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My Hysteria

Freud opened an office in Mombasa with a lovely view of the Indian Ocean. He found the ocean comforting, he said, because of his prenatal memories, which were, of course, wet. He would not elaborate on them but hinted at mermaids, sirens, and a submarine, although he might have confused this third memory of the womb with one of his boyhood in which he had been especially fond of the novels of Jules Verne.

His reason for leaving the comforts of Berggasse 19 was to find evidence, he said. When asked what sort of evidence, he smiled mysteriously. The hostility shown his 1905 opus, Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, had made him understandably reticent; but as our acquaintance grew into something like friendship, he admitted that he sought to validate his belief in Africa as the unconscious of the world or, using the terminology of his mentor Charcot, its second mind.

"What more fitting origin for the world's irrational impulses than Africa!"

He further admitted with an uncharacteristic grin -- all the more disarming for its rarity -- that Mombasa, a town of marked European influences, was, strictly speaking, a flawed laboratory for his African research. Accustomed to civilization and its contentments (childhood experiences of anti-Semitism notwithstanding) and by temperament very Viennese, he could not let go the coast to venture into the interior where the inscrutable and the mad have their dominion.

I had gone to see Freud because I was hysterical. The safari doctor had suggested a partial lobotomy; but his shaking hands, not to mention the unhygienic look of the safari knife with which he proposed to perform the operation, changed my mind. He called me a vile name, but I paid no attention as he had been drinking rather more than usual and was in all other respects a tip-top fellow.

"I am losing my grip," I told Freud at our first assignation. I am facetious in referring to it as such; but we did meet in a darkened room, I was lying down, and he did speak to me in a most seductive manner in order to, as he said, "suck out the bad dreams."

"The 'grip,'" he assured me, "no matter how lost it appears to be is never really so and can be, with indefatigable patience, found again."

"I would like to be numbed," I said, certain I had no such patience."I regret I have no pill for numbing."

"I have suffered much," I told Freud in an access of self-pity.

He was peeking out the blinds and said nothing.

"Did you hear me?" I shouted.

"I'm sorry, my mind is wandering. Out there."

He nodded -- at Africa, which threatened at any moment to spill noisily over the windowsill into the consultancy.

Annoyed, I got to my feet, lifted my hat from the rack, and was about to take leave of him.

"Please!" he entreated. "What I have been searching for can only be found in the heart. The heart of Africa. Will you show me it?"

I hesitated. I had fled the interior because it had proved too much. In the end its over-heated sensuality, riot of sensations, and several types of darkness had become unbearable. I had lost hair, Bible (both old and new testaments), and a portion of my bowel to its small but incessant cannibalisms. I looked at Freud and told him it was not for him.

"Africa is not for you. Not that Africa."

I pointed west in the direction of an obscurity which, even though it was still only afternoon in Mombasa, was having a nervous effect on the birds.

"You are not up to it," I concluded. "And frankly, neither am I."

"It will accelerate your cure to return to the scene of your trauma."

I shook my head no.

"I will treat you gratis," he offered.

Against my better judgment, I agreed.

"It is very interesting," said Freud as he sat smoking atop an enormous ant hill.

"This?" I scoffed. "This is only mildly interesting. What you see before you is the mere outskirts of what is called the Dark Continent."

"Women are the Dark Continent," he said -- a remark that would raise the ire of future generations of suffragettes.

"You don't like women -- do you, Sigmund?"

"Ask me when I have finished my self-analysis."

Secretly, he feared women. At least this is what I concluded after hearing him refer to them as "vampires."

I, on the other hand, loved women and hoped that my analysis would not reveal a predisposition to the contrary.

The jungle.

Darkness, everywhere.

Freud jotted ceaselessly in his notebook.

"What do you think of Africa now?" I asked, shining the lamp in his face.

"Darker!" he exclaimed. "I wish it were darker still!"

"You have the distinction of being the first of my acquaintance to wish it so."

"One cannot bring light without first submerging in the dark."

We were traveling with seven porters: one for the rifles and ammunition, one for the tents, two for our provisions, two for the couch upon which my analysis continued even in the wilderness, and one for Freud's cigars.

"You smoke too much, Siggy," I scolded.

He allowed me this intimacy after I had pulled him from a slough.

"Nonsense!" he said.

"Twenty-five cigars a day strikes me as excessive."

He took out his pocket-watch and began to swing it slowly back and forth.

"If you like counting so much, count backwards from 100."

I did, and very soon regressed to infancy.

"Tell me what you see," he adjured.

