Dreaming for Freud by Sheila Kohler Page A

control is curtailed to domestic matters. He has managed to preserve certain prerogatives naturally, such as having his family travel second class while he rides in first on the trains, in order to travel in peace and quiet and have a moment for his important work.
    He has tried to talk to Martha about his work, but she gets that anxious, distracted look in her eyes as he speaks and doesn’t seem to hear what he is saying, or she changes the subject, or often finds some pretext to escape, getting up and leaving the room, going on some absurd household errand or even to the bathroom. He has the uncomfortable feeling she is shocked. Is it possible she considers his theories pornographic? Obviously she does not enjoy discussing his work. And even Minna, who tells him she admires it and often accompanies him to the
Kaffehaus
in the evenings, or on his travels, does not always seem able to grasp the importance of what he is saying. How much easier it is to speak with Fliess, who has a completely open mind and is able to consider any and all possibilities.
    But the fräulein and Frau Z. were women she could talk to freely, the girl says.
    “And you feel you could trust them?” he asks, aware of what her response will surely be.
    “Of course,” she admits, “confiding in them did have its disadvantages. What interested the fräulein most, I came to discover, was
love
or what she thought was love. The only reason she was so kind to me, I gradually understood as I got older, and the reason she tried to stir me up against Mother and Frau Z., was because she was attracted to
Father.
When he was present, she was all charm and sweetness, and when he left, she lost interest and dropped me completely like a hot cake. She was only using her intimacy or what I thought was intimacy with me as a way to get closer to Father. Everyone! Everyone is in love with my father! They either want his body or his
money
,” she says, lying back down and relapsing into sullen silence, beating her fists against his beautiful rug.
    “And you think it is his money I want?” he says eventually.
    “Well, in the end, are you not on Father’s side?” she asks.
    “You don’t believe that, as a medical man, a man of science, I have your well-being or, at the very least, a respect for the truth at heart?” he asks, shifting around in his chair. Yet he cannot entirely ignore this young girl’s words.
    He thinks of what she dared to say about the harm the learned men in the medical profession do. His brilliant mentors come to mind, those men who came before him at the university in Vienna and who blazed a trail, great thinkers like Rokitansky, Meynert, and above all von Brücke, who has influenced him perhaps more than anyone else; what does she know of them? Is she unaware of the reputation of the medical school in Vienna and how people flock there from all over the world?
    Still, her comment hit a sore spot. He could not help thinking of poor Emma E. and Fliess’s operation on her nose, which came to him in a dream he used in his book. He recalls Emma E. telling him, her voice heavy with sarcasm, “So
this
is the strong sex,” when he had almost passed out in her presence. A fainter who frequently succumbs to strong emotion, he had had to leave the room at that moment and restore himself with a glass of strong cognac. He can vividly recall that poor woman’s blanched face, her protruding eyes, the clots of blood and the fetid smell, when the surgeon had pulled forth half a meter of gauze that Fliess had left behind in her nose. What overwhelmed him then was the feeling of remorse for having recommended this surgeon to her in the first place. Why had he not realized what was happening?
    When Mathilde had once put a bead up her nose, he had divined the problem quickly enough from the odor. He does not intend to make that mistake again.
    Was the operation entirely necessary? He thinks how the woman had come to him with her vague symptoms of nosebleeds,