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PSYCHOANALYTIC: the mulege amoeba dream + a trapper trapped+ opening of A PATIENT'S EXPERIENCE OF HIS ANALYSIS + Part I of the Psychoanalytic Monograph of Peter Handke http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/2009/09/peter-hhandke-wounded-love-child.html
THE MULEGE AMOEBA DREAM
The “simplest” of dreams & comment on what I think it tells us about what we can say about the many matters that are the case. The dream, the Amoeba Dream – an entirely narcissistic dream since it involved an injury to a hyper-cathected part the body ego - was dreamt in January of 1992, in the small town of Mulege, in Baja California Sur, Mexico; and its singing woke me rather earlier and less pleasantly than the towns many roosters, braying burros, dogs and birds usually did. Visually, the dream was represented in the form of “A profusion of Chinamen - singing in unison, and dressed in yellow, delta-shaped hats - cutting into the walls of a convoluted mine shaft.” Transcribed into words, the dream said: “Some Chinks are working overtime in the mine shafts.” [Chink/sing] – I awoke knowing, without needing to reflect on or analyze the dream, that I was suffering from a severe case of intestinal amoebas; the toilet was nearby, as was my collection of native herbal cures that the prescient traveler had acquired from the big glass jars stacked to the ceiling at that badly lighted ancient, mysterious and beautiful shop, the Central Botanica in Ensenada. The question is: What does it take for this dream to be dreamt, acted upon, comprehended, communicated, and remembered, etc. 1] Evidently a goodly number of amoebas, which I knew to be lethal if they accumulate in your liver or course in your blood stream into your brain. 2] Someone who informs himself as to the danger of intestinal amoebas, and who is therefore on the alert; the quality of mental alertness. 3] Someone who, nonetheless, becomes careless as to what he eats, or unlucky with the dishes he eats from. 4] Someone with an ear to listen to what sings in his dreams. 5] On a more serious note: a] Intestines with nerves. b] Nerves that are in communication, in the way that nerves communicate, with the brain, its vestiges in the stomach & at the top end of the digestive worm. Brain cells, synapses, brain chemistry and circuitry, electricity. c] A perceptual system that registers amoebas cutting into intestines as pain; the knowledge of what pain is; the ability to respond to pain. d] A perceptual system that translates the sensations into visual representation; the system evidently must have access to a variety of sources to reach its conclusion; what nexus is it where the information, coming from the various sources, is combined? And whence the information can be unraveled, to an extant to what we call associating involuntarily. e] A narrative function that represents what is occurring in story form; the narrative function itself is dependent on the mental state that we call curiosity; brief, nearly as a telegram as this communication to my self was. f] An inner eye that perceives what is being presented to it; g] An inner ear that hearkens; h] A recognition of danger, to which one can react with fright; i] A communicative system, in the brain, that translates these matters into what we call consciousness [or a consciousness that always is so, be it in a sleeping or waking state], evidently related, in this instance, to an ability to “hear” and “see”, apparently an internalized eye and ear looking and listening inwardly. - How would this dream be dreamt by someone who is congenitally blind? How do you store the idea of amoebas if you are blind: as woodpeckers, as tiny dogs or rats that may have bitten you? At any event: by analogy. Yet what if you are both blind and deaf but can read Braille: tactilely then? As taste? j] The ability to waken from sleeping into a state that we call awake, simultaneously conscious in this instance of waking and of having been seized by the dream - that is, both of what is inside and what is outside and of the distinction between the two, which were not reflective of each other and stood in no relationship to each other; one part of me, still seized by the inner experience, is taking in a much less charged outside.k] The ability, first, to translate the information into visual imagery and then into words, although the original translation may have been from verbal form into imagery; possibly the translation of what was occurring physically was translated simultaneously into visual as well as verbal terms; yet a variety of memories were evidently accessed for the formulation; grammar; a notion of “sense.” All of those areas were accessed. The dream was dreamt in English; it might also have been dreamt in German; by the fourth incident of amoebic dysentery it could also have been dreamt in Mexican. Intestinales!m] A brain, some of whose various functions, had it been observed by magnetic resonance imaging, would have appeared to be especially active; that is, an economic factor would have been discernible in the images taken. Intensity. An anxious brain, since it knew it could be invaded by amoebas!n] Someone still strong enough to rush to the toilet and proceed on his cure, including a ten day course of Flagyl, which contains minute amounts of arsenic and is therefore even tougher on your stomach than natural herbal concoctions;o] A computer dream screen on which to reverie this communication into one piece! Simple as the dream seems to be as a communication of danger, of an internal one in this instance, it contains one oddity that may even be apparent to someone who does not know the penumbra of my associations: why did the “chinks” that the amoebas cut into intestinal walls, so as to access the bloodstream and proliferate there, need to be represented by “Chinamen” in delta-shaped yellow hats. The “yellow” is easy enough and is realistic in the sense of “yellow plague”: after all, I was being plagued by a “yellow peril” of sorts; I didn‘t like those “chinks” that they were producing, not one bit; moreover, “yellow” is a frequent byproduct of infections, which however I cannot be said to have had: the color yellow is also a by product of liver disease; I can be said to have been scared first yellow and then shitless by the dream; however, my