FREUDIAN SLIP
SIGMUND Freud was confident the man he had just watched leave his office was well on the road to… to where? Recovery? No, he had never complained of being ill, mentally or otherwise. To where then? To a life a great achievement, to a vast potential being fulfilled. The great neurologist leaned back in his leather chair, lit a cigar and waited for his client to return.
Twelve sometimes traumatic, often perplexing, always engaging sessions had had a wondrous effect that added to the value of psychoanalysis – or would do so as soon as he was able to write the case up for the scientific journals. He wouldn’t identify his patient, of course. The man had insisted at the outset on total secrecy because patients always did. There was a stigma about matters of the mind and Freud understood and would honour the request. But quite simply the case study would confirm his standing as still the leader in his field.
He would recount how he had been confronted a few short weeks ago with a nervous, depressed, introverted young man who had failed at school and who hated his father and was in love with his mother, an obvious Oedipus complex if ever there was one.
He drew on his cigar in a self-satisfied way, enjoying the richness of the tobacco, and he idly wondered if his oak panelled walls would ever witness another case quite like it. Not in the whole of Vienna, which lay in all its splendour outside his window, nor in world beyond had there been a success that bore comparison.
It was 1920, the world was at peace, the future was exciting, advances in the treatment of the mind astonishing – largely thanks to him, of course. Hadn’t he astounded his fellow professionals with new ways of treating psychopathology?
Freud had explored the man’s set of uncoordinated instinctual desires. He had examined in detail all the parts of psychic apparatus, the critical and moralising roles of his consciousness and how well – or badly – his ego mediated between the two. It had been, Freud thought, like stripping down the engine of an erratic and frustrating motor car and producing a streamline version that purred along and would be simply unstoppable.
His patient had come to him inconsequential – pah! a nothing – and yet would leave a giant. The transformation was extraordinary.
To begin with the man had projected some of his father’s unpleasant traits on to Freud’s own personality,. Transference Freud had named it and it was now an accepted part of the process of psychoanalysis, but in first assessing and then dispensing with the effects of his father’s overbearing ways – while keeping and enhancing the strong desirable paternal characteristics – the exercise had been remarkably successful.
But it was free association that liberated the man’s soul and his spirit had soared. Solid proof, it ever it were needed, that one word or image that spontaneously suggested another from the client was a wonderful technique to investigate the unconscious mind.
It was relaxed and without censorship and truly eye opening, but Freud had gained access to the secret processes of his client’s mind processes. His patient had betrayed violent tendencies but they had been dealt with in transference, and now he was able for the first time to speak for himself and as himself; to expound his own beliefs and views, rather than repeat those of other people. The inhibitions that would have condemned him to a life lacking importance or impact simply fell away and he was free at last to play his part in the world, to be a person of consequence.
So confident had he become he’d been happy to make a minor, yet striking, change to his appearance and did not worry about worry what others might think. But even that wasn’t the point. The point was it had given him identity. Freud couldn’t think yet how he would phrase the phenomenon in his report, but it was as if the man was happy at last in his own skin. Actually, that’s not bad, he thought. He picked up a pencil and quickly wrote: “It is as if he is content with who he is and would soon show the world. Just you wait and see,” and Freud was pleased his phraseology.
In a way the advances they had made together could be summed up right there in that one cosmetic change. It was a move of his latent genius, but it was Freud who had given him the courage to make the decision, as small as it might seem to an outsider. Now he would leave Freud’s care and the world would one day doubtless be grateful. Freud had clients from many nations but it was especially satisfying to help a fellow countryman. He sucked contentedly on the cigar and wondered if the words ‘happy in his own skin’ actually made any sense at all.
Throughout they had maintained a professional doctor-patient relationship, but now he would shake the man’s hand and wish him well. They would separate as friends, if not equals.
If he ever came out of the lavatory that was. Freud mused how his indoor flush toilet was still a novelty in Vienna and his client occasionally took advantage. Ah, here he was now.
Freud got to his feet. His client strode across the room, leaving the door open behind him the sign of a man with urgent things to do and anxious to leave to get started. Good.
He chided Freud: “You ought to be careful Sigmund lest anyone should look at you sucking on that cigar and see some sexual connotations.”
“Sometimes a cigar is simply a good smoke,” he answered, feeling pleased with the retort and thinking he might look to use it again some time. He smiled broadly and held his out across his desk for the other to take.
“May I compliment you,” said Freud, “on that little moustache. It’s individualistic and very you. The world awaits, so go and take your rightful place in it, Adolph.”
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