father, oh don't you see/ the king of the reed's daughters over there by the sea?"/ "Son, my son, I see it all only too well, it's the old willows forever so gray."

"I love you, I'm enticed by your beautiful shape; /and if you won't willingly I'll use force!"/ "Father, my father, he's touching me!/ The king of the reed has done me harm."

Uncanniness seizes the father, he rides in haste, / he clasps in his arm his aching child, / reaches home in dreadful straits/ the child in his arms is dead.

I expect that all the matters that had preceded the dream, uncanniness, the endless sense of deja vues, the fact that I was spying for the grandfather Dr. Eissler, also played deeply into its formation. Indeed, there were sufficient reasons for the uncanny and for eeriness. And to simply write the dream and the reaction to it off under the rubric “the systems u.c. of analyst and analysand are in communication with each other” begs the question why unconscious communication is as important as that which is verbalized. For certainly, aside being a test, the dream was a profound communication, to which I never received a response; and one step towards eventual disaffiliation from Dr. X, although I was not as spooked by this victorious dream as I would be by the incident that made for my withdrawal from this my first analyst some many months hence. If only I had known his dreams! Could there be any way of being closer than that? So fast, so unexpected: On the one hand: the wish to find out if he knew German had come to pass, yet as in that joke about having all your wishes fulfilled that Freud recounts: both Dr. X and I seemed to now have a sausage pinned to our noses. Instead of finding a speculative answer for his maneuver, I might also have asked: “So why did you?” The three sausages …there they hung, smelling sulphurically of falsehood, and it was a smoked sausage, and it stank like a NY City sewer.  

If the arena of truth on which you have been operating with someone whom you have known for a year and a half and to whom you reveal intimacies of which you yourself may not be aware until the other does, on the ground of absolute truthfulness, if that person from one second to the next turns out to have been made of whole cloth what, under normal circumstances, if you are not in an analytic situation, do you do? Your choices are: [A] to get up, say to that person: “Please send me your final bill,” turn on your heel never to look at the person again; slamming the door loudly would not be out of order; which, however; [B] as a spy, having found a weakness in the defense, maybe you hang around for further truth telling; particularly under the new circumstances where I had turned the tables and might be able to “run Dr. X, who was “giving me the run-around” a dream wish of quite a few months prior, and which evidently persisted. Moreover, too much had transpired, and an analytic relationship, that much I realized by then, was certainly like no other, even less like any at that point. Besides, having won my first victory I suspect I wanted more against someone who had now assumed the position of the policewoman governess, “the invisible police officer of the Fates” [Moby Dick] who was to be darkly mistrusted. 

One other element of the dream that requires noting is that the choice of a Goethe poem is not lacking in significance. I suspect that the unconscious spy catcher had concluded that Dr. X was not susceptible to something as down to earth as the common proverb Eiche Weiche, Buche Suche, musical as that is too, and so tried to find out, hoping perhaps that he might be a Goethe Jude, as Dr. Eisler - although I did not know it at the time - had so famously been.    What if he had not taken the bait at that point? What other language puns would the dream work have taken recourse to? As compared to the first two meetings with Dr. E, where I had sensed the possibility of two weather systems encountering each other, here two persons and their entire beings had, through the inadvertencies of the analytic situation, become deeply enmeshed.        

There is of course the alternative that Dr. X, once again, might not have bitten the proffered bait, might not have sung, but might have been alerted to my trying to catch him. After reporting the dream I probably would not have made the same pseudo-naif comment as to why I might be dreaming this extraordinarily graphic story of Dr. X being beaten for not singing well enough. A possible comment of mine, if I had been the first to comment, might have been: “You don’t seem to be singing as well as I would like you to.” “Yes, and you are angry at that.” Which would have left the unconscious very much at a frustrated loss how to proceed, unless I had said: “I suspect that you really know German.” To which Dr. X could not have possibly replied: “And why is it so important to you to know.”

Dr. X, detecting from this dream that I was dreaming to catch him speaking German might of course have become a counter spy in the dream mine. What of the cat and mouse game then? My system u.c. is left bereft, certainly at this late date. Can this entire transaction be accounted for in the terms that an analyst and analysands unconscious communicate with each other? Only if the entire context and all the so far mentioned factors, and probable then some, are taken into account. But once most of those factors are taken into account, telepathy, two persons who know each other, knowing implicitly, as I had always assumed my mother and I had known what the other was thinking and feeling, would not have been that surprising.    