temperature felt quite normal, anxiety of a possibly impending infection then. There is the matter of the “delta” or triangle-shaped hats [seen from a certain angle, as that in the dream, such hats can look triangular and have a dimension, so there is a representational distortion going on in this efficient condensation: however, the notion of “delta-shaped” probably derived from my knowledge of one of the oldest unchanging creatures in our world, the shape of the excrescences of the three million year old jelly-fish, which leave such an unpleasant sting, and a sufficiency of whose defensive emissions can kill you. Yet why the inefficiency of going to the trouble of turning this profusion of dream-mine-mind-magnified “delta-shaped” chink-producing amoebas into “men.” The dream had one other message, and that message was: “You are screwed!” And, literally, only men can screw men: aside the metaphoric truth of that communication of my possible death, the dream thoughts touched on more ancient anxieties. Also: the sheer profusion of these “little men” reminded me of what Lilliputians can do to one’s sense of grandiosity, which had become quite inflated during those first three months in the Baja - what we call the “super-ego” was glad to be out of Bush the First’s Los Estados Unidos Norte and its host of investigations; thusly decompressed, it was quite unrestrained, a bit high, before I was brought low; and dreams being brought low, too, had an ancient history. CommentaryA] Regarding the dream within the history of dream interpretation, I think it would be safe to conclude that what is called “primary process” and “secondary process” mentation occurred simultaneously. How long had the dream been “brewing”? Although amoebas propagate exponentially, it had to have been brewing for some time, but these “chinks” singing was the first I heard of it, the first evidence I had seen of them and the blood they drew. A critical mass had been reached which exceeded whatever disavowal, whatever defenses, if that is the word here, I had put up against wanting to realize what was transpiring inside me. After all, my stool told me that this biting had been going on longer since the minutes that I had dreamt the dream. I had had a delicious very lean Mexican steak at a restaurant called Los Equipales, which is still owned by one Francisco [Pancho] Marron, an interesting last name indeed, though its bearer was quite unaware of its significance. Perhaps the amoebas had feasted on the steak before again turning to me. B] As to wishes being fulfilled: this would seem to be a pretty straightforward anxiety dream, and the only wish that might be latent is the wish to get well. The dream, as pure communication, may possibly be overdetermined in that it also manifests elements of hysteria; and so the notion that the shape of the amoebas was triangular may be overdetermined, too. The “hats” may be the only source of humor, since the sensation of pain mingled with intestinal tickling, the singing sounded also like giggling. However, the amoebas were also on their way to knocking my head/hat off. An overall - nearly petroglyphic - efficiency is to be noted in the construction of the dream for the purpose of being communicative. As to what is called displacement and condensation: the displacement is fairly minor in this instance if for the simple reason that there was a wanting to know directly; condensation is essential if only for the sake of nerve transmission and brain processing. C] As to compromises: the communication strikes me as about as direct as possible. There was no pleasure, only pain and greater pain on the horizon. This was a one-act dream, from which I awoke upon a realization of its significance. The matter of the dream drawing on a variety of mental capacities – does that make it automatically a compromise? Or ought the term compromise be reserved for the transformation of conflicting elements that turn into a third element that can be broken down into its components? Though the associations to the various elements of the dream then become fairly numerous, the message being sung is pretty unequivocal, univocal. D] This is a self-state dream in the sense that it injured my sense of grandiosity; in that respect it is a dream that communicates an injury to the body ego. E] I noted the dream down that morning, made it part of a memoir of my three years in Baja California Sur, and recounted it a few times to people unfamiliar with the esoteric pseudo-science as being illustrative of the pragmatic use of hearkening to your dreams, in the faint hope that they might also pay attention to other matters that dreams can tell them about themselves. I have had similarly efficient dreams about tooth infections, impending colds. F] There is no other person in the dream but my body, except for that profusions of “Chinamen” [with whose few shopkeeper descendents in Mulege, inasmuch as I had become aware of their existence, I was on the best of terms,] and that body is that of a Gulliver who may have been gullible to assume a false sense of security in thinking that he was too big to eat while the Lilliputians were carving gullies into him. G] It is possible to conclude from this dream that the mind/brain - in analogy to my beloved term “super-ego” - has a nexus one might term “super coordinator” or “supra-processor,” the main terminal where all these matters come together, and did sufficiently forcefully so to overcome the wish to go on sleeping. H] As a matter of fact - excepting my ability to translate the dream into verbal language - we can imagine it being dreamt by just about any mammal in a similar state of distress. I am fairly certain that when my dog wakens from his yapping excited REM dreams and I wave either a rabbit’s foot or a deer’s hoof before his nose and he avidly nods in assent, that the chase he has been engaged is for the eternal rabbit or Bambi. I] In the fewest possible words: from the nexus to the parts, or via the part to the nexus. Despite taking even greater care with the food I consumed I managed to contract three further cases of amoebic dysentery in Mexico and one here in Seattle; the onset of each of which was communicated by a dream.
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TRAPPING THE TRAPPER
