The Remaking of Sigmund Freud

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

O Brave New World . . . When man roamed freely among the planets and away to the stars, spacecraft had to carry the best advisers with them, for outside help was usually too far off to do any good in emergencies. And so the android simulacrum was born - a conveniently storable but believably human package which duplicated all the strengths of the Master after whom each was modeled. For centuries a Sigmund Freud was standard equipment on long voyages, but put to little use. Then Man met his first etees, and Freud's career entered a new phase - one which would change history forever.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 278

Sample

SIGMUND FREUD, GRUNTING, PREPARES TO GO OUT UPON the dark surfaces of Venus, effortfully puts on the equipment. Boots, alternator, receiver, steel receptor, helmet, transmitter of light. Outside the mad engineer, Jurgensen, is clinging to the dome, waiting, perhaps, to utter confidences, inside the colonists are poised by this appropriated storage room, waiting for him to emerge but for the moment he is alone. A small lacunae of peace in the void. He had never imagined that life after death—if it existed at all—would be quite so eventful but this proved the worth of his theories. You never knew. That was all; circumstances were imponderable. You could never tell what was lying at the other side of the abyss.

Freud considers the engineer, the crisis, the methodological bind of the situation. He can see the humor of the situation here; Adler or Jung might be more appropriate to this assignment. After all of the tumult, his miserable colleagues might have more theoretical relevance than he. Adler would say that Jurgensen was compensating for his failures on the mission by trying, single-handedly, to demolish it; Jung, that mystic, would mumble about Venus as the plateau of dreams. There is something that is dreamlike (not to say primitive) about this circumstance; Adler does have a point about Jurgensen’s loss of control. Nonetheless, it is not either of them but he who has been taken from the reconstruction banks (or so they have told him) to deal with the situation. So they must see some relative merit in his theories, as compared to the others. Or something. Whatever. It is all very difficult to understand and he is no closer to having control over this than when all of this began, some hours or days ago. Who can tell?

Puffing, Freud adjusts the equipment around him, feeling very much like the paradigm of future man which he had posited in some of his writings … all stimulus and response, heat and wiring, trouble and technology around the vulnerable, living cells. It is most humiliating to see his vision so enacted but at the same time, there is a certain pride to be taken; not all of his guesses were wrong. Staring through the porthole, looking at the green and deadly gases that drift over the enshrouded surface of the second planet, Freud tries to cultivate his tragic sense. This and this alone will get him through; an awareness of the possibilities and his own conclusive helplessness. In his helmet, already, he thinks he can hear the purring of the alien winds.

He perceives a slant of light, turns toward the hatch, sees them waiting for him. “I’m ready,” he says before they can ask. “I’m ready.” He overcompensates. “I will go with you now,” he dreams he is saying in the archetypal night. “Let us go,” he says. He rises. Sustained only by his belief in the unconscious, in the tragic fate of man, Freud extends a hand and permits them to ease him toward destiny.

FREUD’S NEXT TO LAST PATIENT WAS A POLITICAL ACTIV-ist and house painter. The subject had been referred by a general practitioner; the complaint was impotence, but quickly enough he perceived that the symptom was reaction formation against deep inner rage and that the man was in need of extended therapy which he could neither afford nor understand. The patient had an ordinary mind and little insight.

“I am afraid,” Freud said, relighting his cigar, “that there is little I can do for you. A little wine before such encounters might be helpful. It is best to encourage a sense of spontaneity. Do not feel that you must give a performance or are being judged.” Common hedging. He flicked out the match, put it into an ashtray, rolled the cigar between sensitive teeth, noting tiny slivers of pain in the lower right quadrant. Referred pain; it felt as if cancer was blooming below the level, yet of obvious symptomatology. Hypochondria? That was possible. Regardless, there was nothing to be done just then.

