IN 1896, MARTHA FREUD’S YOUNGER SISTER, Minna Bernays, had moved into the Freuds’ apartment at 19 Berggasse. She was unmarried; her fiancé had died in 1886, the same year that Sigmund and Martha were married.
It has long been thought that Freud and Minna had an affair; Carl Gustav Jung said that Minna confessed this to him. The Karpes may have been among the Freudian stalwarts who acted as if to believe that Freud and his sister-in-law were lovers is heresy, but it remains surprising that they did not even mention that possibility and Freud’s guilt over it as part of the reason for the parapraxis.
After all, at the time of the memory loss, Freud had just been discussing sexual potency. His thoughts had then progressed to paintings that depict the Last Judgment, suggesting that sins of the flesh merit eternity in hell. The paintings he was picturing vividly portray naked men, powerful young males presumably with great sexual force. Then Freud was unable to remember the artist’s name, which began with the same first letters as his own. It all makes sense that guilt over some aspect of his own sexuality was seminal to Freud’s parapraxis. Was it possibly his malaise because he was regularly screwing his wife’s sister?
Later in the same summer when I saw Susie and the Karpes talking at my parents’ house, she and I came off the tennis courts at about the same time. She had come up from Fairfield County to play with some friends. On the prime viewing court at the country club—the club that had been created in the 1920s by a small band of snobby German Jews who, although fair-skinned and refined in manner, knew better than to try for admission at the all-Protestant Hartford Golf Club—there was an important doubles tournament match being played by some very good players. The tennis was first-rate, and on the grassy hill where some forty spectators were watching it, I positioned myself directly behind Susie. She wore a short white tennis skirt; I was in regulation white shorts. I pressed myself against her and developed what I remember as the firmest erection possible, of longer duration than any other I have ever had.
In my memory, it lasted at least an hour, never flagging in the slightest. She did not move an inch. She just kept that sweet little ass of hers, absent an ounce of fat but wonderfully soft, the skirt taut, pressed against my throbbing cock. Even though Susie completely obsessed me, and even though, on the night she appeared in my bedroom, I had been focused totally on the little black bow between the cups of her bra, this was the only form of sexual encounter, if you can even call it that, she and I ever had. And how do I feel when writing this? I feel a mix of excitement and embarrassment, of thrill and taboo; I think joyfully of blatantly phallic African sculpture celebrating virility and male potency in general, but anticipate the shock of some of my readers at my indiscretion, and am sorry if the revelation is offensive. An adolescent boy and his mother’s friend, standing on the grassy bank that overlooked the red clay courts, glued to each other, with every deuce and tying of the game score being a joy for me because it meant the match was not yet over. I am amused; I am appalled. I remember it vividly; I want to suppress it.
In recent years, I thought that if I had been French rather than American, we would have had marvelous trysts—the whole caboodle—on afternoons in verdant parks, the way Tony Perkins and Ingrid Bergman did in the movie Goodby, Again, based on Françoise Sagan’s Aimez-vous Brahms? But I am lying to myself and fantasizing. The difference was not cultural; it was constitutional.
On a summer afternoon, a friend of mine, at age eighteen, our parents in the social set, returned a serving tray to a friend of his mother’s who had lent it for a large party. The pretty friend, twenty-five years his senior, invited him in, led him upstairs, and they “did it.” I was never that casual or confident.
But how provocative Susie was. My senior year at college, I had a fabulous girlfriend, Kippy Dewey, who could best be described as a hippie debutante. (She had been “presented” to society in a white ball gown at a cotillion; she also had large peace signs painted in purple on her beaten up VW Beetle, and directed a theater program in a poor neighborhood in inner city Boston.) We were together for over a year. When our romance was in full heat, and we were well-known to one another’s families, although our parents had never met, Kippy’s mother and father, both from old Boston Protestant families, went to a party at a Protestant country club in Connecticut. Susie was there. She made a point of meeting Talbot Dewey, Kippy’s father. The next day, she telephoned my mother to report that they had danced together all evening. He was “a divine dancer, and most attractive.” She knew full well that his daughter and I were lovers. As Dr. Solnit would ask, “What was all that about?”
When Susie was about eighty-five to my sixty, Katharine and I invited her for lunch. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but I was like a teenager getting ready for a date, and wore the jeans that made me feel the most stud-like. That was it—a frisson, a charge, an animal flirtation. But there are few forces as awakening, or as exciting, as physical magnetism. The following day I was still so keyed up that I wrote that the obsession of over forty years was both clearer and less clear to me. Susie was still among the most alive people I had ever known. My journal entry was hypomanic: “She is now as warm as she was once haughty. She is rich and worldly, but earthy. She is regal yet primitive.”