But what is noticeable, too, about this dream is its actionism, not only the manner in which the conductor treats the poor singer, but the force, the violence of the dream as an assault on the unconscious of its recipient: it did its utmost to get through and into him. Sing sing sing or I shall push you down into the manhole. Mouth and anus? Sing you asshole? Other notions derived from my by then very intense reading of the I.O.D. I would think entered into the fashioning of the dream. Perhaps even the apocryphal story of the Frenchman who had learned to play his anus like a trumpet! Loud and clear. There was a dictatorial and aggrieved Kappelmeister, fortunately a diminutive one, concealed within me.       First of all, slow as matters can be to register in my consciousness at times, for a host of reasons, I had to absorb the fact of the uncanny intimacy that had developed between us, but also that his subterfuge, in which he had now been caught, constituted a tremendous insult, also to my prize intelligence! How were we to go on?       

Well, we did for another half year I think, until Dr. X was once again trapped, by a somewhat less subliminal inadvertency than this dream.

I doubt that the Trapper dream would have taken the form that it did and have elicited the reaction it did and have had the consequences it had, had it been dreamt during a different configuration of the various spells. For example, if I had caught my mother in a lie, who detested lying – she once slapped me for it in my late 20s, [that too had come up at an odd moment in the analysis and Dr. X had said: at such a late age?] but joked about my father’s apparent compulsion to prevaricate about just about everything – I would have considered the knowing or not knowing of something crucial to have been part of a merely playful cat and mouse game, part of a flirtation. If my father had lied – big deal, he would have remained true to form. His speaking the truth would have surprised me! But the governess-policewoman-of-the-fates lying presented the opportunity to be particularly hateful to the actually lying analyst who, in the analytic situation, had by then become the projected governess whom I once thought I had killed at age 7 when she was force feeding me one again, which, even more stunningly, elicited absolute no punitive or other reaction from my father’s mother who had brought her into this family, a governess whom my mother, as she made very clear in front of me, detested, as the girlfriend disparu had detested Dr. X

          So Dr. X speechlessness, like my original governess’s nearly forty years prior, did not help resolve the fix we were both in now. I, part of me, was like the happy cop who had caught his criminal but then looked around and had to call for a backup.

A friend and colleague – while agreeing that one purpose of the dream was to smoke out the analyst as a liar - has pointed out that, nonetheless, it is MY dream. In other words, the dream may be regarded as a self-state dream. In that sense, the theme of seeking safety, security through understanding – one of the original motives for entering analysis – linked up in the dream with the early childhood wish to be saved while in the feverish state that the perceived abandonment had produced then, and had re-produced not that long ago during the analysis. All other aspects of its animist allusions could also be found in my then current living situation in my downtown N.Y. boheme. The colleague also pointed out that the analyst by merely acknowledging that he did know German, in all other respects refused to engage me and the other communications that the dream contained. “Poopoohing,” as my very experienced friend puts it, “what I am saying in the dreams. Saying to you [me] ‘It’s all in your head’” the latter of which certainly was a common enough dismissive comment on Dr. X’s part and, as a common place, useful only when in fact I had projected a fantasy; however, analysis of fantasy is of course as major an aspect of analysis as is the interpretation of dreams. Whether I would have responded at that point to a deeper engagement on Dr. X’s part?

#

I had to deal, and unfortunately not just in a dream, trying to puzzle out on my own – since the catching went undiscussed - why someone who was so deeply counter-transferentially with me as to have been caught in a dream of my devising would want to stake the whole game on a cheap and grandiose if well-intended prevarication: yes, I was thunderstruck by the fact that he had been that closely attuned in every sense of the word yet did not seem to be aware of his own extraordinary, wounded capacities for empathy and that they might betray him, as they had initially, during our first two weeks of en face. Perhaps there is something to be said for an analyst, if he felt injured, saying at a moment such as this: “You have hurt me to the quick.” It would have been appreciated, he would have seemed human; the time was approaching for a different richer form of contact.     

