PART I   /  The Aesthetics of I

Once upon a time, perhaps during the summer of 1900, Freud chanced to meet a young man. They chatted, and the young man began eloquently to protest his position as a Jew in Vienna at the beginning of this century. He declared his regrets that Austria had passed from a period of relative liberalism to one of reaction. Now Jews (like himself and Freud) were deprived of full freedom to develop their talents.

He waxed stronger and stronger on the theme, finally ending his speech with a line from Virgil's Aeneid in which Dido, queen of Carthage, expresses her rage at her lover Aeneas who has abandoned her. She leaves her revenge, she says, to the Carthaginians who will follow: Exoriare-- But then the young man could not remember the word that came next. He put together a semblance of the line by changing word order: Exoriare ex nostris ossibus ultor. Let an avenger arise from my bones! But at last, in some embarrassment he asked Freud for help. Freud supplied the missing word: Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor. Let someone (aliquis) arise as an avenger from my bones (1901b, 6:8-14).

At this point, the young man remembered some of Freud's psychological work and his claim that one never forgets something without a reason.

Young Man:	I should be very curious to learn how I came to forget the indefinite pronoun aliquis in this case.
Freud:	That should not take us long. I must only ask you to tell me, candidly and uncritically, whatever comes into your mind if you direct your attention to the forgotten word without any definite aim.
Young Man:	Good. There springs to my mind, then, the ridiculous notion of dividing up the word like this: a and liquis.
Freud:	What does that mean?
Young Man:	I don't know.
Freud:	And what occurs to you next?
Young Man:	What comes next is Reliquien [relics], liquefying, fluidity, fluid. Have you discovered anything so far?
Freud:	No. Not by any means yet. But go on.
Young Man:	I am thinking [and he laughed scornfully] of Simon of Trent, whose relics I saw two years ago in a church at Trent. I am thinking of the[3] accusation of ritual blood-sacrifice which is being brought against the Jews again just now, and of Kleinpaul's book in which he regards all these supposed victims as incarnations, one might say new editions, of the Saviour.
Freud:	The notion is not entirely unrelated to the subject we were discussing before the Latin word slipped your memory.
Young Man:	True. My next thoughts are about an article that I read lately in an Italian newspaper Its title, I think, was "What St. Augustine Says about Women." What do you make of that?
Freud:	I am waiting.
Young Man:	And now comes something that is quite clearly unconnected with our subject.
Freud:	Please refrain from any criticism and--
Young Man:	Yes, I understand. I am thinking of a fine old gentleman I met on my travels last week. He was a real original, with all the appearance of a huge bird of prey. His name was Benedict, if it's of interest to you.
Freud:	Anyhow, here are a row of saints and Fathers of the Church: St. Simon, St. Augustine, St. Benedict. There was, I think, a Church Father called Origen. Moreover, three of these names are also first names, like Paul in Kleinpaul.
Young Man:	Now it's St. Januarius and the miracle of his blood that comes into my mind--my thoughts seem to be running on mechanically.
Freud:	Just a moment: St. Januarius and St. Augustine both have to do with the calendar. But won't you remind me about the miracle of his blood?
Young Man:	Surely you must have heard of that? They keep the blood of St. Januarius in a phial inside a church at Naples, and on a particular holy day it miraculously liquefies. The people attach great importance to this miracle and get very excited if it's delayed--as happened once at a time when the French were occupying the town. So the general in command--or have I got it wrong? was it Garibaldi?--took the reverend gentleman aside and gave him to understand, with an unmistakable gesture toward the soldiers posted outside, that he hoped the miracle would take place very soon. And in fact it did take place . . . [And he broke off.]
Freud:	Well, go on. Why do you pause?
Young Man:	Well, something has come into my mind . . . but it's too intimate to pass on . . . Besides, I don't see any connection or any necessity for saying it.
Freud:	You can leave the connection to me. Of course I can't force you to talk about something that you find distasteful; but then you mustn't insist on learning from me how you came to forget your aliquis.
Young Man:	Really? Is that what you think? Well then, I've suddenly thought of a lady from whom I might easily hear a piece of news that would be very awkward for both of us.[4]
Freud:	That her periods have stopped?
Young Man:	How could you guess that?
Freud:	That's not difficult any longer; you've prepared the way sufficiently. Think of the calendar saints, the blood that starts to flow on a particular day, the disturbance when the event fails to take place, the open threats that the miracle must be vouchsafed or else. . . . In fact, you've made use of the miracle of St. Januarius to manufacture a brilliant allusion to women's periods.
Young Man:	Without being aware of it. And you really mean to say that it was this anxious expectation that made me unable to produce an unimportant word like aliquis?
Freud:	It seems to me undeniable. You need only recall the division you made into a-liquis and your associations: relics, liquefying, fluid. St. Simon was sacrificed as a child--shall I go on and show how he comes in? You were led onto him by the subject of relics.
Young Man:	No, I'd much rather you didn't. I hope you don't take these thoughts of mine too seriously, if indeed I really had them. In return I will confess to you that the lady is Italian and that I went to Naples with her. But mayn't all this just be a matter of chance?

That last, gently evasive question expresses the doubts and confusions that have dogged psychoanalysis for the eight decades of its existence.

Against those doubts, however, stands the striking convergence that Freud's explanation represents, two convergences, really. First, the young man himself became aware that something was on his mind of which he had been unaware. An unconscious idea became conscious. Second, the unconscious idea served as a centering theme around which Freud could fit the other themes of the young man's associations.

That is, his associations went: liquids--relics--Saint Simon--Jews vs. Savior(s)--Italian--St. Augustine--women--an "original"--(St.) Benedict--St. Januarius--blood flowing on a certain day. We could group these into two large themes: first, liquids, liquefying, flowing; second, relics and a series of saints. These two lines relate in form to the Latin syllable liqu--and in content this way:

[5] Fluid, blood, saints, calendar, and months converge toward a centering theme of monthly bleeding. As Freud states his final interpretation:

The speaker had been deploring the fact that the present generation of his people was deprived of its full rights; a new generation, he prophesied like Dido, would inflict vengeance on the oppressors. He had in this way expressed his wish for descendants. At this moment a contrary thought intruded. "Have you really so keen a wish for descendants? That is not so. How embarrassed you would be if you were to get news just now that you were to expect descendants from the quarter you know of. No: no descendants--however much we need them for vengeance."

Freud began in the 1890s by taking seriously this kind of unifying interpretation of meaning in people's symbolic actions. At the same time, he found he could enlarge and strengthen that kind of analysis by free association, nicely defined in his first words to the young man. Each of these techniques sustains and confirms (or disconfirms) the other. Association provides evidence for interpretation to unify. That unity then becomes a source of further associations, as the young man recalls a trip to Naples with his Italian lady friend. Together, association and interpretation make up the essence of psychoanalytic insight.

In form, Freud's proof rests on probability. How many elements in the young man's talk could he bring together and how directly and easily could he connect them?

At the same time, however, the proof of his interpretation simply happened. Indeed, there was no need for a proof. The young man's sudden perception demonstrated the truth of what Freud had arrived at by reasoning alone.

In patient-therapist encounters whether face to face or across the analytic couch, I think psychoanalytic explanations usually draw on both these kinds of proof. In the first, the interpreter or explainer finds a way to create a verbal space between himself and the "other" in which they can each add and share words until they both feel convergence. "How could you guess that?" asked the young man. The second proof is less interpersonal and more formal. Eighty years after the event, I, a literary critic, can supply other themes for Freud's explanation to bring together: that the young man knew he was "no saint," that Origen castrated himself (thereby ending any possibility of descendants), or that "a-liquis" could be read as "without liquid."[6]

Indeed, we can see Freud himself trying such hypotheses with the young man, essaying a theme of saints as first names, the notion of Origen-origin, and "Paul in Kleinpaul" (literally, little Paul). He was evidently reaching for a theme having to do with "first" or birth or children (who are addressed by their first names), but he got little confirmation from the young man--the first sort of proof--and dropped it.

Characteristically, a psychoanalytic explainer draws on both the creation of a shared verbal space through free association and a thematic analysis of that space. The sharing provides the basis for cure, although one can use the technique to explain other, more casual events like this young man's forgetting. The second move, thematic analysis, links psychoanalytic thought to many other disciplines. It is, however, quintessential to psychoanalysis. It deserves fuller treatment and its proper name:

Holistic Analysis

If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions . . . [may] yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur! (1896c, 3:192; see also 1937d, 23:259-60)

We reason this way in everyday life, for example, when figuring out the function of an unknown device. Once I know that this conglomeration of clamp, crank, spikes, and blade is an apple-peeler, I understand that the clamp holds the device to a table, the spikes hold the apple, the crank turns it, and the blade shaves the skin off. In short, once I have grasped the central[7] theme of peeling apples, I can use the theme to relate a host of otherwise baffling details.

We toy with this same kind of reasoning in detective stories. Listen to the immortal Sherlock Holmes at the end of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band."

"Well, there is . . . a curious coincidence of dates. A ventilator is made, a cord is hung, and a lady who sleeps in the bed dies. Does that not strike you?"
"I cannot as yet see any connection."
"Did you observe anything very peculiar about that bed?"
"No."
"It was clamped to the floor. Did you ever see a bed fastened like that before?"
"I cannot say that I have."
"The lady could not move her bed. It must always be in the same relative position to the ventilator and to the rope--for so we may call it, since it was clearly never meant for a bell-pull."
"Holmes," I cried, "I seem to see dimly what you are hitting at."

Holmes also demonstrates--elegantly--two criteria for judging the validity of a holistic explanation: one quantitative, coverage, the other qualitative, directness. At first, Holmes mistakenly entertained a less viperous explanation:

"When you combine the idea of whistles at night, the presence of a band of gypsies who are on intimate terms with this old doctor, the fact that we have every reason to believe that the doctor has an interest in preventing his stepdaughter's marriage, the dying allusion to a band, and finally, the fact that [the surviving sister] heard a metallic clang, which might have been caused by one of those metal bars which secured the shutters falling back into their place, I think there is good ground to think that the mystery may be cleared along those lines."[8]

A good holistic explanation, like Holmes's second, covers the relevant data. One can compare two interpretations quantitatively in the number of details they relate and qualitatively by the relative importance of those details (which in part depends on the quantitative effectiveness of the explanation). Holmes's swamp adder explanation accounts for a great many more details than the gypsy hypothesis. Indeed, the second explanation renders the presence of gypsies relatively unimportant compared to more telling details like the ventilator linking the two rooms, the dummy bell-rope, or the heel-marked chair on which the villain stood. Having arrived at the ingenious idea of the swamp adder, Holmes comments on the earlier hypothesis: "'I had,' said he, 'come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.'"