TRAPPING THE TRAPPER By Michael Roloff “The gradual passage of time [Lange Weile] is the Dream Bird that Hatches the Egg of Experience.” Walter Benjamin, from the essay on Leskov, On the Writing of Fairy Tales. [1] DER ERLKOENIG Wer reitet so spaet durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind. Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er fasst ihn sicher, er haelt ihn warm. "Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?" "Siehst, Vater, da den Erlkoenig nicht, Den Erlenkoenig mit Kron' und Schweif?" "Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif." "Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir! Gar schoene Spiel spiel ich mit dir; Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand, Meine Mutter hat manch guelden Gewand." "Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hoerest du nicht, Was Erlenkoenig mir leise verspricht!?" "Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind; In duerren Blaettern saeuselt der Wind." "Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn? Meine Toechter solln dich warten schoen; Meine Toechter fuehren den naechtlichen Reihn Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein." "Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort Erlkoenigs Toechter am duestren Ort?" "Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau, Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau." "Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schoene Gestalt; Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt." "Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt fasst er mich an! Erlkoenig hat mir ein Leids getan!" Dem Vater grauselts, er reitet geschwind, Er haelt in Armen das aechzende Kind, Erreicht den Hof mit Muehe und Not – In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.
Reading The King of the Reeds, as I call one of Goethe's richest lyrics, makes me, who once delighted in deciphering the puns of Finnegans Wake, want to hold back/ from the numerous interpretations that this poem suggests; it is a poem which I doubt could be written with equal openness and such seeming naiveté a hundred years into the art of analytic interpretation: it’s wealth of associations speaks too richly, too suggestively to tie it down; and with Franz Schubert's setting in your ear, it will be that much more haunting, or terrifying, as the case may be; and in a translation that here tries to retain some of the atmosphere, tone, bounding rhythm, concreteness as well as vagueness of detail, and the loaded symbolism, in all its surface simplicity, all of which in an analytic situation, which at the point that this dream was dreamt and responded to in astounding fashion, could not have been more drenched with Oedipal and pre-Oedipal material: Who’s that's riding through the wind at night?/ It’s the father with his child./ Holding his boy safely in his arms,/ he's holding him surely, he's holding him warm. "Son, why are you hiding your face, are you afraid?"/ "Look father, the king of the reeds, look how near, / the king of the reeds with his crown and his tail?"/ “But that’s just a fog bank, dear.” "Dear child, come away with me!/ Wondrous games I'll play with thee/ Many-colored flowers grow on my shores;/ mother has many a golden fleece." "Father, my father, oh don't you hear /what promises the king of the reeds is whispering to me?"/ "Be still, you must stay still, my son;/ it's just dry leaves rustling in the wind." "Fair boy, don't you wish to come with me? / My daughters will wait hand and foot on thee, / my daughters lead the dances at night/and will rock and dance you to sleep." "My father, my father, oh don't you see/ the king of the reed's daughters over there by the sea?"/ "Son, my son, I see it all only too well, it's the old willows forever so gray." "I love you, I'm enticed by your beautiful shape; /and if you won't willingly I'll use force!"/ "Father, my father, he's touching me!/ The king of the reed has done me harm." Uncanniness seizes the father, he rides in haste, / he clasps in his arm his aching child, / reaches home in dreadful straits/ the child in his arms is dead. I learned Der Erlkoenig as King of the Reeds is called in German [and as I translate the usual title The Erlking to emphasize the physical setting of this animist, Celtic-Germanic tale] and by heart, plus at least a dozen other Goethe poems, [2] during my senior year at college at the most pleasant coffee and cake evening classes at the nicest, learned but unpedantic professor’s home. One reason perhaps why I learned these poems so easily was that - as opposed to a pedantic father who, despite his misfortunes under authoritarianism, force fed me and my cousins various stupidly bouncy Schiller’s poems - Die Glocke in my instance – that professor represented the sought for "good father," for whom learning beautiful things by heart was more play than chore. On subsequent reflection on why this dream was dreamt at that particular time and in this fashion, it will be apparent that the theme of “good father” had been something like a constant in the analysis pretty much as of its inception approximately fifteen months prior. Much had transpired in the meanwhile, chiefly a regression to an abandonment at age nine month, precipitated by a breakup with a lover, and the inception of the entrancement with Dr. X as a torturously experienced object was in full direness, say, as opposed to the always fascinating if sometimes annoying swing we had been in even during the breakup. The time I first heard Schubert’s setting of the poem I cannot recall. However, I expect that if I did not hear it on the radio, it was also part of my father’s voluminous 78 rpm record collection, most of which I played during his near total absence before he and my mother returned, magically, against every odds surviving their respective Gestapo prisons during the Soviet Army’s siege of Berlin in Spring 1945. And I must have also heard it subsequently, though, at that time, in 1983, that Audienz must have lain many years in the past. The poem has a holding quality, and if one wishes to expand the notion of transitional object to something of a greater complexity than it is normally thought of, it would be possible to maintain that the many-sided fabric of the poem – the fabric of language, the fabric in which analysis is conducted - leads to the earliest memories, to