Eventually, only very eventually I concluded, that the matter was stupid but was forgivable. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, paraphrasing Churchill's famous remark about the Battle of Britain: "Never have so few lost so much so stupidly and so fast." [regarding the Brits attitude to dealing with Mossadegh] which may be as good as Oedon von Horvarth's "There's nothing like stupidity to give you a foretaste of eternity."

 However, I sensed no overt ill intention, only analytic grandiosity, the Achilles heel of a profession that is best equipped to rid itself of it; the intention, I decided, had been to discern the resistance as it manifested itself between the telling of something in German and in English. It was a lie devised for reason of the valid experience of the revelation of such differences, to which the two consultations with Dr. E. and his claim that he didn’t remember from one to the next, had alerted me. Nonetheless it had been a lie, and every lie is risqué; it is a theft of the truth; and such injuries do not heal that easily. Wouldn’t there be sufficient other instances for discrepancies to manifest themselves? Aren’t there literally hundreds of other opportunities? It slid, he fox the viper anaconda cat… back into its cover, but no quite as deeply…. Its fangs…. I didn’t exactly let the incident pass: with some sadistic pleasure I asked without even using a derisive tone of voice I don’t think, whenever something in German was about to be uttered: “You do know German, don’t you.” “Yes.”

I began to realize that here, too, the master slave sadism interfered with the relationship. How to get out of it? Play music? Say, Country Joe & the Fish’s Colors for Susan, the only solution that Handke found to ease out of the sado masochistic master slave demonstration in his My Foot My Tutor? However, the “incident” was not conducive to an analysis of the most deleterious of the spells I had brought with me from childhood into analysis. To what degree did the closeness derive from incestuous qualities, telepathy, the brother-to-brother proximity, the entirety of the accumulation of the uncanny? Two wounded musical beings had had an encounter, not on the Acropolis, but in the consulting room.

NOTES

1] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Harcourt Brace

2] Of whom I have no idea whether they, too, still spook around my memory bank. But I also learned Russian once under intense circumstances, and then forgot it only for it suddenly to come back after three weeks in Bulgaria

3] For example, see Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild, the essay Amorbach where he recounts his discovery of his love of the atonal on letting his hand pluck an out of tune guitar. I believe the year was the discordant 1915 and the precocious Adorno was 12 at the time. What traumas lay in his earliest background?

4] Witches Brew, Miles Davis [Columbia Records]; or say Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi

5] Goat is Bock in German, whence the adjective bockig, which means stubborn; Dr. X agreed at some point that the only way I could have retained my individuality was to be stubborn towards the governess/father combination; the implication remaining hanging between us being that at the very least I might be more discretionary about this at this point in my life. I recall a typical incident from highschool where, initially, I had been something of a wizard in Geometry and Math, teaching the class for the teacher as a Sophomore. At the subsequent school had imported the severest kind of headmaster from India, the way black Master Sergeants can then be worse then their white examples: we took one look at each other and it was all over with being a genius at math: I had to struggle to pass.

6-A] Among two of the richest screen memories is one of Christmas 1941, during which my mother’s father, it appears, was briefly between Concentration camps. It is the kind of screen memory that then makes you doubt the usefulness of photographs as anything but memory minders.                                     

In one half of the very large walled but well lighted part of a veranda, there is laid out a large semi-oval track for a toy railroad. In its center is placed Baby Tuckoo, that is I; to my left, or my right, depending which way I happen to be facing, sits my father, the engineer entrepreneur who has put down this major piece of engineering, allegedly his Christmas gift; at the other end, near a large make believe Alpine tunnel that is placed over the two sets of tracks, lounges my seven foot tall Grandfather, typically in his leather hunting knickers. The object of the game is to manipulate the electric control in just such a way for two trains to pass through the tunnel simultaneously in opposite directions, a demonstration of my father’s ingenuity and control, who is in charge of the electric knob. As the two trains approach the tunnel from opposite sides, my grandfather gives me a conspiratorial wink and then flips a switch on the Weiche, [which as an adjective means soft, as a verb evade or avoid, and as a noun railway switch] for the two trains, that have been made to on the same, and no longer on parallel tracks, to collide inside the tunnel, producing angry sounds of frustrated grinding electric motors running overtime.    Turning to my father I see him look at my grandfather, a kind of charming shit-eating grin on his face, and say “Oh Werner, look at what you’ve done.”                 