I was on fire, as animated as Signorelli’s frescoes, as obsessed as Freud with male youthfulness. “She notices everything. Yesterday, I felt young, virile, and eighteen years old in her company. Did she remember the feeling of my prolonged teenage hard-on pressed against her when we stood there over forty-two years ago?”
I had prepared a great lunch, and she caught everything—about what she ate, about whatever we discussed. I was struck by “her total recall and wicked sense of humor. She is, as she has always been, so unbelievably alive. She excites me so.”
A lot was different, though. She now identified herself, much more than back then, as being Jewish. Lots of references to it. She was wildly enthusiastic about the house, the Albers Foundation, and me. We went through a shared cast of characters, some alive, some dead, and she kept coming back to the subject of how people flirted “back then.” I felt like someone on speed, not knowing what to do with all the emotions: much as did the great sage of the human mind, Sigmund Freud, when aliveness and power were so vivid to him in Orvieto.
Five years after that lunch—Susie was ninety!—she invited Katharine and me and our daughter Lucy and our son-in-law to dinner. She suddenly turned to me, in the middle of a conversation about politics, and said, “Nicky! Your eyes are so blue.” I was a total idiot in my delight.
And if you ask what this last detail has to do about Freud and his block about Luca Signorelli’s name, it is because the issues are the same. Blue eyes—one of the telltale markers of “ein gute Arian.” The incredible force of attraction: whether it is the attraction to someone else, or the feeling that someone else is attracted to you or doing a damn good job of pretending to be. You can write about the id and penis envy and the Oedipus Complex until the cows come home, you can pontificate about human development all you want, you can even try to analyze your feelings about being Jewish and their connection to your father and what it means to have blue eyes when his were Galician green, but there is nothing that replaces the charge of irrational feelings.
It is easy enough to see why the sight of the reprint in my parents’ library, in the year following my mother’s death, beckoned me, for what better foil is there to death than sexual power? The mind never stops making leaps, with splendid sentiments coming to the rescue when sadness has dominated. But the mind is also forever stopping itself. Excitement becomes confusion; we have to shut down. I can readily understand how Freud could have jumped from discussing Turks and their views on sex to thinking of those paintings of male power to blocking on the name of the man who had made them.
This is something I had to come to grips with, painfully, in psychoanalysis. For the first year or so, I had no problem talking, and doing what I thought was a good job of plunging into the depths of my own inner life as I spewed anecdotes about my childhood as well as my present life. It was clear, however, that my doctor thought I had barely put my feet into the water.
Eventually, I learned to free-associate. It was, I believe, the hardest thing I have ever done. In some ways, it was comparable to the moments in rock climbing, a sport I adore, when you reach upward absolutely as far as possible with your arms, grab with your fingertips the bumps that are nothing more than infinitesimal protrusions, and jump upward, stretching one leg as never before, to find the slightest foothold, a minuscule inclination or crack, on which to balance the toe of your impossibly tight climbing shoe and then jump up with the other leg to another similar perch.
When I climb cliffs, however, I am harnessed and supported by carefully tied ropes. It is not a risk. It requires confidence and hope, but it never feels entirely dangerous. Free-associating is more difficult.
If I really reveal the bizarre sequence of thoughts and images that jump into my mind, I sound like the visual equivalent of a Jackson Pollock—with everything connected but with no single element readily discernible. It took at least a year before I was convinced that Dr. Solnit would not throw me out of the room like an idiot if I just spat out all that was flooding my mind, if I did not control my thoughts and impose order. I in no way allowed the apparent randomness of free association to occur, nor did I grasp that what might seem haphazard was in fact connected.
I imagined that if I let myself go, my doctor would laugh at me the way a master at Loomis once did when I fell on some sleek crust on a snowbank I was trying to walk up, in plain view of where he was seated at morning chapel. This teacher, who taught math, told me in front of the whole class that morning that he had seen me trying to perform this impossible feat and then fail, my books sliding this way and that as I sank into the snow. “I laughed”—pronounced loffed—“and I laughed and I laughed,” he said with his sadistic grin in front of all the other boys.
To leap into the realm in which one lets one’s mind explore all the possibilities, rather than to impose a series of halts, requires breaking the habits that are reinforced day and night both by the rules of civilized behavior and by the fear of derision. It is indeed like walking on thin ice.
