Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard Read Free Book Online Page A

Schachtel was thin, well-dressed, delicate-looking, almost nervous. He impressed me as the sort of man who read Schiller, Heine, and Kleist, who listened to Schubert and Mahler. His expression was melancholy and I supposed he had suffered during the war. What was it like, I wondered, to leave your own country for another, where all you met was the unhappiness and confusion of the people who lived there? Suppose when Americans went to Paris or Florence, the waiters, hotel clerks, and taxi drivers told them their dreams, their fears and nameless angers.
    In Dr. Schachtel’s apartment on the Upper West Side, there was just a touch of Bauhaus. His furniture was light, almost fragile, and it occurred to me thatwhen Germans weren’t heavy, they were often fragile. Like Fromm and Horney, he was revisionist, and that was what I wanted, to be revised. I saw myself as a first draft.
    I was not asked to lie on a couch, which disappointed me a little because I had been looking forward to talking like someone lying in bed or in a field of grass. Instead we sat face-to-face, about eight feet apart, an arrangement that had a peculiar affect on me. I couldn’t get away from the feeling that it was not I who was being analyzed but my face, which was huge, gaping.
    Another thing that made me uncomfortable was the fact that Dr. Schachtel avoided meeting my eyes. His eyes would travel all around the room, as if he heard a fly buzzing and was idly trying to locate it. I thought of his eyes as following a line of dots, like the path they are supposed to take in looking at a painting. When he did turn to me, it was an unfocused, generic sort of look, a skimming glance that slid off the surface of my face.
    I supposed he did this for clinical reasons, so as not to distract me, but the lack of contact was just as distracting. It was like playing a game of tag or blindman’s buff. Ordinarily, I would have looked away myself, averting my own gaze from what I was saying, but as soon as I saw him avoiding my eyes, I began to chase his.
    I don’t remember what I talked about in the first hour, because my main concern was not to bore Dr. Schachtel. I was terribly afraid of boring him. I had an unreasonable desire to avoid saying anything he had heard before, which made it almost impossible for meto speak. A successful analysis, I imagined, was one in which you never bored your analyst. In avoiding boredom, you transcended yourself and were cured. I had come there not to free myself of repressions but to develop better ones.
    Dr. Schachtel’s face was composed in a concentrated neutrality, the outer reflection of what Freud called free-floating attention. Yet it seemed to me that his attention floated too freely, that I didn’t sufficiently attract it. Judging by his expression, he was thinking of something else—a poem by Rilke, or a passage by Theodor Lipps on
Einfuhlung
.
    It wasn’t until our second session—and only at the very end of the hour—that I discovered what I really wanted to talk about. I had been twenty minutes late and Dr. Schachtel appeared to be upset by this. I told him that I had left the bookshop and gone home to change. I used to put on a jacket and tie to see him, because my relation to my personality was still formal at that time. What I didn’t tell him was that Sheri had been in the apartment and she had deliberately decoyed me into bed. She knew I would end by talking about her and she wanted to introduce herself in her own way.
    I felt shy about telling him the real reason I was late—it was too recent, still warm—so I began talking about the whirring or grinding sound in my head. I used the word
stridulation
, and as Dr. Schachtel was not familiar with it, I treated him to a dissertation on galvanic sounds.
    He said nothing, and his eyes roamed the room. He was bored, I thought. He knew all about me without being told—I was as easy to read as a Rorschach blot. I felt I had to do something to redeem myself, but