Second, a holistic explanation that neatly and directly relates the details it covers satisfies us more than one that establishes only tenuous or devious connections. Holmes's gypsy explanation simply says "the band" did something. The clang was caused by some movement of the shutters. With the second explanation, however, the phrasing "the band" is explained very exactly by the appearance of the snake, and "The metallic clang heard by Miss Stoner was obviously caused by her father hastily closing the door of his safe upon its terrible occupant."

Holmes demonstrates other characteristics of holistic reasoning, notably the need to move away from categories and toward particulars. For example, the category "poisonous snake" does not account for as many details as the more particular "swamp adder" (poisonous plus speckled). The more general the category, the less it explains, like the biblical conclusion Holmes draws: "Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent."

Because of this need for particulars, holistic research does not proceed by counting or by the repetition of experiments but by gathering more data. Holmes has to visit the scene of the death, where, having surmised that the ventilator ran from the victim's room to the doctor's, he can now see its size and position. He can find an iron safe to explain the clang. He can discover that the victim's bed is clamped to the floor. Research leads to more data that require a stronger explanation, one that leaves no loose ends in the new, larger body of material.

To put one's own mind actually to work in this kind of interpretation, the best exercise I can think of is a rather trivial one, a children's game that was[9] taught to me under the name of Puzzling Polly. The one who knows the game starts listing things that Puzzling Polly does or doesn't like. As the other players catch on to Puzzling Polly's secret (her identity theme, really), they join in, until the secret finally has to be explained to the last players, who may be much puzzled and annoyed by this time. For example, I might start by saying, "Puzzling Polly likes puppies but not dogs." "Puzzling Polly doesn't like flowers, but she does like blossoms." "Puzzling Polly likes trees but not shrubs." If you have caught on, you might chime in, "Puzzling Polly likes the funnies, but not the comics." "Puzzling Polly likes summer and fall but she doesn't like winter or spring."

If you have not recognized the theme behind her likes and dislikes, you are probably trying out hypotheses. Polly likes small things better than large--puppies not dogs, blossoms not flowers--but then the hypothesis fails with trees not shrubs. You might hypothesize that the pattern runs: like, dislike, dislike, like, like, dislike, dislike, like, like, and so on, based on the way the sentences are phrased. This works for the sentences I gave, but it fails on the second sentence after someone else joined in, fall but not winter. Then, too, that hypothesis doesn't seem to deal with the constancy or particularity of Polly's likes and dislikes. One could just as well say, if it were the third sentence, "Puzzling Polly likes shrubs but not trees." But, in fact, Polly does like trees and not shrubs.

For a pattern explanation, we require that the theme explain every last one of the details and that it be itself specific or precise enough to account for the specificity of the details it must explain. Most of all, we ask that we recognize that precision by a kind of "Aha!" when the answer comes, as when you realize for the first time (and this is very much harder to do when the game is spoken, not printed) that Puzzling Polly likes things with doubled letters in them, or should I say twinned? "Puzzling Polly likes summer but not spring." "Puzzling Polly likes cartoons and newsreels but not feature films." And Puzzling Polly is, of course, narcissistic.

The game is trivial but it offers one a chance to experience in one's own mind three basic characteristics of holistic thinking toward a centering theme. First, the theme works by convergence into classes, rather than by sequences of cause-effect or if-then. That is, it is not correct to relate the data by saying, "Because Polly likes blossoms, she doesn't like flowers." Or, "Polly's liking puppies implies that she doesn't like dogs." Rather, one sorts the data into themes or polarities: liking and not liking, words having similar meanings but with or without doubled letters. In the same way, we can focus the details of the young man's association to aliquis into a few subthemes which can then finally be stated as one central theme, (not) having descendants.[10]

Second, such a theme states a law of a special kind: one can say whether particular outcomes obey it or not, but one cannot predict any one outcome. The law of gravity says that if I drop this typewriter then it will certainly fall at a constant rate of acceleration. We can be absolutely sure of that. A central theme, however, is more like a generative rule (as in transformational grammar). If you begin a sentence, "In the ________ . . .," I can be fairly sure a noun or a noun preceded by an adjective is coming next, but I cannot say exactly what the noun or adjective will be. If you begin, "Puzzling Polly likes cellars but not ________ . . . , " I can be quite sure the last noun will not contain a doubled letter, and I can be fairly sure it will have a class relationship to "cellars," but I cannot predict the precise word. "Basements?" "Kitchens?" In other words, we are dealing with a different kind of determinacy from that for physical objects like typewriters--but a determinacy nevertheless. In the same way, we can understand after the fact the young man's forgetting the line from Virgil. It is lawful, but we could not have predicted it ahead of time.

Third (and key), the theme has to come from and interrelate all the details it is supposed to account for. They may be details like the young man's associations to months, saints, and blood or the details of the murder of Miss Stoner, but the theme must deal with all the details. A statistical confirmation of part of the data may be adequate for an experiment in the social sciences, but there must be no loose ends in a holistic explanation.

"No loose ends" is an aesthetic criterion and this thinking-toward-wholeness has long dominated thought in the arts and humanities. The literary theorist René Wellek says this method is "the main source of knowledge in all humanistic branches of learning." The interpreter "proceeds from attention to a detail to an anticipation of the whole and back again to an interpretation of a detail" (1960). Holistic analysis or "pattern explanation" (as it is sometimes called in the social sciences) corresponds exactly to the everyday method of the literary critic, that is,

first observing details about the superficial appearance of the particular work . . . then, grouping these details and seeking to integrate them into a creative principle . . . and, finally, making the return trip to all the other groups of observations in order to find whether the "inward form" one has tentatively constructed gives an account of the whole (Spitzer, 1948, p. 19)

The analyst of a poem or a fiction (or a painting or a symphony) usually proceeds as the archaeologist, the anthropologist, the clinical psychologist, or Sherlock Holmes does. One notices patterns of recurrence or absence. One articulates them as different themes, checking them against the evidence and fitting them together to form a model of the whole as one or more very general themes (themes of themes) at the center and a surface of lesser subthemes and variations. As a literary critic I would require of such large themes that I be able to include within them every detail of the text I am analyzing and, if there be one or more central themes of themes, that I be able to subsume all the lesser themes under them.

I should be able to trace any one detail, even the tiniest, up one or another ladder of abstractions to the very center of the thematic structure. Conversely, a central theme should serve as a kernel statement each one of whose terms can be expanded, transformed, and particularized back down the ladders until I arrive at the details of the text I am working with.

Evidently, if we credit Freud, we can use the same strategy to understand a patient. Freud spoke of the central fantasy of his patient the Wolf Man, and

how, after a certain phase of the treatment, everything seemed to converge upon it, and how later, in the synthesis, the most various and remarkable results radiated out from it; how not only the large problems but the smallest peculiarities in the history of the case were cleared up by this single assumption (1918b, 17:52).

The importance of holistic reasoning to the humanities does not, of course, imply that it is "unscientific." On the contrary, major scientific achievements of the last two centuries draw heavily on holistic analysis. Consider evolution. To give an explanation of the decline and fall of a certain species of sparrow (as Darwin did), one interrelates a host of facts about weather, grains, hawks, lice, squirrels, and the sparrow's anatomy or its eating and mating habits. The explanation will be a holistic one.

This kind of problem does not lend itself to the usual kind of laboratory experimentation. In holistic thinking, testing takes the form of getting new data to be converged around a given hypothesis or theme. Thus, astronomers study pictures from Mars or radio waves from a galaxy to acquire a variety of disparate facts. Then they reason like the evolutionist (or Sherlock Holmes) to arrive at a centering idea that will make them all fit.

It is only in the earliest forms of modern science, kinetics and statics, the physics of the eighteenth century and of freshman year in a modern university, that events are reversible and hence predictable. That kind of science can rely almost entirely on if-then, covering laws, obscuring[12] the role of holistic reasoning. At bottom, what differentiates holistic method and the covering laws of these kinds of science, however, is their treatment of time. In a given happening, the fall of a sparrow, say, if-then reasoning looks at some events as prior to others, whereas a holistic reasoner would look at all the separate events as though they coexisted. Hence in holistic reasoning one uses more data as confirmation, while in if-then reasoning "more data" takes the specific form of a future event--prediction. The sparrow will fall at so-and-so-many inches per second.

Otherwise, however, even in statics and kinetics it is possible to regard Newton's principles or Hooke's law as "centering themes" that interrelate such disparate events as the orbiting of Jupiter and the fall of an apple, the flex of a bridge and the crack of a tooth. The confirmations of science look different from those of the holistic interpretation, but are they? Don't both systems, finally, appeal to the facts (or what the systems define as the facts)? It should be no surprise, then, that one can use, at least in part, the same reasoning to interpret a dream as to probe the origins of a galaxy. In the natural sciences, holistic and if-then reasoning overlap and work together.

In the social sciences, the situation is more problematic. In his fine study Patterns of Discovery in the Social Sciences (1971), Paul Diesing distinguishes four methods of exploration in common use: the formal analysis characteristic of economics or linguistics; survey methods as used in sociology; experiments, as in academic psychology; and the case-study, participant-observer method, pattern explanation, or holistic analysis used in anthropology, history, and clinical settings like psychoanalysis. Each of these four methods has different criteria for validity, confirmation, and generalization. Each is differently useful. Errors arise from confusing them or insisting that one alone can claim to be scientific--an issue I shall return to in the last part of this book.

One can think of holistic analysis, then, as the hermeneutic circle of the humanities or the pattern explanation of the social sciences or the holistic analysis of the hard sciences. However we think of it, this kind of interpretation by means of details converging into themes and themes into one centering theme plays a dominant role in psychoanalytic thinking from the very beginning, as such writers as W. W. Meissner (1966, 1971), Michael Sherwood (1969), and Erik Erikson (1958b, p. 72) have shown.

Consider, for example, Freud's analysis of the brief dream he used as the "specimen" for his short book "On Dreams."