This recollection, indeed, has all the surface verisimilitude of something that happened. But how was it that, in evidently just a few days, my preference had changed from my father to my grandfather, the eternal child? Between the two of whom I am equivocating? Not without noting, I would think, the preference expressed for him, over my father, by a figure who is absent in the photo-realistic memory, my mother, who no doubt had reason to be disappointed in her husband. Absent, too, is the governess, except through some of the interdictions represented here, and their consequences. All other matters have all the usual heavy symbolic significance, as does the break in the narcissistic oval, I am at the center; the two figures are outside the oval. In other words, this was the kind of incident that could be remembered over all the other utterly forgotten events of those days because, it so happened, that the particular “facts” were capable of attracting rich symbolic and emotional significance.          

The grandfather’s sadism and complicit playfulness are there, as in real life; and in the numerous stories of his fabled adventures with which I was entertained as a child; some of which, subsequently, struck, and not just me, as showing me how I had picked up a sense of humor, but also his sense of the absurd. I can only infer this idolization of someone who within two weeks of being liberated from Buchenwald, but who was laughing and joking already then; as he had, to his own disadvantage, also in camp.  

6-B] Aside a half dozen or so “pea under the sheets” type screen kernels, which once explored provided a vista into the self, there was a second elaborate screen that must have been fixed in memory just a few months later. It is of two matters that stand as it were in a relationship to each other: One, the broken glass, or is it glistening dew drops, or is it tears on the flower beds the night after a bombing attack had shattered the window glass of our villa; and, two, of the German shepherd who had strangled herself on the fence of the Zwinger [a fenced enclosure, meaning enforce, Dresden has a famous, allegedly aesthetically redeemed on] in which Mara was kept, not that far from the flower beds, allegedly, so the apocryphal story went, because she had been so terrified by the bombing attack. This memory coincided with the equally shattering event of what was experienced as an expulsion from paradise; for, though I may have felt like an severely abandoned child at age nine months, I had meanwhile acquired such a sense of place that a goat might chase me to the farthest reaches of the forest, not all of which I crawled and toddled entirely on my own I suspect, to which my parents had occasionally returned. The departure in the clutches of the then already hated governess thus meant a leaving into great uncertainties and the departure from everything known.

7] I desperately needed someone I could trust. I had business partners whom I had the worst reasons not to trust, there was no reason to trust the current live-in girl friend, in as much as a romantic used to give a matter like that much thought, emphatically nearly all previous ones had proved untrustworthy – although there was, on later realization, something about me that seemed to make it, sometimes, not invariably, the point to chose lovers of such a problematic nature that I appeared to demand that they would prove so untrustworthy that I could thus replay a prior trauma, but who for being so problematic seemed beyond hurt, and who therefore provided easy cause, since cause I seemed to need, so as not to be entrapped; at least so it appeared in retrospective analysis of certain patterns of avoiding those who seemed unleavable under any circumstance and who therefore ought not to be in the least hurt by an involvement with me; and most, though by no means all, of the so-called closest friends were dubious propositions, too; especially some of the founding authors of the semi-revolutionary publishing enterprise of which I was the initiating founder. Nonetheless, you had to keep up some halfway intimate human contact! But how did you even find the time in New York to be truly close to someone? Besides, to what extent could I trust myself, one reason I was here in the first place, or was I completely trustworthy.                        My parents were deceased when I entered analysis. But neither my father nor my mother’s second husband, my guardian for a number of years, had been trustworthy; and the latter would prove even more dubious on some checking subsequent to my analyses that had turned me into something of a researcher of my family’s past; nor my mother in important respects. The only figures who had been trustworthy in my childhood had been my grandmothers, who however had little power, and whose responsiveness thus was too tolerant, and in one instance, since she had come to our house to die, ineffectual; my complicit grandfather had appeared once in my life during which brief visit he managed to become an idol; implicitly I felt I was in communication with my mother, just the way her mother felt she was when she heard birds cuckooing; my governess could be trusted to be a police woman who, also for overprotecting reasons, was an inveterate NO, onto whom I became far too adhesively dependent even while trying to remain independent from her and egotistically, totally selfishly so; my father’s delegate as it were; the expressed preference to the governess was invariably the milkmaid, Lisa, much liked by my mother as well; all of which however did not mean that I had decided to discard the possibility of this longed for trust altogether; at any event the longing for trust, mistakenly too perhaps, continued to exert itself; and during my childhood, in wartime Germany, under circumstances where a child not only was acutely aware of the danger of being blown to bits with shit falling from the sky, but sensed the all around cannibalism, and not only as a kind of pervasive paranoia that was painted on the walls of houses and that the populace emitted.

