Dreaming for Freud Read Online Free Page A

told the doctor. She imagines him saying, “My daughter has a wild imagination. She has been making things up. She must be made to see reason.”
    He is a Jewish doctor, of course, the best kind, and has even been called a miracle worker, her father says, exaggerating, she imagines, as usual, as the carriage stops on the sloping street of the quiet and respectable, if not exactly distinguished, neighborhood, before the solid wooden door with the number 19 Berggasse. Their footsteps echoing, they go along the narrow, dark passage, which leads to the few steps on the right, up to the ground floor office with the sign on the brown door that announces, “Dr. Sigmund Freud.”

III
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THE DOCTOR AND THE RELUCTANT GIRL
    T HE PATIENT IS LATE, HE thinks with annoyance, looking at his watch. He is afraid the father will not manage to convince the spoiled girl to come. She sounds as if she has become quite a handful. When he saw her briefly a couple of years earlier, she was not much older than his eldest girl, his sensible Mathilde, is today. He had proposed treating her then, but she had recovered sufficiently—or so he was told—and refused to return. Now, her father has insisted she do so. But will she actually turn up? Will the doting father convince his cosseted daughter to come?
    They might at least have used the telephone to announce their delay. He has had that necessary apparatus, the telephone, installed in his office for several years.
    He paces uneasily back and forth over the Persian carpets. He looks up at the statue of the two-faced stone Janus he bought recently, which seems to regard him with a superior snarl, and wonders if this new patient might be a mistake, but he tells himself he has little choice. He needs the florins, and the father has them.
    The father has become extremely rich, whereas he, who was such a hardworking and brilliant student, has only a few patients this month, and must worry about money.
    This paucity of patients is a continual source of anxiety. Herr E. has finally left after five years of therapy, and his faithful elderly patient has died, which has cut off a steady source of revenue. It has been a long time since Breuer referred anyone to him. Breuer has been very good to him over the years—they even wrote a book together—and has helped him financially again and again, but the man lacks courage. In the end he had fled, grabbed his hat in a state of panic and perspiration—or so he remembers being told—and run from his neurotic patient when she announced she was bearing his child.
    He is reminded of his father’s story of being accosted in the street by an arrogant Christian who threw his father’s splendid cap into the gutter and told him to get off the sidewalk; he had simply stepped into the road, picked up the cap, and gone on his way. Only Fliess seems to have followed in Hannibal’s father’s footsteps, the father who made his son swear to take revenge on the Romans. Only Fliess has had the courage of his convictions, but perhaps this is at least in part because he has the means.
    He thinks of all the people he is responsible for: his six children,
his worms
, who need new shoes; his wife, who complains about his extravagance; his sister-in-law, Minna, who has come to live with them since her fiancé died of tuberculosis five years ago and who has recently had an intervention; and Marie, their devoted maid.
    Having known the helplessness that comes with poverty, he continues to fear it. His uncle, Josef, he knows, was tried and convicted of selling an enormous number of counterfeit rubles in a desperate attempt to attain wealth. His father, who had turned white after this event, had never recovered completely from the implications of his brother’s imprisonment. He remembers his own years of solitude and struggle, separated from his fiancée and desperately attempting to make a living. He recalls walking the streets of Vienna and staring with longing into the shop