"Pink."

"Pink? What is pink?"

"My mother's breast and my father's bald head."

"What are you doing?"

"Suckling."

"And your father?"

"Also suckling."

"Does this make you angry?"

"No, I'm having a jolly time! Mother is humming the overture to von Suppé's Light Cavalry while Father performs a fish imitation."

"And you continue to suckle throughout his curious tableau?"

"Suckle and smile, yes."

"You're marvelously well adjusted for an hysteric."

We entered the region close to the Absolute Darkness later described by Edison during his investigations in Africa. A blackness precipitated out of the atmosphere, thick and particulate, making our lamps useless. We ended by wearing it, giving reality to the trope "cloak of darkness" while we felt our way among the trees.

"Sigmund!" I shouted. "Where are you?"

"At the breast!" he called.

"This is no time for jokes!"

"I'm regressing -- not to my past but to our ancestors', ages before the dawn of anything that could be called civilization. In the blackness an enormous breast was given me, and I'm getting ready to drink night at it."

"Are you alone?"

"There are demons here with me," he whispered.

"You are in grave danger, Sigmund!"

"The breast belongs to one of the Great Mothers. She is offering me a draught of the ancient world's unconscious."

"Do not swallow!" I warned.

But he did swallow. And the draught very nearly drove him crazy. I nursed him for a time. In the absence of the sun and his pocket-watch, which broke during the psychic upheaval that wracked him, I cannot say for how long. Nightmarish images coursed through his brain. Images of hunger, cold, violence, and iron cruelty.

I put him on the couch, and the porters hoisted it. Together, we began the long walk out of the wilderness.

The porters did not sing.

"A demon leapt!" Freud cried.

He was delirious. We were camped by a river, and I was mopping his forehead with a wet handkerchief.

"A demon leapt at my throat!"

"Shhh," I said to comfort him. But he would not be comforted.

In years to come, he would always blame his cancer on the demon that sprung at him from out the Great Mother: "The Death Mother -- Kali, dancing on a dead man's skull." And he would blame the apostate Jung for loosing her on the modern consciousness. But of course, it was the cigars ... wasn't it?

I brought him out -- brought Freud out. I felt enormous pride, bringing him out. It is, after all, what a safari guide does: bring people out after taking them in. But while I safaried many during my long years in Africa, I was not -- I must confess -- entirely successful. The signs are ambiguous; perspective is forever vanishing; and the door -- when I could find a door -- would often lock behind me. This was a different Africa altogether, impossible to traverse by ordinary methods of locomotion.

Sitting in the waiting room, I listened to a muffled voice through the closed door. I could not make out what the voice said, but it sounded like a plaint. On the hour the voice ceased, the door opened, and a small man left the consulting room.

"Au revoir," he said into his gloved hand -- to hide his teeth, to stopper up his élan vital, who knows?

"Bonjour, Marcel," Freud said.

"Bonne nuit," Proust said to me; for it may have been afternoon by the clock, but for him it was already dark.

"Céleste!" he called, and an automobile appeared to take Proust back to the shrouded furniture and medicine bottles of 102 Boulevard Hausmann.

"An interesting case," said Freud stroking his beard thoughtfully.

"Tell me about it," I said coquettishly.

"You know I can't do that."

He lit another cigar.

"You smoke too much!" I chided.

I took my place on the couch. It was like backfloating, I decided as Freud's blue cigar smoke swirled about me. Backfloating on air. Very restful, very soothing. I felt wonderful, my hysteria had quit me, Freud was a genius, and I loved him.

He stood at the window, nervously peeking out the blinds.

"What is it, Siggy?"

"I have discovered something here in Africa."

"The unconscious of the world?" I said to let him know I had been listening.

"No, death. Death as an impulse in man as strong as the libido."

"Ah," I said, feeling the old uneasiness return.

It began to rain. I opened the blinds and looked out on a Mombasa in ruins. "Universal death," he said.

I went to sleep on the couch and woke, grateful once again that I had not disappeared during the lapse of consciousness.

Freud bit off the end of a fresh cigar.

Night had fallen. Monkeys gibbered on lampposts. A hippo left Mombasa Harbor and lumbered down Queen Victoria Street. Halley's Comet rolled through the darkness, leaving anxiety in its wake. Dread settled over the remains of the town.

"Portents of an unhappy century," said Freud, turning away from the window. "The end of civilization."

In time, the rain beat less and less insistently on the broad back of the hippo. The wind died; the rain finally stopped. But my anxiety that the sun might not rise again remained.

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