8] The girlfriend, as was clear within half a year into the analysis - about whose procedures she knew less than I had upon entering, and I excluded her from it - was jealous of the analyst, made disparaging remarks about his voice on that mechanical interposition, the answering machine, “He sounds like a typical Jewish analyst,” and envious, too, of the apparently pleased expression I bore after returning from the decompressing five mile walk that I took back downtown after most of my sessions. Subsequent to this communication from a girlfriend who was definitely being neglected, say in the same manner in which I was capable of neglecting all other matters analytic over my obsession with dreams, there came a dreadful dream in whose first act I chased an uncircumcised analyst, who was giving me a hard time, around his office. - “But all my friends are Jews!” was my own shocked response on telling this, which was pretty much true, and had been since my coming to this country, a matter of sensibility. [Moreover, this Chasing dream was dreamt even before my so whetted, post-analysis curiosity discovered that an uncle, for nefarious, selfish as well as what he thought protective reasons, had scotched the Jewish part of his and my father’s Jewish Danish German heritage during the 30s: A Wilderness of Mirrors is the title of a Max Frisch novel, a “Wilderness of Deceptions” might be a story of mine.] But with Jews, ever since seeing photos of the death camps, at about age eight, where my mother’s father who had spent nearly the entire twelve year Reich in four different camps, too had been tortured, my identity had been so total I had produced some of my best and emotionally laden, musical and exhausting and mourning work as a translator of some five dozen Nelly Sachs poems; the question of why I would have had such quick and deep empathy, in reading of his torture in 1947, with someone whom I had come to idolize during the one week I had spent in his presence during the one week he had been between camps in my early life, or why I could feel so tortured, being subjects whose exploration lay some time ahead.  Moreover, the only physical fight I ever lost was to the son of a Nazi general, over that very matter: lost not for reasons of physical inferiority but because I had become so over-emotional that my heart gave out. Again, my fine class mates at this boarding school were astonished, how I could have succumbed so quickly, and to someone physically my inferior, but more negatively puzzled than by the stories that spoke out of me.                                                                                               To find myself to be anti-semitic, thus, was a total shock. - The harsh dream, not so incidentally, ended in wonderful kind of –then unanalyzed - pastel suburban compromise where Dr. X and I lived happily, collaboratively side by side a beige and mauve existence! That kind of suburb: in a dream of several acts, the first generally spoke most truthfully, the end realized the preferred wish.                       Dr. X, after double-checking the circumcision matter, responded that I seemed to be unaware of how badly I felt about myself. Then he ascertained what had elicited the dream: I had been talking about being in analysis to a friend, had praised the procedure and my analyst, and the friend then expressed the wish that this would be something he would love to do, too. These “facts” made the dream that much more odd to me as well as to Dr. X. Within a week of a very upset and puzzled me, focusing pretty much entirely on this dream, the equally puzzled Dr. X suddenly – out of that wonderful blue of his discoveries - uncovered the girlfriend as the source of this so astonishing anti-Semitism, not that the matter of “circumcision” did not point, so I felt, to more profound and troublesome wounds that I wished to have healed.                                                                                  It was by means of the analysis of that dream and of its so surprising sources and how it had cooked in the dream mine-mind that I learned how suggestible I had been, and obviously still was, the suggester, whoever she now was within the contradictory circus of spells, thus becoming suspect. Again: ought I not to have raised the matter also with her, instead of just letting it slide into the dream mine/mind? Into a reservoir of justifying resentments building up against her? Now there were two spells, in opposition to each other as it were. During my childhood, my mother on her occasional appearance, had always made it very clear how much she disliked the governess in whose clutches she nonetheless then left me once again. The two chief spells seemed both positively and negatively charged at present.                                                                         

9]  Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams Yes how much more do we know meanwhile about the artist who fashions all this into a single production, that compromise artist, The Self - Your Whole Being  - which exists in a culture within history of time and timelessness, who creates these beautiful or sometimes dark truth-bearing mares.