The table d'hôte dream

Company at table or table d'hôte . . . spinach was being eaten . . . Frau E. L. was sitting beside me; she was turning her whole attention to me and laid her hand on my knee in an intimate manner. I removed her[13] hand unresponsively. She then said: "But you've always had such beautiful eyes." . . . I then had an indistinct picture of two eyes, as though it were a drawing or like the outline of a pair of spectacles . . . ' (1901a, 5:636-40, 648-50, 655:nd57, and 671-73, see also 1901b, 6:120, 136.)

Frau E. L., Freud drily comments, was not a friend, and the dream as a whole seemed without emotion, disconnected, unintelligible. To discover its meaning, Freud began to free associate, first dividing the dream into its separate elements, then associating to each separately.

Company at table or table d'hôte (Freud seems to mean a meal to be divided among a group, all paying the same fixed price and helping themselves from the same serving dishes). On the day before, Freud recalled, a friend had driven him home in a cab and the friend paid for it. He had joked that he liked a cab with a meter--it gives you something to watch. Freud continued the joke: "A cab with a taximeter always reminds me of a table d'hôte. It makes me avaricious and selfish, because it keeps on reminding me of what I owe. My debt seems to be growing too fast, and I'm afraid of getting the worst of the bargain; and in just the same way at a table d'hôte I can't avoid feeling in a comic way that I'm getting too little, and must keep an eye on my own interests." He had gone on to quote one of the songs of the harpist in Wilhelm Meister:

Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden (I, xiii).

Freud associated something else to this first element of the dream. He and his wife had been sitting at a table d'hôte at a resort, and she was paying more attention to a gentleman of distinguished name across the table than to Freud. Further, Freud had reasons for not renewing his acquaintance with this man. He became irritated, impatient, and finally asked her to concern herself more with him than with these strangers. "This was again as though I were getting the worst of the bargain at the table d'hôte." Freud erased the disagreeable experience and expressed his wish that his wife would turn her whole attention to him by dreaming a situation exactly opposite to what had in fact occurred.

In fact, he had reproduced an episode during their courtship: after a particularly pressing loveletter Martha had responded by putting her hand[14] on his "under the table," and he then recalled that that phrase was also represented in the dream. However, "the intimate laying of a hand on my knee belonged to a quite different context"--about which he is discreetly silent.

It is clear, nevertheless, that he had cast Frau E. L. in the role he wanted his wife to play. Associating to her, he remembered that he had once been in debt to her father, and at this point Freud that realized his associations were bringing out a theme not directly visible in the dream itself--money and debts.

In connection with Frau E. L.'s statement that he had beautiful eyes, he associated the phrase, "Do you suppose I"m going to do this or that for the sake of your beaux yeux?"--just because you're so charming? But she had said he had beautiful eyes. In the dream, that must have meant, "People have always done everything for you for love; you have always had everything without paying for it." Again, this was a reversal, Freud felt. "I had never had anything free of cost"--except that his friend had taken him home in a cab "without my paying for it."

Further, he remembered, on the evening of the cab ride he had felt in debt to their host--an eye surgeon. Freud had given him one present, an occhiale, an antique bowl with eyes painted round it, but he had let slip a more recent opportunity of repaying him. That night, Freud had inquired after a woman he had referred to the oculist for spectacles.

Finally, Freud asked himself "why spinach, of all things, was being served in the dream." Notice the form of his question. He assumes an aesthetic unity for the dream. Everything is there for a common expressive purpose.

What came to mind was the Freuds' family dinner table: precisely the son who deserved to be admired for his beautiful eyes refused his spinach. (Another reversal: as a child, Freud, too, had disliked spinach, but it had become one of his favorite foods.) Martha urged the boy "just to taste [kosten] a bit of it." (Kosten can mean 'to taste' or 'to cost' or 'costs.') The word, notes Freud, thus "fits into the 'table d'hôte' circle of ideas." It could be represented by the spinach. Martha had said, in the way of most mothers, "You should be glad to have spinach. There are children who would be only too pleased with spinach!" Freud now recalled Goethe's words as though they were addressed to parents: "You lead us forth into life, / You make the poor wretch guilty."

At this point, Freud stopped his associations to the dream. He had gone through one "circle of ideas" after another, each leading by association to the others until he had arrived at "certain central ideas" (I would call them themes): "the contrast between 'selfish' and 'unselfish,' and the elements 'being in debt' and 'without paying for it.'" "I might draw closer together the threads in the material revealed by the analysis, and I might then show[15] that they converge upon a single nodal point, but considerations of a personal . . . nature prevent my doing so in public" (5:640).

In later comments on the dream, Freud introduced another element. He had recently had to come up with 300 kronen (about $200 in 1984) to help out a relative who was ill, with whom he had had several cabdrives and of whom he was quite fond. Nevertheless, he admitted, "I cannot escape the conclusion that I regret having made that expenditure." Although he felt no conscious regret, he had been passing through a thin time financially. "No wonder," said the dream-thoughts, "if this person were to feel grateful to me: love of that sort would not be 'free of cost.' Love that is free of cost, however, stood in the forefront of the dream thoughts"--another reversal (5:672, 656-57).

Freud's candor and fullness of association make it possible to set out the four themes in relation to a single nodal center: as he phrases it, "a wish for once to enjoy love, love which 'costs nothing.'" That unitary idea comprises two polarities:

being in debt;       (schuldig, guilty)	without paying for it
Frau E. L.'s father harpist's song table d'hôte spinach (kosten) child to parent eye doctor eye bowl the grateful relative	the touch of the hand beaux yeux the free cabdrive "love that is free of cost"
selfish	unselfish
cabdrive with meter table d'hôte: I'm getting too little my wife should concern herself with me, not strangers keep an eye on my interests I regret having made that expenditure	friend paid for cab loving fiancée during courtship parent to child "love that is free of cost"

The themes are related to one another and to what Freud calls the "center" by a fundamental reversal: "Not until I have recognised this impulse [that I regret having made that expenditure] does my wish in the dream for the love which would call for no expenditure acquire a meaning."

As the role of money in this interpretation might suggest, holistic analysis can apply to any event that can be translated into any kind of symbols. Take, for example, a seemingly random[16] number:

426718

The patient was the youngest child in a large family, and at an early age he had lost his greatly admired father. While he was in a particularly cheerful mood the number 426718 came to his mind, and he asked himself: "What ideas occur to me in that connection? First of all, a joke I have heard: 'When a doctor treats a cold it lasts for 42 days; when it is not treated, it lasts 6 weeks.'" This corresponds to the first figures in the number (42 = 6 x 7). Then the patient was silent. Freud intervened to point out that the six-figure number he had chosen contained all the first digits except for 3 and 5. The patient was immediately able to continue the interpretation. "There are 7 of us brothers and sisters, and I am the youngest. In the order of our age, 3 corresponds to my sister A., and 5 to my brother L.; they were my two enemies. As a child I used to pray to God every night for him to remove these two tormenting spirits from life. It seems to me now that in this choice of numbers I was myself fulfilling this wish; 3 and 5, the wicked brother and the hated sister, are passed over."

Freud then asked, "If the number represents the order of your brothers and sisters, what does the 8 at the end mean? There were only 7 of you after all."

"I have often thought," replied the patient, "that if my father had lived longer I should not have remained the youngest child. If there had been 1 more we should have been 8 and I should have a younger child after me to whom I should have played the elder brother."

The patient's associations had explained the whole number, but Freud still wanted to establish the connection between the first part of the interpretation and the second. He found it in the necessary precondition of the last figures: "if my father had lived longer." "42;me6;mt7" symbolized the patient's derision and anger at the doctors who had not been able to help his father. Therefore it expressed his wish for his father to go on living.

The whole number, 426718, thus worked out the fulfillment of his two infantile wishes about his family, that the brother and sister he disliked should die and that the baby should be born after him. He expressed his wish in the shortest form: "If only those two had died instead of my beloved father." The numbers, including one after 7, were all there, except for 3 and 5.

The themes that interrelate the numbers form polar opposites:

42 days of doctoring all 7 sibs, except--     a loving father and 1 more child

6 weeks of no doctoring numbers 3 and 5 the missing 8th child

[17]
The terms on the left represent various forms of presence, those on the right, absence, but my abstract words "presence" and "absence" have for the patient the more concrete meaning of living a longer or shorter time, finally, of living, of not having ever lived, or of dying. The theme of the numbers, so to speak, is: I wish the loved ones had lived and the bad ones had not.

For this patient, for the young man who forgot aliquis, and for the dreaming Freud, the relations among the themes and numbers and words are established by these individuals, and they have highly individual meanings. Like an electrical engineer examining signals or a literary critic interpreting a text, I might arrive at an extraordinarily coherent holistic interrelation of symbols, but the usual psychoanalytic interpretation draws on an additional source of persuasiveness, the personal witness of the person whose symbols are being interpreted, the interpretee.

The symbols being interpreted form a verbal space which both interpreter and interpretee enter. The act of interpretation makes it possible for both of them to own the symbols between them, but differently, the interpreter by thinking, the interpretee by his actual experience. These two different ways to experience symbols can come together. If I associate to and interpret my own dream (as in the psychoanalytic setting), I explicitly fuse the active, intellectual effort of understanding with the more passive, emotional creation of the symbols I seek to understand. If interpreter and interpretee are one person, the act of interpreting makes it possible for that one person explicitly to join two intellectual stances that in disciplines like electrical engineering or literary criticism we believe we keep separate.

Nowhere is this shared symbolic space more visible than in the "squiggle" technique developed by D.W. Winnicott for the analysis of children. Consider

Iiro

Winnicott had been invited to present a case to the staff of a children's hospital in Finland. So as to discuss someone the staff knew, he interviewed (through an interpreter) Iiro, a nine-year-old boy who was in the hospital not for psychiatry but for hand surgery. He had been born with his fingers joined together and unseparated toes (syndactyly).

Winnicott asked the boy to take turns with him in "the squiggle game." One of them would shut his eyes and scribble with a pencil on a piece of drawing paper. Then the other would take the pencil and turn it into something, saying what it had become. In effect, the drawings elicit free associations from the child.[18]

Winnicott went first, and Iiro quickly said, "It's a duck's foot." Winnicott realized that Iiro wanted to talk about his own webbed hands, and he offered the boy a second squiggle, even more explicit. Iiro in turn drew his own version of a duck's foot. Winnicott concluded that "we were firmly entrenched on the subject of webbed feet."

