Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [135]
Freud waited, cigar poised in the air. The flickering abated; the lights stayed on.
“Perhaps we’ll be all right,” he resumed.
“Please, Dr. Freud,” said Colette. “Can you explain what’s the matter with my brother?”
“I’ll tell you what I know, Fräulein, but the concepts will be new to you and strange. Brandy?” Taking his time, Freud refilled his own and Younger’s glasses.
Well, where to begin?” said Freud. He was seated again, his legs crossed, in one hand a cigar, in the other his brandy. “Twenty-five years ago, I discovered a path to unseen provinces of our mental life, which I may have been the first mortal ever to enter. There I found a hell of inexpressible fears and longings, for which men and women might have burned in earlier eras. A man cannot expect such insight more than once in a lifetime. But last year, I made a new discovery that, in my more vainglorious moments, I think might even surpass the first. No one will believe it, but that will be nothing new. It came to me from studying the war neuroses—indeed in part from studying your brother, Miss Rousseau. Not that your brother has a neurosis, strictly speaking, but his condition is similar. I want to be clear about one thing: he requires treatment. Wherever you go next, you should not simply leave him as he is. His case is straightforward enough. I could cure him myself, I expect, in—I don’t know—eight weeks.”
“Cure him?” repeated Colette. “Completely?”
“I should think so.”
Colette didn’t know how to respond.
“You sent us to Jauregg,” said Younger. “Why?”
“Many choose to treat their psychological disorders mechanistically. Miss Rousseau has to decide if she really wants her brother analyzed. I’m not sure she does. Twice now, she has brought her brother to Vienna but refused to commit herself to the time an analysis would require. And perhaps she’s right: after all, it may not be pleasant for her.”
“For me?” asked Colette. “Why?”
“I told you last year,” said Freud. “The truths that psychoanalysis unearths are never irrelevant to other family members. Fräulein, you know what it is to yearn for revenge. Your brother is taking revenge too—by not speaking.”
“On whom?” asked Colette.
“Perhaps on you.”
“Whatever for?”
“You can’t tell us?” asked Freud.
“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” answered Colette.
“It’s just speculation, my dear. I don’t know the answer.”
“But you said you knew what was wrong with him,” said Colette.
“I do. I understood it last summer, two months after you left. It was child’s play, as a matter of fact. Younger, what is the boy’s most revealing symptom?”
“I have no idea,” said Younger.
“Come—I just gave it away.”
Younger chafed at Freud’s habit of luring him with analytic conundrums, particularly under the present circumstances, but all the same, the lure took. Child’s play? “His game,” said Younger. “Something to do with his fishing reel game.”
“Exactly,” said Freud. “Miss Rousseau told me that her grandmother played a German hide-and-seek game with her brother when he was little. He is saying fort and da when he unspools and rewinds his reel—gone and there. What does it mean?”
Younger thought about it: “When did he start?”
“In 1914,” said Freud.
“He’s reliving the death of his parents,” said Younger.
“Obviously. Over and over. But why?”
“To undo the feeling of loss?”
“No. He isn’t undoing anything. He’s making himself experience the single worst moment of his life again and again.”
Cigar smoke had filled the candlelit room with its heavy, heady odor.
“It’s the key to the riddle,” said Freud. “All the war neurotics repeat. They have a kind of compulsion—a repetition compulsion—a need to reenact or reexperience the trauma that has given rise to their condition. And they’re all repeating the same thing: death, or the moment when they came closest to it. Normally, we have defenses—fortifications, physiological and psychological—that keep our mortality away from us, out of our consciousness. If these fortifications