“You are saying you will not treat me,” the house painter said. He was a bitter man. His mustache twitched. “You have been highly recommended, however, as someone who would help—”

“I am simply not available. This consultation is a courtesy. My bookcase is overflowing, my researches demanding, and there is the travel. Furthermore, I do not think that I am the ideal analyst in your case. I am sorry about this, but there is other help available in Vienna; perhaps you will see Carl—”

“But no,” the patient said. He stood, leaned crookedly against the desk, staring desperately at Freud. Already the patient had mentioned his political involvement, the sense of inchoate, desperate rage that came over him when he thought of how common men were being exploited; this must be another of those rages. “I won’t settle for this,” he said. “You deny me help, just like all of the rest of them. I tell you, I have plans, I have needs—”

“We all have plans,” Freud said gently. “In this society we consider alternatives, stay poised upon their existence right up to the very end. It is this necessary delusion that makes us human.” He exhaled smoke, spat foul tobacco, sensation turning the jaw aqueous. Why must it happen to him? Why did he permit it to be done, over and again, and become a philosopher-fool with these patients? Nauseated, he stubbed out the cigar. “This consultation is free. There is no charge for the advice.”

“I am suffering, you will suffer, there will be terrible penalties,” the house painter said. “This is another example of exploitation; we cannot have it.” He turned, left the room. Freud heard swearing in the corridor, and then the outer door was slammed. Looking through the window, he could see the little man trudging down the path. In the slump of his shoulder, tilt of his head, he did indeed belong with those masses who he felt were being reviled.

Freud sighed, thought of waste, pain, human folly. That patient would come to nothing and in forty years, if still alive, still impotent, would still project his insufficiency on the social condition. Self-delusion was rampant. The times fostered self-delusion as an arboretum does trees. At least that unhappy and unpleasant person was protected (by his very condition!) from inflicting his neurosis upon his children.

Freud considered his appointment book. The final patient, due in less than a quarter of an hour, in Vienna on a quick journalistic tour, was Colonel Robert McCormick, editor in chief and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Freud sighed again and relit his cigar. He would die of some vague cancer of the jaw if he did not stop that; the cells themselves shouted the message, but he could not give up the habit. What could he do? So much of life, as his own studies indicated, was preordained, deterministic. At least he was fully conscious of what he was doing to himself.

So he took a further moment to rest and revive, to be properly introspective. He was a contemplative and feeling man; patients tended to run together in his mind if he did not take time between sessions to restructure and align his perception. The fifty-minute analytic hour was one of his more recent discoveries; it would be an obvious necessity as the methodology took root. Richard Strauss had reactive depression. Alban Berg, sorrowfully trapped in marriage, could not escape his dominant wife. Gustav Mahler, an hysteric, would die with (or without) his Alma. William Randolph Hearst had delusions of persecution. Alice B. Toklas was in love with her employer, a stern novelist, but dreaded her own homosexual impulses. Warren Harding felt manipulated. And so on and on. Freud was famous. He had founded a new school of mental science. From all over the world, the well-known and the obscure came to him, seeking assistance, and he could give them so little. Most, like the house painter, had to be sent on their way at once. Others, like Mahler, did show keen understanding of analytic principle and were worth some time but were too old, too pained to change their fate. A few in negative transference had been exceedingly unpleasant. It was all so painful.

Still, one had to continue. Freud’s researches and profound ruminations on the human condition had imparted to him a tragic dimension.

He went to the door, opened it, and saw McCormick waiting in the anteroom. He was a florid man in sombrero and white jacket with large boutonniere. “Come in, please,” Freud said politely. McCormick stood. Freud had no secretary. A secretary would only distance the patients and in addition might read the precious, private files. McCormick’s self-delusion was unlike that of the previous patient, Freud sensed; it was appurtenance. If truth were marketable, then McCormick would find a way to deal with that.

His new patient following him at a respectful distance, Freud reentered his office, closed the door, seated himself once more behind his desk. He gestured to the couch against the wall and then sat there, stroking his head, as McCormick settled on it, facing him eagerly. More and more his thought patterns streamed like that, his consciousness flitted from topic to topic. Anxiety neurosis to be sure, moderately well compensated, but there was the problem that he might, well, perhaps it could lead to … Freud faced it—he feared imbalance. He knew that some of his estranged or rivalrous colleagues thought him mad, and he was the target of scurrilous allegations. Jung had had some very painful things to say, likewise Alfred Adler. Freud knew he was not mad, was confident of his balance and his abilities, nonetheless—

“I am not here for treatment, Doctor,” McCormick said. “I know of your wonderful work and have come to make you an offer, a fine offer. I would like you to write an advice column exclusively for our newspapers in which you can give readers practical answers to their problems. Five times a week you can do this with three months off during the year, and we can offer a five-year contract at the outset. Three columns a week if you find this daily schedule too taxing. With our syndicate working on distribution, you would double your income immediately, as we reach many newspapers in cities throughout the country with our columnists and your work in particular would be excitedly received. You will be a most intriguing addition to the papers. Also you will be able to render help, real help to the masses, Doctor! Millions of people will read your words and be inspired. It is a marvelous opportunity, don’t you agree?”