Then, given Winnicott's next, open squiggle, Iiro drew a line that closed it off and said it was a duck swimming in a lake. Finland being a land of lakes, Iiro being like all Finnish boys involved in swimming and boating, Winnicott concluded that Iiro was expressing a positive feeling about ducks and swimming and lakes, hence a positive feeling about his own webbed hands.

Iiro turned his own next squiggle into a horn, and began to talk about music, the way his little brother played the cornet. "I can play the piano a little," he said. Iiro said he was fond of music and would like to play the flute--a manifest impossibility. Winnicott then made his first reference to the material as it related to Iiro's hands. Knowing that Iiro was a healthy, happy boy with a sense of humor, Winnicott remarked that it would be difficult for a duck to play the flute. Iiro was amused.

After some intervening squiggles, Winnicott turned one of Iiro's into a swan, asking Iiro if he could swim. " Yes," he said, warmly. Winnicott's next squiggle Iiro said was a shoe. He said it did not need anything done to it. Winnicott's made his squiggle half-consciously into a kind of hand. Iiro turned it into a flower. From this sequence Winnicott inferred that Iiro was unwilling to look at his own hands.

Iiro, however, did a more deliberate drawing that looked like a drawing of a deformed hand. When Winnicott asked him what he was thinking of, he said, "It just happened," and he seemed to have surprised himself.

Winnicott wanted to let things rest a bit and asked about dreams. Iiro said, "I sleep with my eyes closed so I don't see anything." His dreams, he said, were "mostly nice." "I have not had a nasty dream for a long time." I sense, from Winnicott's presentation, that Iiro was saying he could look away from the unpleasant reality of his hands. In technical terms, he was able to deny or disavow them.

Iiro's next drawing put an arc around an angle like the angle between the two prominent fingers of his left hand, which was a few inches away on the table. Winnicott commented, "It is like your left hand, isn't it!" and Iiro replied, "Oh yes, a bit." Winnicott felt that Iiro had become, perhaps for the first time in his life, objective about his hands. He said that he had had a lot of operations and would have more and that his feet were the same way (hence the shoe in his earlier drawing). Winnicott commented, "It is rather like the duck, isn't it!"

At this point, Winnicott made something of an interpretation: "The surgeons are trying to alter what you were like when you were born." Iiro[19] talked about his hope to play the flute and about future operations. When he grew up, he said, he wanted to be like his father, a contractor, or perhaps the man who taught handicrafts at school. When Winnicott asked him if it ever made him cross to be operated on, he brushed the idea aside. "I am never cross." "I choose to be operated on." "It is better for work to have two fingers than it was when I had four all joined together." Winnicott felt that Iiro was both refusing to acknowledge his problem and reaching out toward the therapist, trying to put his problem into words.

Returning to the squiggle game, Iiro turned Winnicott's scribble into the hilt of a sword, and then provided his own drawing, an eel (although Winnicott took it to be the sword for the hilt). Playing with the idea of an eel, Winnicott asked, "Shall we put it back in the lake or cook it and eat it?" to which Iiro replied, "We will let it go back and swim in the lake because it is so small."

Winnicott concluded that Iiro had identified himself with the eel, in a sort of prebirth imagining, and ventured on an interpetation:

If we think of you as small, you would like to swim in the lake or swim on the lake like the duck. You are telling me that you are fond of yourself with your webbed hands and feet and that you need people to love you that way as you were when you were born. Growing up, you begin to want to play the piano and the flute and to do handicrafts, and so you agree to be operated on, but the first thing is to be loved as you are and as you were born.

By way of relief, Winnicott asked about his family and home, and Iiro was positive about both, particularly about new babies. "One knows if one is sad."

Winnicott made Iiro's next squiggle into feet and shoes. Iiro turned Winnicott's last drawing into a duck again. He was restating, Winnicott felt, both his love of himself and his need to be loved in the state in which he was born, without surgery any alteration.

Between them, Winnicott and Iiro made a record of Winnicott's extraordinary tenderness and intuition as well as a tribute to the boy's trusting candor in dealing with the cruel inheritance fate had dealt him. The case shows psychoanalytic method at its best, the combination of a search for the emotionally telling detail with the search for themes about which to focus those details.

Obviously, it is easier (in some ways) for me, thinking through this printed[20] transcript for the umpteenth time, to outline themes and themes of themes than it was for Winnicott. He had to respond in real time, to the boy sitting there in front of him, waiting, while I write in the timeless time of literary criticism. Nevertheless, I think it is useful to spell out Winnicott's sensitive thematic analysis.

In effect, he grouped Iiro's associations to the drawings into three themes. First, there were swimming and the ducks (they appear in four squiggles). These Winnicott identified with Iiro's feeling that he could love himself and had been loved with his webbed feet and hands. The water suggested to Winnicott an Iiro at or before birth. Second were horn, cornet, flute, and carpentry. All involve abilities of the hand (which were so problematic for Iiro) and the relation of those abilities to Iiro's growing up to be a man like his father or his teacher.

Third were Iiro's images for his real situation: shoe, hand, sword hilt, sword, and eel, and his remarks on his father and mother. The shoe and hand imaged the way Iiro's hand and feet then were. The eel had to do with swimming, but it was also a sword, something a boy Iiro's age might use to play martial, masculine games, an emblem for his ability to become a man like his father. In this symbolic sequence, the sword hilt, which resembled his deformed hand, became an eel or a sword blade.

Then, in talking about his parents, Iiro noted that his mother shared his deformity. He declared his acceptance of his father and his father precisely as a source of new babies. It seems to me that these remarks combine with the other clusters of images to say, "In order for me to grow up and become a man, I need to be loved as I am now, handicapped like my mother." Winnicott had broached this theme to Iiro, that he needed to be loved as he was, webbed feet and all, like a little duck. By returning to the theme of the ducks, the two of them brought this exquisite interpretation round to its beginning and a natural close.

Conclusion

Winnicott's interview, like the other three instances in this chapter, shows two basic characteristics of psychoanalytic thought. First, analyst and analysand create a space between them pregnant with symbols they each own. In a way, this is what we do in any ordinary conversation, even if we are not so learned as to include quotations from Virgil. What is especially psychoanalytic, however, is the deliberate enlarging of this symbolic field through the technique of free association. Thus Freud asked the young man (in the classic psychoanalytic method) to tell him, "candidly and uncritically, whatever comes into your mind." Thus Winnicott and Iiro each drew random squiggles for the other to "turn into something."[21]

Psychoanalysis, then, offers a mode of analysis for that shared space. We can call it the hermeneutic circle of the humanist, the pattern explanation of the social scientist, or (best, I think) holistic analysis. An interpreter groups details together into similar or contrasting themes, then brings those themes together toward a still more central theme so as to structure the symbolic space into a focal generalization and peripheries of detail. The interpreter interrelates the details and makes them mutually meaningful in the light of that central focus.

Psychoanalytic method usually operates in a therapeutic context where one party in the dialogue is creating a verbal space in order to remedy something perceived as wrong or sick (as the young man wanted to understand his forgetting). Yet as Holmes and the apple peeler show, holistic analysis and psychoanalytic interpretation apply just as well when the motive is simply a wish to understand--as when Winnicott wanted to present a case to his Finnish colleagues or Freud to demonstrate his methods through an "obscure and meaningless" dream.

Often, in finding a centering theme, especially in a therapeutic setting, the interpreter or interpretee will suddenly become aware of some thought that was formerly unconscious, but this is not necessarily the case with all holistic analyses. Holistic method serves in geology, astronomy, evolutionary biology, and many other disciplines where what is revealed by the analysis may be hidden without being unconscious. In these contexts, the success of a holistic interpretation, its validity or accuracy or satisfactoriness, does not depend on a cure or sudden perception. The more details from its discourse a holistic analysis interrelates, and the more directly it interrelates them, the more valid it is--for any purpose.

In all these settings we make a holistic analysis stronger by creating more data, more symbolic entities in the space between the interpreter and the interpreted. In this need for ever more data, holistic interpretation differs from other kinds of analysis, notably the "if this, then that" hypotheses one tests by experiments. An experimenter needs to define the this and the that quite narrowly and to exclude or control for data outside the definitions, an altogether different procedure.

Holistic analysis becomes more persuasive as the humans involved in that analysis bring in more and more symbols for the centering theme to unify. Hence the intellectual form of psychoanalytic thought--its holism--meshes with the classic psychoanalytic procedure--free association. To think psychoanalytically, as one must to think about the I, is to blend the creation of new symbols, spaces, and interactions with their analysis so that association and analysis, whole and theme, each will actively sustain the other in what another kind of scientist might call a positive feedback.[22]

2  /  The Idea of Identity

Iiro's story differs from dreaming about a table d'hôte aliquis or thinking of 426718. They are isolated incidents that one can think through holistically (as a whole "fitting" around a center). They yield to psychoanalytic explanations that contrast unconscious and conscious motives. Winnicott's theme for Iiro's drawings and associations, however (the boy's need to be loved in the state in which he was born), suggests something far more pervasive: a style that permeates much of what Iiro thinks and does.

I mean "style" just exactly in the literary sense: as someone's characteristic choices of words, sentence structures, and perhaps even ideas. In effect, such a concept of style extends the traditional psychoanalytic method of holistic interpretation from particular acts (or "behaviors," one particular dream or symptom or slip of the tongue) to a whole life.

To construct someone's style in this general sense, you would draw out essentials from the many, many manifestations of that style, just as you would abstract a musical theme from its variations--or just as the young man's associations to aliquis led to a single worry underlying them all or just as Sherlock Holmes could fit many puzzling details into one coherent scheme by the hypothesis of a swamp adder.

Perhaps because it is a literary concept, writers are particularly good for instancing style, because in every work they leave behind hundreds of choices from which one can state holistic patterns of sameness and difference. Consider a man I think of as--

The "Promising" Writer

F. Scott Fitzgerald left in his letters an unusually full account of his choices and opinions about life in general.* For example, he wrote of his talent as a

There was a flutter from the wings of God and you lay dead.
Your books were in your desk
I guess some unfinished chaos in your head
Was dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies.