the instinctual, the rhythmically haunting and panicky; it's super ego voices, its caringness, its anxieties, its seductiveness, its transgressions, its sensate and sensuousness qualities - are of a very high order, particularly to someone like me who was exposed as of in utero to endless music, recorded and at concerts, which my father, a conductor’s best ear, attended both for pleasurable and representational reasons. The night before the crucial session during which the trapper of my unconscious was caught into confessing that he knew German, I dreamt that I was conducting Dr. X singing Der Erlkoenig, in all its windswept, eerie, stormy, musical fashion - perhaps the dream of the mad Hugo Wolf that one of Freud’s patients dreamt, and the whole notion of redreaming someone else’s dream, were motivation for its construction on the part of someone who was conducting a no doubt resistant parallel self-analysis with the assistance of The Interpretation of Dreams [FN] : Lieder! Songs! Sing. Liederlich = sloppy; you Luder = you lying bastard were some obvious associations. However Dr. X, above whom this sometimes very much suddenly-out-of-the-nowhere [obviously out of a state of suppression] upstart conductor, who at one time in his life had considered becoming such a one, was standing, was not singing obediently and well enough it appears. The dream contained several if not all the stanzas of the poem, in Franz Schubert’s [er schubbert, he’s lying] setting, as Dr. X sang [singing also very much in the kind of “singing” truth-telling that, if you don’t, can land you in the N.Y. State prison Sing Sing], whereupon I raised the baton [bat, bat on] and beat the singing analyst down into a N.Y. City manhole, whence he descended with a kind of “the death of Don Giovanni” decrescendo screech with which I had crashed and now crashed him in a dream of a crashing 747 that had announced the impending crash of my relationship with the now vanished amour disparu. It was a decrescendo acquainted me with the truth of atonal hell, one reason I suspect why everything harmonious is as suspect to me as it was to Adorno who recognized some fierce subjective truth in the disharmonious. [3] Or why I liked the Miles Davis of Witches Brew or the kind of music that Herbie Hancock [4] did in the 70s. I had that kind of atonal experience inside me, from early on it appears. There was what was experienced as a severe abandonment at age nine moths; I had heard planes whine and screech as they crashed during my childhood. One of my earliest complex as opposed to one-note screen memories, of a furious and angry mechanical screech, as a matter of fact goes back to that of two toy train engines colliding in a make believe Alpine papiér maché tunnel, at Christmas 1941, at age four. [5] So as to the matter of over-determination, there seems not to have been any lack thereof in each and every respect. However, the solution to the equation in which this determination can be formulated I expect over-taxes the ability of someone, who some years hence in his analyses, so excelled at interpreting dreams that the dream mine, from one interpreted dream to the next, upped the ante in matters of difficulty, so that I – my sense of reason and time prevailing, eventually conceded defeat to the ingenuity of the dream weaver. That morning, after I had dreamt what I call the Trapping the Trapper Dream, upon lying down on the couch in my usual fashion and warming up with the usual pitter patter of what had transpired since we had seen each other last, I launched into a recounting of this dream, which had as it were seized me, unanalyzed at that point, and to my amazement Dr. X started to “sing” the very poem-song that I had had him sing in the dream. Within the first bar I said: "I thought you didn't know German." So that was what the dream was about. There was a moment of mutual silence. Maybe there ought to have been a session’s worth of silence. # At this point I need to backtrack about fifteen months to the inception of the analysis and then work my way forward through the relevant stages and incidents to that then present moment. I had come to pick Dr. X as my analyst at the suggestion of Dr. Kurt Eissler who, though he said that we were making a compromise, picked Dr. X because he fit three of the four of my criteria: he was a man, he was thoroughly experienced, and he knew German; the one requirement that he did not meet was that he was not about Dr. Eissler’s age: on subsequent reflection I had asked for a grandfather figure. As a matter of fact, Dr. Eisler I halfway felt after the second of our two meetings would have fit my bill of requirements very nicely. Dr. E. also mentioned that I ought to send him a postcard down the line and let him know what I thought of Dr. X; he wasn't really sure about him. If the purpose of the suggestion was to put a sometimes extremely nonchalant me on an alert, an alert a preferably also sleepy me did not want to be in, that purpose, as well as the puzzlement introduced by the “second take,” to use a term from the recording industry, could not have been better served. I sent Dr. E. his postcard about the time that Dr. X announced to a baffled me that the “transference” had set in. I might [again] have asked Dr. X, what he was talking about, to me who, by then, had been talking away on the couch for some months. The word rapport I would have understood. “Yes, best as I can tell, he seems o.k.” But how and who was a novice such as myself to assess an analyst, as compared to someone who botched an operation? The first two weeks’ eight sessions with Dr. X - and never again, except for those instantly formalizing arrivals and leavings at which, turning around for that last look, I caught sight of the same face ludicrously scrunched up into a gargoyle projection screen that tried so painfully not to disclose its feelings - were spent en face, telling Dr. X earliest remembered dreams and memories [invaluable screen memories they all turned out to be which, so much like my childhood’s compressed Japanese paper flowers, magically expanded when nourished in the placenta of the analytic setting]. This shower of offerings of mine, pretty much tossed pell mell, included an extraordinarily painful event that had cut the evidently so cuttable me to the quick at age seven. It involved