“I’m sorry,” Freud said. “I’m not interested.”

“But think of this, Dr. Freed,” McCormick said earnestly. “Consider what we have to offer you.” He shrugged convulsively, seemed to be attempting inflation within his clothing; not only the billows of his stomach but his smooth, innocent American cheekbones seeming to expand in the harsh light of Freud’s office, the steamy odors of his continent seeming to come from him, America itself heating those spaces. “It would be a platform in the New World! You are already well thought of by many of my countrymen in the universities or medical colleges, but the man in the street, the common reader who we strive to reach with our newspapers, barely can be said to know you. This would make you famous; it would far expand the influence and reach of your ideas.”

“My name is Freud” he said calmly, thinking of the lunacy of a certain kind of American, an absolute determination and unaWareness of inference which was not duplicated among all the countries and creeds of the world. “No, your offer is very kind, but to accept it would be highly unprofessional. I am a researcher, a doctor, a scholar if I may modestly say so. Not an advice columnist, whatever that is you’re talking about.”

“But think of the good you might do! You could treat many, the masses, instead of only a selected few who can afford your very high fees.”

“I’m sorry,” Freud said. “I’m really sorry, but you do not understand my researches, my theories. Neurosis is a poetic malfunction, a language of the heart; it can be treated only in confidence and in a private means. There is no way that my researches can be flattened for your masses, most of whom do not suffer from anything as luxurious as neurosis.” He stood, hoping that by his signal McCormick would see that the interview was terminated. “I cannot help you; what you seek is outside of my range.”

“Do you know what?” McCormick said with a sneer, stroking the flower in his lapel. “You’re just another intellectual, thinking you’re so goddamned superior to those of us who do the real work, go on with the real tasks of this world. I know your type.”

“I think nothing of the sort, Colonel.”

“Well, then, the hell with you,” McCormick said as if he had not heard that response. That had to be the case. The man had heard nothing. Only the resonances of his own voice, eternally, were fed back to him. “The hell with all of you,” he said determinedly. Freud considered the rosy hue, the cast eye, the evident bigotry. McCormick would not stand. His feet fluttered in patterns on the floor. Rank projectivity was at work of course and probably self-hatred as well, but he had no time for that and the Colonel had no interior; he was as essentially untreatable as the house painter.

“Please,” Freud said mildly. “Please leave.”

McCormick crossed his legs. “I arranged for a whole hour. I’m paying you for this time; I’m not going to be thrown out until I make you hear my proposition.”

“You bought nothing. I am not for sale. I do not wish to continue this discussion. The consultation is free.” His second free consultation of the day; there was a sign of something deeply wrong. His tragic sense, unfettered, scuttled like a small animal within his breast. Really, I have made too many sacrifices, he thought. Pain, torment, misdirection, abuse, martydom, and all for what? To be a syndicated gossip columnist for Robert McCormick? He felt an uncharacteristic and dangerous flare of rage. “There is no justice,” he said incautiously, thinking not only of this situation but of Jung and Adler. “You’re just like the rest of them; there’s no difference at all. Get out.”

“Not so,” McCormick said oddly. “Not so whatsoever and furthermore.” He stood convulsively, removed an ancient pistol from his clothing, shakily aimed it. To his horror, Freud saw death coming. He was going to be killed. It was unavoidable. For so long he had theorized of it, strewn it through his own dreams and papers, then, unbelievably, it was happening to him. He was going to die. Richard Strauss will shit in fever and Gustav Mahler’s mania will cycle ever higher, making Alma too crazy. My researches will languish, lesser men will pirate my insights, spread them indiscriminately, eventually I will become a parody, a joke, used at last against that very perception of human misery which was to be my legacy to the world—

“Please,” he said, raising a hand. “Robert, I’m going to die soon enough anyway.” He indicated his jaw. “I’m sure there’s an inoperable cancer in there, so it doesn’t matter, you see, it just doesn’t matter. You don’t have to do this; I don’t have that much time left. Don’t take me away from the little that there is. I have to work—”

“You do not have to work,” McCormick said. His forehead was distended, his eyes bulged; he was a picture of the New World seeking revenge, absolutely focused upon reparation. The barbarian, free of his shackles, had come at last to exact tribute. “You have to do nothing at all. There is no need for you. You are an arrogant man, Freed; you think that you’re better than all of the rest of us, but this isn’t so, it isn’t so at all. Everything levels out in the long run. That’s the principle of mass publishing, you see, that’s what has made me my fortune: everything becomes the same, tits and blood are the foundation of democracy. I saw that even before that pirate Hearst did, and it is going to be the face of the century.”