When, however, Fitzgerald felt that he had the necessary supplies, he felt confident, even omnipotent. "Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you--like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist--or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore." "All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." "You know," he wrote to another writer, "I used to have a beautiful talent once. . . . It used to be a wonderful feeling to know it was there, and it isn't all gone yet. I think I have enough left to stretch out over two more novels. I may have to stretch it a little thin, so maybe they won't be as good as the best things I've ever done. But they won't be completely bad either, because nothing I ever write can be completely bad." The self-confidence a sense of inner supplies gave him could all too easily shade off into arrogance, as in those sentences or in something he said of himself: "As long as I'm unknown I'm a pretty nice fellow, but give me a little notoriety and I swell up like a poison toad."

Fitzgerald was much aware of the material and spiritual supplies he was given and how he responded, but he was much more aware of what he gave and what it cost him. As he half-laughingly wrote, "I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort." In a more somber vein, "Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself[24] leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager." And so it was that when Scott Fitzgerald felt rejected and unknown at the end of his career, his words for it were "to die so completely and unjustly after having given so much."

The imagery he uses--buying the next meal, holding his breath, nursing himself, hearing only the sound of his own breathing, giving of a body substance (or something that lives inside him), and being destroyed by "the great janitress of destinies"--these images echo to me a version of the early relation between feeding mother and dependent child. It was perhaps because of the style of that early experience that Fitzgerald tended to see the giving and withholding of inner supplies in terms of greater and lesser forces. Perhaps. We can never know, of course.

Fitzgerald did, however, interpret situations in terms of greater and lesser forces. It was this way of polarizing experience that lay behind what he called his "wise and tragic sense of life." "My view of life," he wrote, is "that life is too strong and remorseless for the sons of men." "The thing that lies behind all great careers," he said, is "the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle."

"There was a book," he remembered from his childhood, "that was I think one of the great sensations of my life. . . . It filled me with the saddest and most yearning emotion. It was about a fight the large animals, like the elephant, had with the small animals, like the fox. The small animals won the first battle; but the elephants and lions and tigers finally overcame them. . . . My sentiment was all with the small ones. I wonder if even then I had a sense of the wearing-down power of big, respectable people. I can almost weep now when I think of that poor fox, the leader--the fox has somehow typified innocence to me ever since." As a teenager, Fitzgerald chose Princeton for his college because it always just lost the football championship, nosed "out in the last quarter by superior 'stamina' as the newspapers called it. It was to me a repetition of the story of the foxes and the big animals in the child's book."

In the same vein he idolized a man who came back from the Great War already a hero and the greatest polo player in the world, yet had the "humility to ask himself 'Do I know anything?'" and enter Princeton as a mere freshman.

Fitzgerald interpreted the advent of the movies in the same way, as a confrontation of greater and lesser forces. "There was a rankling indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written word subordinated to another power, a more glittering, a grosser power." "I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and[25] supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that . . . was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration." Yet it was typical of Fitzgerald that he found it necessary to identify with that grosser power and, in fact, to go to work for Hollywood himself.

All his life he identified with that greater power by molding, manipulating, and cajoling the human material around him, getting people to perform in one way or another. When, for example, there was a fire in Fitzgerald's house, he took command of the firemen. His chauffeur had a speech defect in which he substituted s for th. Fitzgerald composed a sentence full of ths which he then made the poor man repeat over and over. Late in life he set himself up as a tutor to his mistress, Sheilah Graham, as, much earlier, in his college years, he had written his sister long instructions on how to be a coquette, how to get boys to talk about themselves to her, how to flirt and tease, and how to have a good laugh and a charming smile. During his daughter's college years, he advised her on which books to read, men to date, and invitations to accept. He had something to say about every single course she took.

Although Fitzgerald kept trying to make himself into a superior power, he seems to have thought of himself as a lesser force, being given to by that power--or being withheld from. As he said about democracy, "The strong are too strong for us and the weak too weak." He particularly saw his own creativity this way. Sometimes he gave. Sometimes he was given to. "I don't know what it is in me or that comes to me when I start to write. I am half feminine--at least my mind is."

These extremes showed strikingly in the famous image of the crack-up with which Fitzgerald described himself during a depressed period: "his realization that what he had before him was not the dish he had ordered for his forties. In fact--since he and the dish were one, he described himself as a cracked plate, the kind that one wonders whether it is worth preserving." Again there is the duality, this time based on the double meaning of the word dish: "dish" as the food he hungered for; "dish" as the cracked container; and "he and the dish were one," the eater, the eaten, and the empty worthlessness.

He saw his marriage to Zelda as creating the same duality between his being filled or his being depleted so as to fill someone else. As a young bachelor, he said, "I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry. . . . I was a man divided--she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream." Before the situation[26] became totally hopeless, he said, "I had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on her."

In writing, he created by being given unto and then by giving again himself. As a boy, in a prototype of his later career, he would attend the old Teck Theatre in Buffalo and take in long sections of dialogue and then, with his prodigious memory, repeat the performance to the other children in the neighborhood. Essential to Fitzgerald's idea of writing was giving something to the reader: "I believe that the important thing about a work of fiction is that the essential reaction shall be profound and enduring." "I would rather impress my image (even though an image the size of a nickel) upon the soul of a people than be known"--that is, than receive personal recognition. "The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind."

One could only give something to the reader, though, if one had first taken it into oneself. The artist's purpose, Fitzgerald thought, should be to express in some palatable disguise emotions he had himself lived through. In this sense, Fitzgerald saw the purpose of fiction as "to recapture the exact feel of a moment in time and space, exemplified by people rather than by things . . . an attempt at a mature memory of a deep experience." "It was necessary for Dickens," he said, "to put into Oliver Twist the child's passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway's first stories, In Our Time, went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known." The idea turns up in one of Fitzgerald's own early stories, set in Elizabethan times. A fugitive rushes in to hide in his friend's quarters. The guards come looking for him and tell the friend that a lady has been raped, but they do not find the fugitive. The friend remonstrates, but the fugitive insists that he is responsible only to himself for what he does. Then, after his friend has gone to sleep, he sits down and writes The Rape of Lucrece.

The same giving and being given to, Fitzgerald felt, applied to character as to content. "It takes half a dozen people," he maintained, "to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character." And also to style. "A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year." Your style should be "a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired."

His creativity consisted of being given to by the world and giving in turn to his readers. Fitzgerald had an extraordinary flair for sizing people up as well as a remarkable ability to incorporate and reproduce vocabulary. Finally, he had a sense of himself as an actor, absorbing a part given him, making it part of himself, and then giving it to his public. He was greatly concerned with when and how his books would appear, with autographing them, for example, and otherwise making himself a public figure. Give unto others as[27] you would have them give unto you. In effect, Fitzgerald was playing out his version of the Golden Rule on a public stage, and he was very, very good at it.

Yet there was a failure built in simply because of the magnitude of the demands he made. At the beginning of his career he saw himself entering a world of "ineffable toploftiness and promise," and he himself having "a sense of infinite possibilities that was always with me whether vanity or shame was my mood." Not to have that relation to infinity was to be fatally flawed--as he described a woman who he felt had failed, "She didn't have the strength for the big stage." As for himself, however, being inspired gave him an infinite power: "I can be so tender and kind to people in even little things, but once I get a pen in my hand I can do anything.

Writing would balance the books between the real and the fantastic, the finite and the infinite, the loving and the aggressive. For example, Fitzgerald advised a fellow writer, "Try and find more 'bright' characters; if the women are plain make them millionairesses or nymphomaniacs, if they're scrubwomen, give them hot sex attraction and charm. This is such a good trick I don't see why it's not more used--I always use it just as I like to balance a beautiful word with a barbed one." "Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things," he once noted, "will start you on the art of fiction." Thus, his writings are full of marvelous aphorisms achieved by moving from human details to the grand scale, for example, "The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness." Or moving from planetary forces to the helpless human, as in this closing of a letter: "Pray gravity to move your bowels. It's little we get done for us in this world."

Yet these attempts to get from the finite to the infinite were, inevitably, doomed from the start; and the deepest strain in Fitzgerald's life and works is the sense of inevitable loss and failure. "The utter synthesis between what we want and what we can have," he wrote, "is so rare that I look back with a sort of wonder on those days of my youth when I had it, or thought I did." "Again and again in my books I have tried to imagize my regret that I have never been as good as I intended to be." It was this sense of inevitable loss that gave rise to his "tragic" sense of life and a feeling for the chanciness of existence: "You have got to make all the right changes at the main corners--the price for losing your way once is years of unhappiness."

This sense of an unanswerable demand from the infinite could give Fitzgerald as stern an artistic conscience as any writer ever had. This work ethic could also, however, make loss and depression dominant themes in his work and life. As he said, "It is from the failures of life, and not its successes that we learn most." Once, simply from hearing someone recite Horace's Integer vitae ode, he sadly thought, "I knew in my heart that I had missed[28] something by being a poor Latin scholar, like a blessed evening with a lovely girl." His sense of loss could yield this extraordinary image for the succession of the generations: "We are creatures bounding from each other's shoulders, feeling already the feet of new creatures upon our backs bounding again toward an invisible and illusory trapeze."

The same sense of reaching toward a vanishing security gave rise, I think, to Fitzgerald's special, magical feeling about money and being rich. It was as though those who had money proved they were in touch with the infinite by spending it, and he had to try to identify himself with them by his own spendthrift ways. "All big men have spent money freely," he wrote. "I hate avarice or even caution." "That was always my experience," he wrote near the end of his life, "--a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club. . . . I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works." He told a friend that the whole idea of The Great Gatsby was "the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it."

The way out of Fitzgerald's doomed effort to climb into the infinite was to separate himself from it. Thus, breaking up an affair with a married woman, he wrote her: "The harshness of this letter will have served its purpose if on reading it over you see that I have an existence outside you--and in doing so remind you that you have an existence outside me." It is in this sense, I think, that we have to take his artistic conscience as represented in such statements as, "Work was dignity and the only dignity." "To me," Fitzgerald wrote, "the conditions of an artistically creative life are so arduous that I can only compare to them the duties of a soldier in war-time." And, in this context, I think of his image for himself in failure, standing at twilight on a deserted firing range with an empty rifle and the targets down.

