ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL TOOLS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS is free association, which requires the patient to tell the doctor whatever has just come into his head, however illogical.
For my first year with Dr. Solnit, whom I met for four sessions a week when we were both in Connecticut (we had agreed to an unusual treatment plan that allowed for the extensive amount of traveling we both did), I screened out my associations. They would have interrupted my narrative.
Once I understood the need to tell him what my mind was seeing at all times, to reveal the odd jumps of thoughts and images, everything changed. Of course in real life one needs to limit the associations most of the time, but there are moments when they are instructive. It took me nearly three years to accept Dr. Solnit’s counsel that repetition is an essential tool of the process, that psychoanalysis is the opposite of deliberate storytelling, where one edits out the things one has already said. I finally came to grasp that the spontaneous reemergence of certain themes, whatever they are, whether or not they seem noteworthy, is a means toward understanding.
This tool helped me, similarly, to understand what happened to Freud at Orvieto—or at least what I think happened. Just now, envisioning the scenes of Jakob and Sigmund Freud as narrated by Jean-Paul Sartre, I see about three things at once.
For one, I keep picturing Signorelli’s imagery, in particular the powerful Herculean men.
At the same time, my mind presents images of my own father. I am remembering, yet again, those events when I was twenty-two and he was fifty-four and we picked out his father’s casket with me being so opinionated, and then, in the car driving home, Dad allowed how troubled he was by his father’s essential weakness. My father had amplified that he struggled with Grandpa’s being physically the smallest of four brothers, as well as the poorest, and the way that tyrannical Nana never let him forget either deficiency.
The third group of associations is embarrassing. While thinking about the ride home from the mortuary, I pictured myself as a non-Jew. Indeed, I inherited my mother’s blue eyes and fair skin. When I was little, I had her naturally blond hair. My father, on the other hand, had black hair, olive skin, and hazel eyes.
To be named Nicholas—with the middle name of Fox, to boot—is entirely different from being named Saul. Dad went to high school in the poor Jewish neighborhood in Hartford; I went to an Episcopal prep school. Moreover, to most, but not all, people—how some readers will hate this!—for many years I simply did not “seem Jewish.” That has changed in recent years, and I have become more relaxed about the whole thing and accept and enjoy it as part of my identity, but then I felt differently.
SHORTLY AFTER KATHARINE AND I SENT OUT our wedding invitations in the summer of 1976, my future mother-in-law, Andrea, received a phone call from an aunt of Sidney Kaufman’s, my future father-in-law. “So I see that Katharine is marrying someone who isn’t Jewish,” Esther Auerbach said, offering sympathy to the mother of the bride.
“What makes you know that, Esther?” Andrea asked.
“Nicholas Fox Weber: how goyish can you get?” Esther asked.
“I’ll have you know his father’s name is Saul,” Andrea said, proud to be able to one-up the woman who criticized her for turning on lights on the Sabbath.
Esther apparently was not completely convinced. At our wedding, she handed me an envelope with a check in it. When Katharine and I opened it afterward, we saw that it was made out to “Christopher Weber.”
The check was for one hundred dollars, which to us was a fortune in those days. As soon as we returned to Connecticut, I went to deposit it, having to explain to the teller at Hartford National Bank that to my new bride’s great-aunt, if you were named Nicholas you might as well be Christopher. Fortunately, my family was well known at the bank and the teller allowed me to deposit it.
What strikes me is that now, as then, I loved this event. I relished it the way I did when a woman I played tennis with explained to me that she was preparing for something called “a Seder, a ritual dinner associated with an upcoming holiday we celebrate,” and when I told her that my family had had Seders my whole life, she practically fell over. “Nicholas and Katharine: I assumed you were both related to the Czar!” she exclaimed. There were a number of moments like this, and I thrived on them.
I understand all too well why Freud would have wanted to close his mind to the idea of having the same faith as Signorelli’s Antichrist. I am aware that, just now, writing about my wife’s family, I tried to avoid using my father-in-law’s name, which I have always found distasteful. No wonder Sigismundo Schlomo became Sigmund (and then forgot Signorelli, so undesirably close to the whole mess).
When I was at Columbia, I had to study German, a requirement for art historians. Although it was my maternal grandmother’s first language, I did not take to it; I was uncomfortable with its guttural sounds and complex structure, and associated it with barbarians in war movies. I struggled with the introductory course.
During about the sixth week of the first term, the teacher, the very Teutonic Herr Gutmann—out of central casting as a fair-haired SS officer—was going around the classroom, having everyone read aloud from the textbook. When the guy next to me was done, Herr Gutmann grimaced and said, “Herr Shapiro, your accent is too YIDDISH!” After I took my turn, he said, “Weber”—pronounced Vay-burh—and commented, “Ya, sehr gut. Die name ist Lutheran?” I shrugged my shoulders but said nothing.