He shot Freud in the right eye. Freud collapsed even before he felt the pain. Riven, bleeding thunderously, he saw the rose on McCormick’s lapel unfurl, spout fluid. It was a splendid image, ironic and painful, and he wondered if it was merely a version of poetic truth or some deep revelation of McCormick’s plans for the future.

“I don’t have to take this kind of thing,” he heard the publisher say. “No one is going to make me take it. Not from a kike.” Footsteps receded. Freud wondered if McCormick would now go to Jung, make the same offer there. Would Carl take it? Probably, he thought. Carl had always had, whatever his pretensions, a cheap populist mentality. So he would accept the offer, save his life, redirect his life, destroy his academic legitimacy forever.

EMILY DICKINSON SAT POISED IN HER BEDROOM ON THE second floor of the building at 280 Main Street, Amherst, in the state of Massachusetts, opening herself to inspiration in the accustomed way and considering her latest poem. She had finished it just that afternoon. The year was 1862. She was a widely published poet, a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s and Harper’s Magazine, and her first collection, The Heart Seeks Pleasure First, published the year before, had sold well with excellent reviews, but she still had a feeling of insufficiency in regard to her work.

Probably, she thought, it had to do with the long years of struggle when she worked in anonymity. She had never lost that sense of failure, even though her work had improved enormously, and, of course, long-deserved recognition had come in its wake.

The war was going badly. That was the inspiration for her newest poem; the war was going very badly for the Union. It had been her intention to contribute as best she could to the staggering northern cause with a bit of determined verse. Emily despised the Confederacy. She despised the institution of slavery. She despised, for that matter, the institution of war to which the nation had been committed, but she knew that it could have been no other way. Harper’s Ferry must not have been in vain; slavery had to be abolished. At the center of the terrible war guttered the flame of old John Brown’s abolition—part madness of course. But even the mad could speak true. Sometimes, she thought, the mad are but the only ones who can truly understand these times, can act in accordance with them. It was a daring conclusion, but that was how she felt.

Emily decided that she would send her new poem to the Globe, That newspaper had been asking for her verse, their letters becoming ever more pleading and insistent, as if her modest poetry could really make a difference to the editors. Still, her latest did have elements of the journalistic, and poetry in those times had to be used to take a stand. If it did not do this, was not used to that end, of what use would poetry be at all? Oh, she thought, in that case hers would be an arcane and dreary art that would mean nothing at all.

The Heart Seeks—Pleasure First—

And—then It looks for Light—

The Light that will flaming lead it

Past the arc—of—Night

The Light Doth Become—a—Sword

That Can Be Known—to Some—

As Liberation, for the Nation—

So at last—Freedom!

It is 1848. Kansas was bleeding, but Fillmore would not intend. Industrialism and the fragmentation of the culture lay decades in the future, but Emerson, her neighbor, was already delivering thunderbolts to theocracy. It would never be the same after Emerson took God from the cycle of seasons. Emily Dickinson, unaware of all that then, not to be aware of the shaking circumstances for many years, regarded herself in a mirror, looking at her red hair, intense eyes, the arresting tilt of her cheekbones which when she entered a room struck everyone as being truly dramatic, even frightening.

She would be leaving for studies at Holyoke in a few hours. The coming year struck her as being particularly dangerous, highly exciting, and on that early fall morning she felt close to that sense of intention which had haunted her off-center for so long. “I am different” she murmured. “There is something special about me. I am not like the rest of them; if they could see into my soul they would know that.” The explosion of purpose, almost unseemly pride, made her blush; she saw in the dull mirror the imprint of shame, and yet she would not allow pride’s sister to drive her from that knowledge. I will be a poet, she thought. No, I am a poet, and I will use the medium to inflame and inspire. Because I want to give them the truth, she thought, they must have it, they must be led to understand what is going on.