The image of the soldier suggests some of the violence he felt in being separate from that infinitely giving source. A word he used even more for such catastrophes was "broken." Thus, of Zelda, he said, "She broke and is broken forever." And in still another style, his sense that being separated from the giver was a breaking could let him arrive at an aphorism like, "The insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read." He advised a would-be writer, "If you want to be a top-notcher, you have to break with everyone. You have to show up your own father." And indeed, his father's being fired seems to have laid down for this man the prototype of the loss of inner resources as a breaking: "That morning he had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of strength, full of confidence. He came home that evening an old man, a completely broken man." Then he in turn as a father conveyed all kinds of "breaking" messages to his own daughter.[29]

If she went to the wrong kind of parties with the wrong kind of people, he said, he would have a "broken neurotic" "on my hands . . . for the rest of my life." At one point, he threatened to send her to work in a canning factory: "It would have made you or broken you (i.e., made you run away)." Again, to be separate is to be "broken." The line was a fine one, as when he wrote her about a social fiasco. "I don't want it to be so bad that it will break your self-confidence, which . . . is fine [if] founded on . . . work, courage, etc., but if you are selfish it had better be broken early." In a more playful vein, he threatened to change her nickname to "Egg, which implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life and that I could break you up and crack you open at my will."

How can I phrase Fitzgerald's life style? I see three basic polarities within which he interpreted his world. First,I think, he saw situations in terms of bigger powers and lesser powers, in particular, his own self and the much bigger world he resolved to conquer. Second, he tended to divide things into those which were magical and infinite as against those which were separate and broken. The most important such dualism involved himself and the world: either he magically participated in the world, or he was his stoically resolute, separate self at the risk of being emptied and broken by it. Third, actions for him took the shape of giving and being given unto as against not giving, not being given unto, and therefore being--in that word which he came back to over and over again--"broken." His great imaginative gift was that he could project all these inner ups and downs onto an infinite plane outside, as a child might.

If I try to put into a single sentence a Fitzgerald-ness based on these three complex polarities--giving and being given to, bigger and less powers, being part of a magical world and having a separate, broken self--I come out with this: By giving myself, I show I am part of a world that magically gives me infinite supplies of talent and grace; but by not giving I show I can stand alone, even at the risk of being broken.

Obviously, there are many ways of talking about a style besides trying to phrase it into a single sentence. I like the sentence method, though, because it allows me to state both the key terms I see and the relations I see among them. A noun like "supplies" can serve as a theme summarizing a variety of traits: Fitzgerald's perception of his own and others' talent; his preoccupation with wealth; or his drinking. Each of these words in turn, "talent," "wealth," "drinking," can serve as themes for grouping particular behaviors: this or that writing, a certain party, some advice to his daughter. "Supplies" in turn becomes the object of giving or not giving, being given to or not being given to. These verbs can be unfolded into diverse traits and the traits in turn into particular behaviors. In other words, such a sentence functions like a theme in a piece of music or a kernel sentence in the early[30] transformational grammars. One can unfold it and transform it into an infinity of variations, each new and different, yet all echoing the original.

By giving myself, I show I am part of a world that magically gives me infinite supplies of talent and grace; but by not giving I show I can stand alone, even at the risk of being broken. In other words, Fitzgerald always headed in two directions at once: to give infinitely and so prove he himself had been infinitely given to; to withhold and so show that he had not been given to, that therefore he had a right to be angry and to break into that magical source or to be broken himself. In his own words, "I have no patience and when I want something I want it. I break people. I am part of the break-up of the times."

Thus, he was always involved in one of two cycles, giving or withholding. He was driven from one to the other as it became apparent that he was not going to receive infinitely (after all, none of us does), or as he needed to assert his own separate identity apart from the era in which he lived. He always created expectations but only sometimes did he live up to them. One word that (for me) might unify him or the way he saw his world is promising.

In his life, he worked--and played--very hard at making himself into a legend. As one way of uniting himself with a larger past he insisted that he was descended from Francis Scott Key. In another mode, he became the very embodiment of the Jazz Age. He carried on fabulous parties and debauches, many of them marked by recklessness and violence. At one party, for instance, when Zelda lay down in front of their car and told him to drive over her, he had released the brake before their friends could restrain him. Sober, Fitzgerald was the picture of grace, gentility, and generosity. Drunk, out came a mean streak of rudeness and cruelty that appeared in his sober self mostly as a liking for boxing and other contact sports and a persistent hobby of military history. But perhaps this violence was implicit in his sense of the conflict between the giver and the receiver--as in his imagery of breaking and cracking. He could say, for example, of Zelda's career, that she was working "under a greenhouse which is my money and my name and my love. . . . She is willing to use the greenhouse to protect her in every way . . . and at the same time she feels no responsibility about the greenhouse and feels that she can reach up and knock a piece of glass out of the roof any moment."

Finally, however, what interests me more about Fitzgerald than his wife or his life is his literary achievement. If what I have said about his having a style of choices is correct, then I should be able to trace in the ego choices his work embodies the same style as in the ego choices expressed in his opinions and his life. Consider, then, three of the passages I like best from my favorite among Fitzgerald's novels, Gatsby.

This, for example, is a single sentence describing college people coming[31] home for Christmas vacation on the great passenger trains of the 1930s and 40s. I love it because I too stood between cars when I was coming home from college and breathed the wintry air between Boston and New York. "We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again." There is the taking in (air, dinner), the merger with the larger being (this country), the separateness from it and the melting into it again.

In those words, "indistinguishably" and "unutterably," you can hear the distinctive note of withholding. You could almost call Fitzgerald the Master of the Negative Prefix, particularly when he refuses to tell you something, that is, to give from his mouth. Listen to this astonishing statement of withholding from a narrator. A narrator is, after all, supposed to be telling us the novel:

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

My literary term "style," however, does not quite do justice to my claim to have understood Fitzgerald holistically as an "all" and a "one" dialectically interplaying. The classical word for such an idea of a person is "character" (etymologically the same as "style," both having to do with carving letters). The classical psychoanalytic definition is Otto Fenichel's: "the habitual mode of bringing into harmony the tasks presented by internal demands and by the external world." In the language of ego psychology and multiple function, character is "the ego's habitual modes of adjustment to the external world, the id, and the superego, and the characteristic types of combining these modes with one another, constitute character" (1945, p. 467). Fenichel's word "habitual" takes us beyond the momentary balancings of ego or id (as described, for example, by Robert Waelder's principle of "multiple function") into something that over a long period of time remains the same (Lat. idem, the root of

Identity

Indeed, in recent years, the word "character" has yielded to "identity," particularly as used by Erik Erikson and his followers: "the confirmation of the individual's sense of selfhood by his membership in the community" (Mazlish, 1975, p. 85). Such a definition turns inward, toward the individual's own feeling of wholeness, but also outward toward the way both individual and community confirm each other. From this version of identity, a "sense of identity," really, has come a great deal of admirable work in psychohistory and psychoanalytic sociology, and even folk psychology, as in "This week I'm having an identity crisis."

I want, however, to add to Erikson's "identity" a literary critic's precision. I want to define identity by an operation or procedure for examining the style in which particular individuals function. In one sense, I am refining the key term of Fenichel's classic definition, "habitual." In another, however, I am drawing into this concept of the I the most exact of the modern theories of identity, that of Heinz Lichtenstein as developed in his book The Dilemma of Human Identity (1977). I want to define identity as having three simultaneous meanings, as

(1) an agency
(2) a consequence
(3) a representation.
[33]

Identity, in this first sense, is the agent initiating the actions that systematically create identity. One needs therefore to think of identity as a system (probably a system of information-processing feedback). Identity is not only the active, agentic principle of such a system but also the passive self that that system creates as it interacts with the world. Hence, identity is also

A consequence. Identity is what is being created as the individual brings an already existing identity (identity in the first sense) to new experiences. Identity in this second sense is the "I" that results because "I see," "I remember," or "I repress."

Identity as what is created by living is necessarily correlative to identity in the first sense of agency. Hence identity is, if not paradoxical, at least circular. We shall need to resort to feedback or something like it when we wish a fuller model. The "we wish" and "model" remind me, however, of the third term: identity as

A representation. Identity is a way of putting into words the dialectic of sameness and difference that is a human life. As I did with Fitzgerald, a person looking on from "outside" can formulate for all the infinite choices by which someone manifests himself, a unifying style by looking at what is familiar and what is novel in each new action. I am constantly doing new things, yet I bring to each new thing my characteristic way of doing. I understand that sameness in what someone else does by seeing it persist though change. Conversely, I understand change by seeing it against what has not changed.

The poets have long recognized that unifying dialectic between sameness and difference. Emily Dickinson, for example, began one of her poems,

Each Life Converges to some Centre--
Expressed--or still--

The insight is not only a poetic one, however. The philosopher Stephen Toulmin gives Newton, Darwin, and Freud as examples when he remarks how the very greatest scientists are often

dominated and guided by a simple enduring 'vision.' Quite early in their careers, these scientists formulate for themselves, and set down in[34] writing, a tentative system of radically novel concepts and hypotheses, which can be seen at work throughout all their subsequent investigations, directing their curiosities and influencing the pattern of their analyses, like some kind of a cognitive 'field' (1978, p. 335).

Interestingly, at least one brain scientist suggests that this persisting unity is something intrinsic to the human brain itself. "The brain," writes J. Z. Young, "has many distinct parts but there is increasing evidence that they are interrelated to make one functioning whole, which gives a unique and characteristic direction to the pattern of life of that one individual" (1978, p. 265).

One way of wording that characteristic direction or pattern--the one Heinz Lichtenstein suggests--is to formulate a human identity as a theme with variations. That is, if we imagine a human life as a dialectic between sameness and difference, we can think of the sameness, the continuity of personal style, as a theme; we can think of the changes as variations on that theme. I can understand another person as living out changes and variations on a persistent core just as a musician might play out an infinity of variations on a single melody, as a mathematician might generate a myriad of functions from a single variable, or as a linguist might transform one kernel sentence into hundreds of different utterances.

I can use the term "identity theme" for the continuing core of personality that I see a person bringing to every new experience, their theme or style or, to borrow a French term, cachet spécifique. I would arrive at someone's identity theme as I would a personal style, by abstracting it from its many, many various expressions. Then I can use the term "identity" for the history of that theme and the history of its variations over a lifetime.

In other words, "identity" in this third sense means the history of a person looked at as a theme and variations. Identity is a "representation" in the sense that a history requires a historian.