habited protestant nurses jokingly accusing me of my passion having killed my [subsequent to my mother of course!] first amour, a German jet fighter's wife who had a heart ailment [and whose husband no doubt flew jet-propulsed Me-261s of the kind that I heard screaming and screeching overhead on the slate-colored sky of my village but never could catch sight off - that fairy tale monster bird element, too, was playing into the animist fairy tale as which I experienced and digested my childhood world [bird in every including the beaked sense of its German word Vogel] and with which luscious beauty I importunately had played patiénce until I was released back into the clutches of my prison keep, leaving the heart patient and her bad ticker behind [just as I had played patiénce with my mother’s mother when she refused to go down into the cellar of our house out in the country during the not-that-remote but invariably exciting bombing attacks] on our bunker-hospital’s patio while recovering from tonsillitis when the weather that summer of 1944 was obliging and Bremen was not being bombed to smithereens, the trembling of the reinforced-cement bunker providing foretaste of deeper tremors to come. Time. The experience has congealed into a metaphor and a real memory screen memory. At the communication of what the sisters had said Dr. X flinched, and I recall flinching at his flinching – the wounded curing the wounded it was going to be: the man had empathy, too much damn empathy if you asked me! But for that I could trust him, so I assumed. All you need do is show me a scar or tell me of an operation and I flinch, involuntarily. Uncontrollably. I even laugh about it most of the time, because the involuntariness of it is as laughable as Dr. X involuntariness was initially when we had first met. That shared whatever pain, and whatever deeper pains collected around the flinching was the actual onset of rapport for me, and of too quick trust, [6] from my point of experience, as compared to the baffling announcement about the “transference” having set in that Dr. X would make some months down the road. I also recall that, before lying down, after the first two weeks, I duplicated the attempt to ferret information about Dr. X, as I had with Dr. E., so as to establish a “normal relationship.” But Dr. X stated that the less I knew about him the better it would be for the analysis – and who was I to quarrel with the expert, puzzling as I found that kind of arrangement between two persons who were going to spend much time with each other. However, in retrospect, I could not be happier, for the sake of this training bra of an analysis, except for one crucial instance, that the projection screen mirror that Dr. X presented remained unmuddied by personal information about him, comical as that gargoyle remained – particularly to someone who had spent much time in the most ancient of castles and in very medieval surrounds during his childhood - as a last sight after the resurfacings from such sometimes volcanic depths. Not that real curiosity as to who Dr. X was aside from my experience of him as ear and voice and a razor-quick consciousness was allayed at any but surface level. The neutrality that his voice expressed, in most instances, proved sufficient reassurance that we were attuned, from which attunement, when we were attuned, I – being someone to who had felt since early childhood that most understanding was “implicit”! – inferred that he understood, however he had arrived at this understanding - through empathy or actual experience or expertise - being irrelevant. The one time I encountered Dr. X outside the consulting room – out on the street - he looked to have one shoulder considerably lower than the other: “Were you wounded during the war,” I asked with genuine concern from the couch, once again seeking to establish a “normal relationship” [between the wounded!], but his rebuff seemed so total as to obviate any further concern I might have for him as a human being, especially during the last stage of the unfolding spells, to which I had scarcely ever had feelings of any kind. Well, yes, when he had a cold – and no matter that at some point, despite everything that transpired, I was immensely grateful for everything I had learned during our probe. Also, I recall, asking Dr. X whether he knew German; which he said he didn't, and my saying, “Oh I thought that you did,” whereas, being a bit less polite - “calling him,” to use the poker term - I might have said: “Dr. Eissler said that you did.” And - in retrospect - then what? Or Dr. X might have said: “What gave you the idea?” which certainly would have kept that ball rolling, and might have obviated the coup of the “trapping the trapper” dream that these initial moves were so fatefully setting up. Not that there would not have been a coup attempt anyway, but it would certainly have been of a different kind, perhaps a dream would have sought to elicit the nature of his wound. But then, impulsively, it didn't seem all that important to make that much of an issue over whether Dr. X knew German or not! I would take a chance! Yet another chance! I wanted for the adventure to begin. So I would have to translate. Big deal! Half of my life had been spent translating, some of it the kind of work that required the most delicate of ears, deep musicality and sense of rhythm. Yet another instance of so many chances taken. Perhaps there had been a mis-communication between the two doctors? But for the very reason that the first doctor had asked me to be alert to Dr. X, my preternatural alertness had now become doubly honed; it would become even more sharply honed as time passed. I suspect that Dr. X decided to take “his chance” of lying about not knowing German somewhere during our first eight face to face encounters: “You don’t know your story.” [I didn’t then.] I knew too little, I could be trusted to be fooled, and to mutual advantage at that! I recall that upon lying down on the couch I knew the fundamental rule, though it was of course reiterated, and I very much knew what it meant, and knew it to the point of being sometimes socially obliviously impolitic; and knew its steely value, which was to be adhered to to such a degree that you reserved that one lie for that one moment that you needed it to save your skin, something I