I am not sure of my unconscious reasons, but with the investigation of what happened to Freud when he could not remember the name of the painter of the Orvieto frescoes, I convinced myself I had gone as far as I could. Yet this was a form of self-deceit. Something had me stop when there was a vital link I had not yet made. I was like a climber on the face of a cliff who thinks he is doing well by ascending on pronounced protrusions that are like shelves but who is unwilling to try the areas that are more challenging.
Then I showed everything I had written to date about the Karpes’ text and Freud’s parapraxis and my theories on Jewishness and maleness and my associations with Susie to Victoria Wilson, the editor of the books I have been writing about artists and architects and art patrons for the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for over twenty-five years. Vicky has always been as insightful and savvy and tough a reader of my writing as I have ever known. I felt that I had researched my subject to its maximum, that I had expanded my horizons and ventured into a new area of writing, and that I had gone to the summit.
Vicky responded enthusiastically but also said that I needed to make the links clearer. She wanted everything to be “crystalline”; the way things were connected needed more precise explanations.
I realized that the detail I needed to consider more fully was the real importance of this information Freud had acquired in Trafoi a few weeks before he was unable to recall Signorelli’s name. I have to admit that, about a year ago, my main response to learning about Trafoi was simply to find out where it was. I then did research to determine if it would be a good place for a ski trip, combining my favorite sport with the knowledge that I might do it at a place where Freud liked to spend holidays. Given the tools of research now available via the Internet, I should have done better. It’s as if I were trying to divert myself by imagining whooshing down the snow-covered slopes, rather than addressing an important matter head-on.
I now realize that, suppressing something in myself, I had completely failed to go down a road that would provide a vital linkage of facts. I am not sure if I had been timid or just sloppy, but what is clear is that I had closed both eyes to a vital detail.
WHEN THE KARPES WERE WRITING, OF COURSE, the affair with Minna was only a rumor. It’s understandable that they did not consider it as a factor.
I have no such excuse. In 2007, a German researcher discovered that on August 13, 1898, the forty-two-year-old Freud and the thirty-three-year-old Minna Bernays registered as a married couple at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja—a village high in the Swiss Alps, near St. Moritz. They stayed in room 11—one of the largest in the inn—for three nights, and while Freud wrote postcards to Martha, who was in Vienna, and described the glaciers and the mountain scenery, the documentation at the inn names the woman staying with him as his wife.
It was not so hard to access, online, the newspaper article and other sources that make this information definitive. And, oddly, they all leave out what I consider a very important fact, which is that Freud’s eldest sister, Anna, was married to Martha and Minna’s older brother, El. So the connections between the Bernays and Freud families already exceeded normal boundaries.
Trafoi and Maloja are near each other in the Tyrol. But what I now grasp, and had failed to discern at a point when I thought my research was essentially done—until Vicky Wilson, like a psychoanalyst, encouraged me to go further, to seek clarity, really to understand what led to what—is that only a month before Freud vividly remembered those images of virile men brandishing the effects of testosterone, yet could not remember the name that had the same first three letters as his own, those letters being associated with words in various languages for “man,” he had spent three nights in a hotel room with his young sister-in-law, having checked them in with false names. I now think that Freud’s efforts to blame the misfired memory loss on what happened in Trafoi were a subterfuge; it was what occurred in another mountain village, a few days later, that he was trying to forget—or cover up.
Talk about guilt!
If we follow Freud’s methodology, as he describes it in the Parapsychology of Everyday Life, then his efforts to keep one thing secret caused him to miss the target and keep another thing secret. The thing he kept secret concerned names. He had lied about the identity of Mrs. Sigmund Freud. In Italian, and we are speaking of the Italian part of the Alps, the word for “she” is élla. Signor is Mr.; élla is “she.” The combination is mighty close to the name Signorelli. Freud had, in fact, concealed the truth about who the élla was with the signor. He had also lied about signorina (also lied by concealing the truth that his companion was a signorina—as indeed Miss Bernays was—and making her a signora). Now his mind concealed the name Signorelli.
On the other hand, Minna and Sigmund often traveled together, apart from the rest of the family, with everyone’s knowledge.
We also know from a letter Freud wrote Fliess two years later, when he and Martha were yet again going to Trafoi, that he scheduled that trip so it would not coincide with his wife’s menstrual period, during which time she was “not capable of enjoyment.” So he still had sex with his wife, and planned his mountain holidays accordingly! The “affair with Minna” obsessives—and there are many—are unjust in claiming that Martha, the mother of six small children, no longer made love, which is what forced Sigmund to turn elsewhere.
Maybe he and Minna were being frugal, and so stayed in one room, yet had to register as husband and wife because it was the law. As my maternal grandmother used to say, “Unless you’re under the bed, you don’t know, and even then you can’t be sure.”