Lichtenstein, from whom I am adapting this concept of identity, thought in terms of a "primary identity" in the individual. Not unreasonably. We are[35] born into the world with a certain hereditary endowment. That heredity manifests itself in a rather general style of "temperament" or "initial organizing configuration." As every parent knows, babies differ. Some are "easy." Others are "difficult" or "slow to warm up" or "persistent" or "distractable" (Thomas, Chess, & Birch, 1968, 1970; Burks & Rubenstein, 1979). Obviously, such traits are so general as to admit of a great range of behavior, some of which will suit the mother (or mothering person) and some not. Accordingly she will favor some and not others, and the infant will sense itself according to the way she reflects the baby back to itself. Out of the "fit" of mother and baby, close or jarring, easy or abrasive, abrupt or gradual, the child's personality will develop. According to Lichtenstein, "The specific unconscious need of the mother . . . actualizes out of these infinite potentialities one way of being in the child, namely being the child for this particular mother, responding to her unique and individual needs." This way of being Lichtenstein calls a "primary identity," "a zero point which must precede all other mental developments" (1964, pp. 53, 54, 1977, pp. 215 and 218-19).

Lichtenstein intends by "primary identity" a style of being which is a structure in the person, like the ego of traditional psychoanalysis. Created out of heredity and the earliest relationship between a baby and its first caretaker, such an identity is in, even is, that person. Formed before speech, it is a preverbal thing that can never be put precisely into words, can never be "known" in that sense. Just as we can never know the mind of another person, so we can never know this primary identity which is the essence of that mind, although we can approximate it by phrasings like the "style" I phrased for Scott Fitzgerald.

It seems to me, however, that people no more agree on "true" or "right" readings of identities than of poems. A statement of identity is a representation of some person but it also represents the representer's identity. If Fitzgerald interpreted Hollywood as a powerful, withholding mother, that says as much about Fitzgerald as about Hollywood. In the same way, when I read Fitzgerald in a series of polarities, that says as much about the way I see things as about Fitzgerald.

By the very act of interpreting someone, a representer of identity does something which thereby becomes part of the representer's style or identity. "Identity" thus has the same ambiguity as "history." It claims to say how things actually were, but it is necessarily someone's account of how things actually were.

Identity as representation leads to two possibilities. How do I represent the wholeness of you? How do I represent the wholeness of me? Identity can be perceived by the person in question, as when I think about me, or identity can be perceived by another from "outside," as when I think about you. The[36] distinction is important because, even with empathy, we will never feel exactly the pleasure another mind feels, we will never know the knowledge we share in the same way, never love as that other person loves.

This distinction between the "inside" and the "outside" interpreter is also important because in it a theme-and- variations concept of identity poses and preserves the classical psychoanalytic polarity: conscious and unconscious. That is, to someone formulating an identity from outside, like Freud observing the young man or me interpreting Fitzgerald, a given piece of behavior is neither unconscious nor conscious. It is simply behavior. To someone experiencing identity from inside, however, like Freud's young man, behavior, and hence identity, are necessarily partly unconscious. (See the Appendix, pp. 334-36.)

Identity as representation is my view, however, not Lichtenstein's, and it may not be Freud's either. Freud himself seems to have believed in a unity in the personality. On November 6, 1907, Freud was speaking in his large waiting room, presenting a case history to colleagues and questioners assembled as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. One question he answered almost as though he were anticipating Lichtenstein's theme-and-variations version of primary identity. "In general, the human being cannot tolerate contrasting ideas and feelings in juxtaposition; it is this striving for unification that we call character" (Nunberg, 1962, I, 236).

The patient who occasioned Freud's remark has been known for many years by a horror movie epithet taken from the symptom that brought him to psychoanalysis:

The Rat Man

He wired ahead for new glasses, but when a fellow-officer delivered the package to him he found he could not repay the postage because he was baffled by a series of "commands" that he pay different people, traveling to different towns to do so. Finally, completely paralyzed by the problem, he sought advice from a friend in Vienna. The friend suggested he consult a physician--Freud. Lanzer and Freud had their first interview on Tuesday, October 1, 1907.

The "commands" were his presenting symptom. They were not, he felt, his own inner moral principles, and thus they represented what he called "a dissociation of personality," some alien force. He felt he could resolve the dilemmas they created only by turning to someone else. His friend, as an outside authority, could counter these commands from outside (as he had done previously when Ernst felt commanded to take his law examinations before he was ready). In his first interview with Freud, Lanzer told how he had turned (when he was much younger) to a male friend for moral forgiveness when he felt particularly guilty of criminal impulses. In this craving for absolution from outsiders, he showed his need to appease and yet deceive a superego still sought in external figures.

Lanzer sought other forms of outer authority. For example, he had to consult his mother about entering treatment. All that kept him from suicide was his fear of causing his mother pain, particularly in view of the early death of his sister. Certainly it fits the rest of Lanzer's personality that he was trying to become a lawyer and that the particular part of his studies that these obsessional commands disrupted was criminal law.

Although Lanzer craved external laws, he also wanted to be released from them. He recalled two occasions when he became sexually excited (and masturbated) on hearing commandments broken. One was when a postilion[38] broke a city ordinance. The other time, he was reading how Goethe overcame his mistress's prohibition against kissing.

Indeed, Lanzer became able to masturbate at all only after his father's death. He would work on his law examinations until late at night (thereby pleasing his then-dead father). He would even leave the door open so that his father might reappear and see him hard at work. Then he would take out his penis and look at it in the mirror--hardly an action calculated to win paternal approval. Years before, on the occasion of his first sexual intercourse, the thought had flashed through his mind, "One might murder one's father for this." Similarly, he had felt that, if his father died, he could marry his lady.

Hence, not only did Lanzer feel conflicting demands from "outside," he also suffered from mixed feelings of love and hate toward the significant persons in his life. He reported these mostly about his father for, at this stage in psychoanalysis, Freud did not explore the early relation of mother and child as deeply as an analyst would today.

That early relationship, one would say today, necessarily couples love to dependency, frustration, and anger. It therefore poses one of the basic tasks of infancy: learning to live with feelings of love and hate toward the same person--like Lanzer's feelings toward his father. Today, one would guess that the roots of his ambivalence toward his father lay in his relation with his mother.

Freud, however, wrote of his patient's ambivalence in all kinds of other relationships. He noted, for example, how Lanzer attended all the funerals in his family, even of distant relatives. He was constantly killing people off in his imagination so he could show sympathy for their relatives. For example, he wished that his lady might lie ill in bed forever. On a solitary walk, he moved a rock out of the path of her carriage lest it hurt her, but then he put it back lest he seem foolish.

Freud interpreted, both in his theoretical remarks on the case and in his comments to Lanzer, these doings and undoings as the acting out of ambivalence. More specifically, he thought that in Lanzer's development, the sadistic components of love had been exceptionally developed (probably by his father). Lanzer had therefore developed an unconscious hatred of his father which he then repressed. This unconscious hatred had given rise to an especially strong love as a disguise--and that love had constantly to be doubted (because of the hate underneath).

This pattern, said Freud, applied not only to his father and to Ernst's strong identification with his father but also to Gisela, the lady he loved (who was also his cousin). Thinking of her, he sharply separated love from copulation, which he perceived as a hostile act. Thus he could fantasy, while he was with another, non-Platonic girlfriend, a dressmaker, "a rat for my cousin." He[39] was punishing her but he was also imagining his sex with the dressmaker as a loving preliminary to sex with Gisela.

In the manner of 1907, Freud interpreted all these conflicting impulses as showing that Lanzer had disintegrated into three personalities. One was unconscious, made up of the passionate, evil impulses he had suppressed at an early age. A second was conscious--the law student. Then a third was conscious or preconscious, involved in the superstitious and ascetic rituals he had developed to counter his repressed wishes.

Given such a splitting, Lanzer overestimated the effects of his feelings on the world because he was unconscious of their internal, mental function. His love and hate seemed magically powerful because they overpowered him with these obsessional thoughts.

From the age of seven, he told Freud, Lanzer had felt that his parents knew his thoughts and that his sexual or aggressive impulses would be followed by disastrous consequences. Thus, he became a coward out of the fear of the violence of his own rage.

Lanzer's ambivalence, however, did not contrast love and hate only. He also expressed his mixed feelings in the more primitive emotions of simple pleasure and disgust--notably about rats. In telling the story of the rat torture, for example, he showed a mixture of horror and enjoyment. Rats themselves made him think of disease, notably sexual disease (syphilis). Hence they also had erotic values (as with the dressmaker).

In other words, as one would expect with a personality so bound up in commands and compulsions from outside, Lanzer was preoccupied with excrement. A child's excretions are not only the subject of parental commands; they are also the first objects to combine pleasure and disgust. Lanzer represented his excrement as his money--coins--or as his father's gambling debts (Spielratte) that had to be paid out, hence like Raten (installments) or Ratten (rats). Sometimes his concern with money revealed its bodily origins directly as when he dreamed that Freud's daughter had patches of dung instead of eyes. That is, he dreamed of marrying Freud's daughter, not for her charms, her beaux yeux, but for her money. In a still more blatant fantasy, he thought of himself lying on his back, copulating with Freud's daughter by means of the stool hanging from his anus. Lanzer took pleasure in sniffing and smelling, another derivative of the erotic value he put on excretion and its products.

At the same time, to excrete is to put out something that may be a living part of one's own body or may be dead matter. Two episodes Lanzer recalled bear on this aspect of anality.

When he was three or four years old, his father beat him for having done something naughty. The boy flew into a rage, but, since he knew no swear words with which to attack his father, he called him the names of all the[40] common (dead) objects he could think of: "You lamp! You towel! You plate!"

Related to this episode was what Lanzer called the greatest fright of his life. He got from his mother a stuffed bird from a hat to play with. As he was running along with the bird in his hands, its wings moved. Terrified that it had come back to life, he threw it down.

These two strongly remembered episodes admit a pattern: a frenzy in forcing out of himself something dead and bad; then terror at the prospect that it could come to life and return. It was this pattern that Lanzer was acting out in another childhood episode he remembered, the time he played a cruel trick on his younger brother. Hoping to hurt his brother very much, he promised him he would see something if he looked up the barrel of a toy gun. Then Ernst pulled the trigger. In effect, he was forcing on his brother the thing he himself most feared: the disastrous recoil of his own wishes on himself. He made himself the active one, however, mastering the feared situation instead of fearing it.