had needed to do - it had been with a partner at the firm - only once, and which I had learned from my mother whose savoir faire had saved her skin in that fashion when she, a dashing counter espionage agent, had been entrapped by the Gestapo; a maternal figure, the only one I really listened to in my childhood, who detested lies, laugh as she might about my father’s lying even when he did not need to, something that made him grin idiotico-charmimgly and self-consciously when he was caught yet again. Within the day of being on the couch I stated - subsequent to a confession of something important that I had until then concealed - in these very words: "This will only work if I am completely honest." Not that I, much later, during a truly torturous stage of the analysis, when Dr. X was experienced as a torturing Gestapo agent, didn’t learn to clam up at times, offering only the most minimal information. That stage, when everything turned into a NO despite the fact that Dr. X said, quite accurately, that he was not saying no to anything, was just then setting in. Dr. X and his indefinable, central European, slightly nasal accent [a feature amplified by the answering machine which so sheared his voice of its pleasant cushioning] had ample opportunity for the compromise solution of: "Well, of course I heard a little German in my childhood," or, "I know some Yiddish, but it would be pushing it to say that I know German" so as to get himself out of what turned out to be, obviously and the more so in the dream that caught him, the most dreadful of fixes of his own making; and I might have said; “Yes I know some Yiddish and there was a time I knew Middle High German;” the cake I assumed being to trap what I wanted to catch myself, the conscience of the king, to catch it in the discrepancy between the original and the translation – to which the doubled consulting with Dr. E. had alerted me. Entry into the adventure, thus, already had its own prehistory, and so it had been “off into uncertain waters;” especially so for the person who found refugio on his couch in the early 80s who might well have come in from some years at the front lines [“The Spy who came in from the Cold” was the title of one dream during the analysis.]; as tomcat, this person was a bit chewed up; he’d been a bit through the mill; and that he would arise of the experience like a phoenix, at least for a while, though also deeply puzzled, who could have anticipated that? I had been in the process of transitioning even before entering analysis, I had begun to survey my involvement in a large incestuous clan, the darlings and monsters clan I called it, extricating myself from it while ascertaining its intricate landscape. I had finally decided to take head-on a partner at a firm that was just going down in flames, and who, on looking back, had driven me nearly as insane I had seen him drive a previous partner of his – one of the major themes early on in the analysis. Moreover, I was just recovering from a case of anemia, with the amusing result that upon my frequent slips I would say: “Oh, my anemia” – anemia as involuntary amnesia, what could be more appropriate! Or vice versa. However, the nice thing about such slips is that you know that you really know and that eventually the word will spill and that you will find out why your lips resisted! # To return to the moment that Dr. X, after all these months, admitted that he knew German; and did not avail himself of the lie that he just happened to know a few Lieder: this particular Trapper dream did not come out of the long ago blue of the initiation of the transference. On reflection on one of the dreams immediately preceding the tolling of this bell, I concluded that there had at least been one other dream that had tested him. Not only had there been the penultimate testing dream, but my chief way of communicating with Dr. X was to speak in what, the briefest elaboration of his reminded me, were metaphors, out of a trance, or to deliver up my dreams. The work, initially, had begun to have traction once I acknowledged the empirical fact that I was talking over Dr X’s voice, trying to shut out things he had to say - I evidently wanted to retain entirely my own view of matters - while delivering myself of my New York novel’s worth of tails and details and all their very many sometimes very dirty tails: thereupon I made the effort to hear him out, finding his observations quickly fruitful; nonetheless, many of his right on the nose observations must yet have proved irksome no matter that “facing it” quickly became my way of dealing with them – except for an exploration of the most powerful denials at the inception of the breakup. Dreams, very much underground for years, had quickly begun to resurface: “Some good, some bad”: Dr. X’s enigmatic comments fostered curiosity. I had been curious all my life about my first remembered dream of “teasing a Billy goat,” [Bock, the adjective being bockig, stubborn-[5] who thereupon had chased this anxious four year old also farmyard me of that dream up a forest clearing [Schneise in German where it sounds much like schneide, to cut] - and then for the unicorn to pin me at the V of two intersecting fences in the farthest part of the forest on our property as I woke in terror. Remember that and don’t forget it is what such dreams say, indelibly! Predispositions, prior traumas. Ambiguous, conflicted and multiple spells even then. The opposite of that dream then was dreamt during the course of the twenty-four dreams that charted the course of the breakup, from inception to blank slate dream: in one of those dreams I turned into the Billy Goat of my childhood. All this seemed to the good, or certainly not to any degree of such serious disagreeability that I might have thought of quitting the procedure [though at one time I considered, projectively, changing analysts], and the asked-for postcard that I then sent Dr. E., saying that Dr. X seemed to be o.k., did not cite his apparent lack of German; that theme had been put into abeyance; in that grotto it hibernated, its sensors put on subliminal alert, a slightly frustrated wish, I think I was right in thinking that the language of childhood would play a role. - Not that I, who had no basis for comparison for such evaluation, could really tell how well the analysis was going, despite