How foolish being Jewish makes some of us! But then again, wasn’t it Herr Gutmann’s fault, just as it was the Viennese who were to blame for Freud’s being such a schmegeggy?
DAD AND I HAD VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL FEATURES, and I speak with his voice and accent. But I have that farmer’s nose and full lips in a totally different tonality, and a leaner frame, and I use that speaking manner in a life that is a radical jump from my father’s. As I write this, how I love him and miss him, while feeling that I am him but, contradictorily, belong to a different species.
I see myself in a photo where I am wearing tennis whites as a camp counselor in New Hampshire, while I see Dad with Mother on the Queen Mary in 1952. In that marvelous picture of my parents, Dad looks like the Latin lover (in a white dinner jacket) of my mother, who might have been played by Lauren Bacall. In the one of me, I look as if I am the same American white bread as the rest of the staff. I even have the right sort of chipped front tooth.
Of course I am projecting; I am seeing my issues as the concerns that caused Sigmund Freud to be so disturbed, and stimulated, by elements of Luca Signorelli’s frescoes that he drew a blank on the artist’s name. You might accuse me of trying to psychoanalyze an experience in the life of the inventor of psychoanalysis: the height of presumption, especially for someone with no expertise whatsoever in the field. But isn’t this what all human minds do? Don’t we always mix up a lot that is coming from within us, feeling we do and do not understand, with our observations of other people? I by no means claim that there is a “truth.” The older I get, the more elusive I find the idea of certainty. I prefer love, the sheer pleasures of good art, the thrill of sexual desire, the acceptance of complexity and the impossibility of resolution, to the idea of “a sure verdict.” I am also intrigued by what one feels, as opposed to what one knows with certainty. I grew up in the tradition of what was considered rationalism, where we try to “solve” problems and assume we can pin down mysteries through research and detective work, but I am coming more and more to value gut feeling. Writing the biography of Piet Mondrian, I was astonished when I discovered that in 1941, the year after he moved to New York at age sixty-eight following two bombings of his London studio during the Blitz—having moved to London only two years earlier because he felt that Paris, which had been his home for twenty years, had become too dangerous—Mondrian had said to the artist Carl Holty that he “hated discipline.” The remark was a provocation from a highly disciplined person. What Mondrian preferred was “intuition.” This is what he observed and felt when Hazel Scott played Boogie-Woogie on the piano and he danced with Lee Krasner at the Café Society Uptown. I am convinced that the place to which Richard and Marietta led me with their brilliant exegesis inspiring my own associations and instinctive responses has guided me to understand why Sigmund Freud could not recall that name. The Karpes orchestrated the route, and my unplanned side trips in other directions were telling not just about me, but also about Freud.
Pivotally, the connection with Susie, which prompted the journey to begin with, resulted not only in my suspending logic, but also in my savoring the wonder of irrational attraction and the power of aesthetic beauty. I don’t think I would have opened that reprint if it were not for the memory of my intoxicant, with her navy blue-and-white polka-dot hair bow, charming the bejesus out of Richard Karpe. Susie caused something like nuclear fusion within me. Jewishness and the meaning of masculinity are interwoven issues for some of us, and, for me, all that arose with Susie became the catalyst for recognizing the particular dance they also provoked within Freud. Then came the way that art can be the stimulus to beat all others. The feelings of sons toward our fathers, what today is called our sense of gender, affect us immeasurably too. You may say these are my issues. But I am convinced they are the same that caused Freud’s much-analyzed, but never fully understood, fundamental parapraxis.
Sigmund Freud had reactions to Jacob that were amazingly parallel to my father’s reactions to his father. Comparing the Webers to the Freuds, I belong more to Martin’s generation, with Dad and Sigmund Freud aligned as the sons of Grandpa Dave and Jacob. My grandfather was always working for other men—his brothers and brother-in-law—just as Jacob Freud was never in charge in the garment business. Both men were quite unsuccessful. My father was not like my grandfather—he ran his own business, and he made a fair bit of money—yet I also identify to some degree with Sigmund, as regards the way he saw Jacob. Like Freud’s father, my own depended on his wife’s family (Dad took over Mother’s family’s printing business). To me, he was, quite simply, not a tough guy. Yet I feel guilty that I think that. And he had quiet strength, even if he never would have held me over a fire until I vowed to avenge our family’s enemies.
None of it is black and white; there is no single truth. Our fathers are many things seemingly opposite, simultaneously. But what is certain is that Freud, when looking at the Signorellis, would have been measuring himself and his father against Hannibal and Hamilcar. The allure of sheer masculine strength would have been fundamental to his experience of the frescoes. The discomfort and, yes, some form of sexual charge in the face of his dream male role models were so unbearable that he obliterated the artist’s name, beginning with the very same first three letters, from his mind.