Excreting was a highly charged modality for Lanzer. So was looking. Throughout his childhood, he wanted to look at naked girls but, he said, he feared something awful would happen if he thought about such things. For example, his father might die. Nevertheless, he enjoyed peeping at his sister's body until his mother put a stop to it. He had exhibited himself to his mother and to his governess while he seemed to be asleep. Earlier another governess (Fraulein Peter) had let him crawl up under her skirt and finger her genitals. Ever after, he was left with a tormenting desire to look at the female body, especially smooth surfaces like thighs. In later life, he fell in love with his lady's body, which his sister had described to him. During the analysis, he brought out a number of fantasies of looking at women's genitals, but associated with rats, insects, feces, and other sources of disgust.

In other words, Lanzer's lookings had acquired multiple functions in his mind. A looking could serve as a source of pleasure if it was also a source of reassurance, that is, when looking excluded the orifices of the female body. Looking also took the place of touching for him, and it is worth remembering that the whole crazy series of symptoms that drove him to seek a doctor's help began with a pair of dropped eyeglasses.

Freud's suggestion that looking had taken the place of touching for his patient matches another theme: a regression from risky acting to safer thinking. Thus, Lanzer impulsively attacked his servant girl and just as impulsively left off. Freud suggested the real purpose of this acting out was to evoke the inner prohibition. In general, Lanzer's compulsions to look instead of touch and his substitution of thoughts for overt actions, like his obedience to "external" commands, reversed outside and inside. Activities[41] in the outer world he converted to forces in his mind, and he gave his thoughts existence in external reality.

This is a reversal in spatial direction, so to speak. Equally important in Lanzer's psychic economy were reversals in temporal sequence. For example, at the age of twelve, Ernst had had a crush on a little girl. The idea came to him that she would be kind to him if he were to suffer some misfortune, specifically, his father's death. Here again Freud could see a reversed logic. She loves me. If I love her, my father will be angry at me, and I will want to kill him. If, however, he were already dead, then it would be all right. He would not be angry were I to love her.

At one point in Lanzer's long romance with his cousin Gisela, she was called away to nurse her seriously ill grandmother. He suddenly had a "command" to cut his own throat, and he was even going to fetch the razor, when he received another "command": "You must first go and kill the old woman." Freud interpreted these two "commands" as, first, Lanzer's hostile wish to go and kill the old woman who had deprived him of his love; second, a command to kill himself as punishment for this hostile wish. But, Freud pointed out, these wishes came in the reversed order so typical for this patient.

The same kind of complex reversing process gave rise to his presenting symptom, the contradictory commands about paying back the postage for his new pince-nez. The idea (or wish) had flashed into his mind: "As sure as my father and the lady can have children, I'll pay him back the money." To punish himself then, for this double insult, he had to promise himself to do an impossible deed, namely, to pay back the money to the wrong person. Otherwise the rat-torture would be carried out on his father (now eight years dead!).

This sanction was itself a reversal. To the image of rats creeping into the anus he associated babies coming out (or the intestinal worms from which he had suffered as a child). In this presenting symptom, as in his whole illness, Freud pointed out, "What appears to be the consequence of the illness is in reality the cause or motive of falling ill." That is, by falling ill, he avoided the task of reconciling his love for the lady with his father's pattern of marrying a rich woman--and indeed his father's more general role as the inhibitor of his sexuality.

This general pattern of reversal underlay his relations with men in many contexts. For example, once he got the idea that his lady was showing a preference for his brother. To quell his jealousy, he asked his brother to wrestle with him. Not until he himself had been defeated (and thus punished for his hostile wish) did he feel pacified. It was as though he had always to deal with hostility toward males before he felt free to turn to a woman.[42]

What he described as the first great blow of his life took place when he was fourteen or fifteen. It involved a nineteen year old student who was a prototype of the male friend on whose external authority he relied--as he did Freud's. This student made much of him until he succeeded in being appointed his tutor. Then he began treating him like an idiot. Ernst realized that the student had simply used him to gain admission to the Lanzer household to court one of his sisters.

This, his first recollection on the couch, led him to memories of his governess Fraulein Peter's genitals (and her male name was not without significance). In other words, as Freud comments, it was (again!) as though Lanzer had to bring out his hostile feelings toward males as sexual beings and external authorities before he could trust his male therapist enough to go into sexual material dealing with a woman.

Thus, in the presenting conflict about paying postage, he had displaced his duty to repay the young woman in the post office onto a male lieutenant. Further confusion arose because he transferred his wish to go see two girls who had looked on him with favor onto the two lieutenants. Again, he had had to deal with males before turning to females. Indeed, his whole confusion about women and money while he was in military service was much colored by his identification with his father's experiences while in the army.

Lanzer dealt with male inhibitors before female gratifiers. This pattern suggests that Lanzer's (anal) reversals of space and time relationships came before, and hence served as, the psychological strategy this son brought to his (oedipal) rivalry with his father for his mother. He came out of that oedipal struggle still more firmly committed to a pattern of reversal. In any case, the pattern appeared constantly in his adult re-creations of oedipal situations. For example, he had a fantasy that, if his lady were to marry somebody else, he would himself rise to higher rank in that man's department until one day he could grant his lady's entreaty and rescue her husband from the consequences of a dishonesty (like his father's?) that he had foreseen all along. Another example: his sister petted him and kissed him like a lover to the point where he felt he had to assure his brother-in-law, "If Julie has a baby in nine months' time, you needn't think I am its father; I am innocent!"

In general, of course, he found father-figures everywhere around him. Freud himself became one, specifically, a father trying to marry his daughter off to the patient. While telling the story of the rat torture, he addressed Freud as "Captain." The cruel captain had, by his very cruelty, become another father-figure. Indeed, in his response to the story of the rat torture, Lanzer thought of his father as alive, as he did in many of his obsessional ideas, although in fact his father had died eight years previously.[43]

While Lanzer created fathers in the outer world, he also identified himself (in his inner world) with his own father. For example, he equated his own unpaid post office debt to his father with his father's gambling debt while in the army. What caused his neurosis was his conflict as to whether to marry his love or marry into the rich family of his mother (as his father had done). As Freud succinctly put it, he could not choose between his father and his sexual object.

His cousin Gisela was a relative, too old for him, perhaps sterile, and certainly in poor health--in general, a doubtful candidate for marriage. In this more or less unavailable woman, Lanzer had perhaps re-created his sister Katherine. She in turn may have played for Lanzer in childhood the role of the mother in the family triangle. Then his love for her would have been tempered by the opposite feeling: that when she was gone, what was left--his relationship with his father--was better. As Lacan points out in his reading of the case, Lanzer re-created in his present life and his inner world the family constellation or mythe of his father (1953; Evans, 1979).

He felt both love and hate for both his father and "the woman" in this constellation, be she mother, Katherine, or Gisela. His resentment of his lady therefore combined with his attachment to his father, and conversely his hatred of his father joined to his love for his lady. He could not choose between two such alternatives, Freud noted, since it was this very uncertainty that protected him from injuring either his father or the lady. "Our present patient had developed a peculiar talent for avoiding a knowledge of any facts which would have helped him in deciding his conflict," notably the facts about the operation on his lady's ovaries. "He had to be forced into remembering what he had forgotten and into finding out what he had overlooked," Freud wrote.

In other words, he used denials of his perceptions, memories, and knowledge in order to control what was inside and what was outside--to "place" his emotions outside himself. "He was at once superstitious and not superstitious." "He believed in premonitions and prophetic dreams," creating their effects by "peripheral vision and reading, forgetting, and, above all, errors of memory." Then he would project those shadowy, repressed connections into the outer world of reality evoking his superstitious awe. Finally, after analysis cleared up these obsessions and superstitions, he would smile at his own credulity.

By these rituals, he said, he was able to ward off both of the bad ideas that came to him about the rat torture, namely, that it would be done to both his father and his cousin. Similarly, he was able to suppress the episode of the captain who had told him where he really should pay the postage, to the young lady at the post office who had been attracted to him. By such means he had been able to think of his father as alive years after his actual death.[44]

Closely related to these denials of obvious facts and perceptions was the patient's ability to keep things split. He could always keep up several attachments to women, to work, or to ideas simultaneously. That way, he never had to choose one and thus express his hatred of the other. As he imagined the rat torture, he split it: there were two rats in the pot. One bored into the victim and one did not.

That was the real issue: the denials, forgettings, and splits all served to control what went in and what went out. His greatest fear was that he would not be able to keep control, that something would burst in against his will. The rat torture, although it meant many things, meant this one above all others. It implied rats boring their way into his anus, his father's, or his lady's. In all these settings, "rat" could imply a penis (heiraten, to marry). The rats also seemed to be associated with the idea of coming out (like the popgun hitting his brother), particularly babies (or worms) coming out of the anus (confirming a childish fantasy that men as well as women can have babies, through the anus).

These were fantasies of things coming into or out of the body. Lanzer had similar fantasies about language. He feared that things could enter into his phrases and turn them into their opposite. For example, he dreamed that Freud's mother died and that he sent Freud a card with "p.c.," pour condoler, on it, but, as he wrote, something changed p.c. into "p.f.," pour feliciter. He used the conjunction aber ("but" or "though") as a verbal formula for repudiating "commands," but then he got the idea that the mute e of the second syllable was "not a sufficient protection against intrusions." Accordingly, he began accenting the word, abER, thus making it, Freud noted, almost Abwehr, "defense," a word he had learned in therapy.

He had another magic word, Glejisamen. After various complicated explanations, he concluded it came from combining his lady's name, Gisela, with Samen (semen) with no gaps in between. He had to say this magic word quickly so that nothing could slip into it, and he added the phrase "without rats." Even this was not enough, however, and to prevent its being reversed into its opposite, he contracted the whole word into just Wie.

In short, Lanzer distorted words by taking things out in order to prevent bad things creeping in. Taking out made what was left more secure. Coming in violently and catastrophically reversed the sense of what was being said.

This pattern applied generally to what went into and out of Lanzer's mouth. He began to heap the grossest abuse on Freud and his family, reporting it in a state of terror lest Freud beat him as his violent father had. It was only by getting it out this way that he could believe he had felt hostility toward his father. He had various related fanta