Dreaming for Freud by Sheila Kohler Read Free Book Online

herself. Her life does not seem a continuous stream, but rather a series of separate moments, photographs in someone else’s album. It is quite different from the suspenseful story, one thing causing the other to happen, which she has invented, writing about the engineering student she likes in her imaginary diary she now keeps hidden in a locked drawer.
    So she remains silent, staring at the oval portrait on the wall of a bearded man, wondering who he is.
    Even the doctor himself, whom she remembers from her brief visit two years ago, seems different, as if
he
were someone else. She remembers him as somewhat thinner, smaller, older, and wearing glasses. Instead, when she entered the room this afternoon, she thought he looked slightly plump, his nose shiny. He seemed rather cheerful, greeting her heartily, a man pleased with himself, or pleased with her appearance in his consulting rooms, an optimistic, perhaps even deluded man, telling her he can cure her horrid pains with words. He seems to her a typical Jewish petit bourgeois, a shopkeeper or even a dressed-up peddler, a very ordinary potentate. How could such a boring, middle-aged man, with his silly pinstriped pants and his mournful bow tie and the hand-stitching on his corduroy jacket, understand the strange story she has to tell? She hardly believes it herself. And in the end does this story have anything to do with her body, her aching limbs, her breath? How can talking make pain go away? Is the body so intimately connected with the mind? She does remember how, when she left her home for some days, she had become terribly constipated, unable to use the
klo.
    “Start away!” the doctor says, eager to earn his fee, she imagines. Her father is doubtless paying him well.
    “When I was very young,” she tells him, speaking clearly, her voice coming to her almost as though it belongs to someone else, telling someone else’s story, “I felt much more extraordinary because everyone told me how clever I was, how quickly and early I had learned to read and write. Everyone said I was such a precocious child. I learned languages and the piano fast. I loved music—I still do. I was even good with numbers and liked to play number games.”
    “Numbers?” he says.
    Her throat tickles. She must not start coughing, because once she starts, she cannot stop. She tries to relax as he told her to do but she feels her throat contract. She swallows. Lying on his couch for the second time, her stomach cramps, and she is afraid she might have to go to the
klo
. It is a perpetual worry in here. The first time she had to get up and go in the middle of the session, but when she got there nothing happened.
    She remembers how another dreadful doctor had once made her take off her underwear and lie flat on her stomach when she was suffering from severe constipation. He had covered her back with only a towel and she had had to lie there disgracefully with her bottom stuck up in the air. Then he had reached up and put an electrode directly into what she thinks of as her most private part. With the force of the electricity there had been immediate and explosive results. She will never forget the shame of it, the awful, humiliating shame. She had wanted to die.
    Now, recalling it, she has a pain down her right leg, and she feels nauseated. The office smells of cigar smoke, she realizes, which is what is making her feel nauseated, though the window is open on this sunny fall afternoon.
    She has always hated the smell of smoke and has never allowed anyone, even her father, to smoke in her own room. This doctor, like her brother and her father and his friend Herr Z., she divines, must be a smoker. She wonders if the doctor smokes the same kind of cigars as her father, which, he has told her, old Emperor Franz Joseph smokes, too. The smell is the same.
    “Yes? You were a precocious child?” he says.
    “I was a wild girl in those early days, free and pleased with myself,” she tells him, smiling