the fact that I did a kind of monthly run-through, just as I did with all my projects, of where we stood - though my successfully standing up to the partner, without the least ambivalence, if belatedly, having totally turned the tables, indeed might have. However, that standing up had begun prior to the analysis, upon the discovery that the partner had stolen a close friend’s life work; that had been the decisive trigger to eliminate all ambivalence to a single-minded degree. I did not consider that, being in so many ways pleasurably recumbent while floating off in this particular bathysphere down to the fault of my being, I might eventually find the entire situation ignominious, and worth revolting against, if only in a dream. Dreams, as I have said, had come back to life within a few weeks of analysis, but were not thoroughly analyzed at first, puzzling productions of the unconscious whose meaning I however was delighted to be able to catch fairly rapidly through fascinated observation of the process of associating involuntarily; one side of me was producing – the other was fascinated by the productions! I called its source the flim-flam mine, also because each dream was like a filmstrip. The world told as a series of puns as in Finnegan’s Wake had always struck me as one proper response to existence. Moreover, such producing was not all that different from the time when I had written my first fairy tales in German class at age twelve; all you needed do was give me the name of a site, say Duevelsberg [Devils Mountain] and the imagination, within a school hour, produced a story explaining how the hill had got its name: an angry fire-breathing Zeus had rolled wagon wheels wrapped in burning straw down the hill to terrify the brother horde besieging teasing him, at the Winter solstice, a nordic imprecation and celebration for the sun to arise again, perhaps from the Wolf that had swallowed it. - Located not far from a heath [Devils Moor] what little contact I had during my early years with the village and the farmers of the surround had been stuff for an imagination that thrived on my father’s large unread collection of all the world’s fairy tales and sagas. The teacher was happy too, made me read the story to the class, and then pulled my ear for my disregard of the rules of punctuation. The class seemed awed, and giggled at the baldheaded Prussian professor’s sadism. I myself was astonished at what I had produced as I read it out loud; was pleased at the surprising response of my schoolmates; annoyed at having had my ear pulled. During the sequence of the analysis that focused on the breakup there had been one dream in particular that had elicited wonderful spontaneous laughter from Dr. X. The girlfriend disparu’s parents had brought tin after tin of chocolate vanilla cookies up to our loft aerie: it was a reparative, obliging wish on my part. Thus I knew that Dr. X, this unknown being, responded to dreams in a more personal fashion than with accurate enigmatic pointers. At heart, the guy had a sense of humor. Moreover, he had a heart, a couple of times he had attempted to be, as far as I was concerned, unnecessarily and wrongly helpful as a matter of fact! And, in no end of instances, the little noises, guffaws, sounds of surprise, groans of despair or the laughter emanating from behind me were as important as Dr. X’s interpretations; if only for reasons of maintaining some spontaneous living contact within what, at times certainly, seemed like going down four thousand feet into the Guaymas Trench in a bathysphere - something that I, whose dream metaphors were drenched with maritime imagery and who had spent time at sea, would actually do about ten years later in that kind of utter slightly rustling stillness, child’s play compared to an analysis, nor in the instance of that adventure entirely by my lonely self; although, with time, and in some many respects entirely egotistical, I began to have an inkling that the experiment was a mutual one, that we were in the bathysphere together, as I would be in the future with a different kind of expert whose attention, however, hovered on very different kind of exotic fauna and flora and possible difficulties, at 4,000 feet under sea. The only technical term – aside Dr. X’s one-time use of the word transference - he ever used in a communication was his pointing out, once, that my having spent the entire previous week [“Oh, have I really?”] preoccupied with the analysis of dreams – I had just started to read that royal road, the Interpretation of Dreams – constituted a form of resistance. Utterly fascinated by dreams at that point, I had thought not only that I had worked as hard as I possibly could, and been more than obliging – definitely a resistance as was pointed out to me over and over! - following “the master’s” suggestion - but had entirely indulged what you might call a bent of mine that could focus fanatically on one subject to the exclusion of all others: This way of going whole hog, as I was told, did not correspond to the usual way of doing analysis, which was meant to be: yes some dream discussion, the pitter patter about how the previous day or days went, on-going problems of a lesser or greater extreme outside the analysis, how I was handling them, in other words, a kind of daily reporting of my daily Bloom’s day, and which, once my sense of smell was as pristine again as upon my birth, of my frequent disgust with foul odors in sulphuric N.Y. I had been competitive, too, I expect, with my exclusive focus on dreams; at least wanting to be Dr. X’s equal; I was doing it – self analysis in this instance - once again on my own, yet I was also doing it for Dr. X. - Freud’s having done so, its whatever completeness beyond imagining and knowledge at the time, with his Interpretation of Dreams, was motivation as well: that it could be resistance, too? This empiricist eventually allowed himself to realize that at the very least it had been a fruitful if grandiose resistance compared to some of the other entirely unconscious unproductive ones, discovery of most of which defenses, especially of the derivative of a nearly monumental capacity for denial, except for what is called “turning against the self,” would take me by some surprise. However, Dr. X merely blurting out the word “resistance” so thoroughly