FN-Denial: does the primary system have something that might be called “acceptance” 15] Though noticing the fact of the empty diaphragm container in my and the lady about to be disparu’s bedroom when she was off to work, the significance of this unmistakable fact if ever there was one, was as barely glimpsed nothing in a merely registering consciousness that only stewed unconsciously. One evening, bringing another couple home to our loft, I lifted the friend’s girlfriend on my lap – something I had never before done in my life - but when my lady, now made jealous at the so obvious hint at that I was as capable of infidelity as she, and I went to our bedroom that night I said: “I am so unhappy I don’t now what to do” and promptly passed out. When the lady came to her parent’s house that I was sitting in the country and I proceed to speak out of the just dreamt 747 dream [one of whose scenes had featured two bodies writhing in winding sheets] and I asked if she was seeing someone else and she answered “yes,” and I sent her packing back to the city whence she had come [there had been something in her voice the day before, and she had spent the evening dancing at The Heartbreak, a hall that a genius of a businessman had set in the perfect quarter for it].              

If denial means out of sight out of mind and earshot, then the reply couldn’t be more emphatically in the affirmative. Segueing back into analysis after the first summer vacation at about the time that the girlfriend proceeded to disappear I had the most difficult time grasping whether such out of sight out of mind constituted denial! For some weeks I hemmed and hawed, one day agreeing, the next day it making no sense to me, equivocated, because I could not get a grasp on the “away”: it had made me feel so much stronger! “Of course,” said Dr. X, sounding astonished, it seemed, by such naiveté [FN-Denial]; and it of course was difficult so grasp for the spell that the girlfriend cast had become thoroughly equivocal, who was experienced more as governess, whom I wanted out of the loft, than girlfriend at that point, and governess so much more once you knew her severe and neglected mother; compacted and fractured, dithering, fluid spells as it were. As a matter of fact, I had shocked Dr. X not all that many months prior with a dream where I was having an affair with a virginal might-have-been who lived in Rockland County, a wishfulfilment occurring in a county where I guessed that he, who lived in New Jersey, resided too [!]: he had far stronger inklings than I allowed myself to entertain.

FN-resistance

This outtake from A Patient’s Experience of his Analysis makes it apparent that the Dr. X handled the resistance in a rote, and for that reason alone, inappropriate and deleterious manner. At the first mention of the word, when my reading of the Interpretation of Dreams had fascinated me to a fairly single-minded pre-occupation with them, Dr. X had had the opportunity of doing what he proposed at the end of the analysis with him; that is. at a time that I no longer trusted him: to collaborate. This would have been not only a royal road for the analysis of my dreams, but obviously for the matters that came up in the dreams and for how my mind worked, that is for the defences it employed. No doubt I would have tired of focusing on dreams in my own good times, as I did eventually on my own.

Since the unfolding of the transferences evolved into a duplication of the relationship, or rather non-relationship, with a hypercritical terrifying governess figure of my childhood, a handling of the analysis from a self-psychological perspective in general, specifically of the “resistances” [which cannot be really called resistances except from the point of view of the authoritarianism inherent in classical analysis] would have averted these major problems; although Dr. X understood that the governesses terror and all pervasive NO had an emasculating effect, he did not know how to avoid duplicating that in the analytic situation; nor how to elide the double-bind in which I found myself in finding any help from a governess figure to be an equally emasculating if not terrifying matter. Collaborators can be hard to find. On the other hand, in one instance of a now deceased fellow translator friend we worked very closely and happily together, until he went off the deep end and joined a Sufi sect and started lifting imaginary rocks in his head. In the instance of a director who derived from Brecht’s so collaborative ménage at the Berliner Ensemble our collaboration on plays as well as on translations worked wonderfully and professionally as long as his wife did not exercise her dictatorial control over him to the extent of ruining his career as a director. At any event, I then found a collaborator for matters analytic when I needed him. See, for example: Arthur Malin, The Analysis of Resistance¸ IJPA 1993. # 74 Pages  505-518