Poetry beat within her like a bird, like a fish; she felt those hot, dark impulses moving congealed with purposes deep under the skin. Flutters of language, soon to emerge. I will write, she thought. That is my mission and my goal. First, however, I must perceive myself: this room, the world, the steeples, the churchyards, all of the angles and joints of life itself, meeting as if by skilled carpenter’s hand in the angle of vision. Fully, richly, darkly; oh how they mesh. There will be much to come of this.

Blood filled her cheeks, scalded her heart. She felt an instant of giddiness subsumed in darker intention which left her drained yet full, fearful yet composed before her destiny.

Some years after the death of Emily Dickinson from Bright’s disease, her brother, the Reverend William Austin Dickinson, became interested in the writings and reputation of Sigmund Freud, a German medical practitioner whose insights into the role that the mind might play in the symptoms of physical illness fascinated him. It seemed to be Freud’s divination that many intelligent and creative women were “hysterical”; that they evolved physical conditions because they could not cope with the demands and restraints of their inner lives. Austin was, at that time, somewhat hysterical himself: a bad marriage, the deaths of his parents and younger sister within a span of only half a decade, had ravaged his mind and heart.

His letter to Freud, composed during a spell of discipline and lucidity, was, however, a precise and well-structured document. He began with the customary salutations of the period, then invoked his own credential and background, noted that he was a member of a distinguished New England family, explained how he was introduced to Freud’s work through a mutual friend (imaginary) in the medical profession, made some appropriately self-deprecating remarks about his ability to understand such profoundly original and provocative material written by a scholar. Then, approaching the central purpose of the letter, Austin outlined the career of his late sister, who had been one of America’s most popular poets in her lifetime even though that reputation in the years just after her death had already begun to erode cruelly.

“This seems so often to be the fate of those oriented toward journalistic or inspired verse and it is in many ways a cruel judgement. But this is not the issue,” Austin wrote. “I am not writing you in order to complain about circumstance but only to ask you a question, a question which I believe you are better qualified to answer than anyone in my experience. What I wish to know is whether or not my sister’s career was pathological in nature that is to say, whether her poetry was an outcome of the extreme isolation of her earlier years and whether, perhaps, if she had lived a more social and fulfilled childhood she might have avoided poetry altogether. And also, concomitantly and if this is true, would it have been better for us if she were happier and the poetry not exist? Or does the work itself assume a kind of transcendent validity? These are questions perhaps more metaphysical in nature but I particularly inquire on pathology. In that regard I remain your humble servant & etc., etc.” Austin enclosed a considerable sample of the poet’s work so that Freud might familiarize himself with her writings and make further judgment.

Austin redrafted the letter several times, struggling for the correct voice. References to his own unhappy domestic situation seemed irrelevant; he put them in and took them out. Praise for Freud’s American reputation seemed like blandishment, and he decided to excise. Certain memories of Emily’s childhood did seem relevant, however, he had expanded upon them. Speculations on mortality were reluctantly removed; he was not, after all, trying to display knowledge; he was looking for an answer. At last, doubtfully and wondering if any of it had made sense at all, Austin posted the letter, wondering if there would be a reply, whether the Viennese man of science had any answers at all.

Weeks glided by, then months, and Austin came to the conclusion that either his letter had gone astray or Freud, contemptuously, had elected not to answer. The alienist was a busy man, of course, but a brief reply would have been a courtesy: it was not as if Austin were someone from the streets. But there was nothing to be done about it, certainly not a further letter, and after some brooding, Austin decided to leave the issue alone. Slowly the issue and the inquiry ebbed from his consciousness; he had other matters to concern him, including his own advancing age and incapacity. When he died half a decade later, not only his letter to Freud but Emily herself had been overtaken by time and event. Dickinson’s poetry slid inexorably from popular favor. Oncoming technology and the more brutal social partitions of the swiftly approaching twentieth century would relegate her to the position of minor, sentimental poet, not atypical of so many of her time who filled the popular journals and newspapers. They reflected events, that was all.

When Freud was murdered by Robert McCormick in Vienna, his files were sealed. Years later, when his heirs at last got to and went through them, Austin Dickinson’s letter was there, filed neatly under D, cross-referenced under artists. Freud had made no remarks upon it, although from the many creases and faded handwriting it would appear that the letter had been carried about and read . . .