rebuffed and slighted me that - that is what counts in this instance - for some considerable time, a very non-dream-reporting me did not proffer a single dream, not until Dr. X got me back into collaborative efforts on dreams - no, not by stating, with equal unartfully blaring bluntness, that my dream reporting had ceased entirely, but by insinuating the query whether I had any idea why dreams came in several acts; as they nearly invariably did in my case. “Oh, so the guy [the insinuator!] is interested!” That indeed had the effect of allowing me to pay attention to dreams in analytic sessions again – outside the analytic situation, especially during vacations, no one was going to stop me from reading analytic material, if only to keep purchase on the analysis. After our tracking down the makings of one especially powerful three act dream, [7] I thought to myself, becoming more and more puzzled about whose vehicle I might be, and awed, also in a dream - where I first encountered and realized the vastness of that realm – the metaphor was maritime - “the unconscious.” –‘Whoa! And what dark shape is looming there?” Occasionally I would try following, naively, what I took to be a suggestion of Dr. X’s, only to discover that matters were not as simple as that, which taught me to be wary of my preference for being a robot. What, as a matter of interesting fact, was it that alerted me who must have subliminally lain in wait for some considerable time - as I now shifted away from the amazing openness at the vent at which I had been during the breakup, to foisting the severest of governess spells onto poor Dr. X. It was not Dr. X’s voice on the answering machine, amplifying his accent, stripping his voice of its modulations and so providing the trigger for the girlfriend to so express her envy. Who knew where in Europe he had spent his childhood and how? No, it was the way he pronounced a certain word; and during yet another particularly spooky moment. Inevitably perhaps, particularly at this stage in the analysis where the re-experienced abandonment had thrown me back into a state of childhood-like loneliness, the subject of the German writer of boyhood adventure fantasies Karl May had come up; and as I was describing a scene how I had crawled Indian-spy fashion on the ground in our forest, and while I was describing how I did this, I acquired the strange deja-vue-like conviction that Dr. X was very noticeably trying, but evidently not succeeding, to be my anaclitic companion in the forest and to hug the ground just the way he empathically felt I was hugging the ground while describing the activity; the earth to which I was so close. He seemed to want to become my mechanical double, that was one matter that spooked me, it was too close, too adhesive, probably homosexually as well, and the very much more so perhaps since this happened to be one of those times where I was merely reporting, not speaking out the metaphoric depth whose significant location he was so good at pointing out for me: we seemed not to be in, or only half, in the kind of metaphoric sync we had been in so frequently; or the awkward ineptness of his attempt brought me out of my reverie. And I use deja vue very much in Jakob Arlow’s sense, of a state of great fear, but ultimately overcome, and not in the so delightful sense it has acquired at the noggin of one of America’s great primitifs. He, the analyst person, as which he was experienced at that moment, as compared to a disembodied consciousness, the pure phantasmal other, seemed to feel that I was speaking deeply out of my metaphoricality on the couch dream; he, the physician, was more deeply, or trying to get into the dream, it seemed, than I myself was. It was an eerie moment, also in that he seemed to be assuming a role, and had been caught assuming a role; something I suppose I might have conveyed to him – yet it also seemed too ineffable for that. I could catch him in our cat and mouse game must have been a conclusion that the unconscious reached, where he was doing, had done all the catching until now. “Doesn’t he know that I am only reporting?” I thought to myself. But look what depths I am drawing him into must have been another less articulated discovery. The moment passed, unanalyzed as it were, but alerted me to, as had his many instantaneous right on the money dream interpretations, that indeed, much of the time Dr. X was very much of a hand in glove companion to the depths of my being. Yes, I could trust him, more deeply than I perhaps had ever wanted to trust anyone? The variation on good father was closest friend, longed for brother; as I had had one as of age eight during my boyhood. The moment was nearly incestuous. Incest, too, had begun to play a conscious role in the analysis around that time. Subsequent to the breakup, my confidence somewhat on the mend, the reviving tomcat happened to fall into a conversation, at one of my neighborhood venues, with a young woman whom I described to Dr. X the following morning as “the most beautiful woman” I had ever met; and what a good thing, too, that he did not avail himself of his occasional, invariably inappropriate, capacities for the sardonic and say: “Once again!?” Not only was that young woman exceedingly beautiful, also in the cool judgment of acquaintances, but she happened to bear my mother’s first name. Within minutes of the inception of the conversation with this blonde beauty she fugued, first, into saying “Oh, an involvement” and, within a few further seconds, into telling me that “I and my brother we always know what the other one is thinking.” She had just gotten divorced. And if I had not been in analysis I would have gone on fugueing with her in no time. The following day, Dr. X, counselor to the lovelorn, dropped the word “incest” into our conversation, and terribly regretfully I faced the fact that an “involvement” with this newest edition would be a case of “from the rain into the gutter.” I withdrew in such a way as to make myself utterly unattainable, not that such realistic and painful sacrifice did not leave a reservoir of resentment: subsequent to my departure from Dr. X some months later, the “most beautiful woman I have ever set eyes on” was passionately consumed in a dream! Better that I suppose than nothing! And safer it turned out too. Farewell My Lovely –Raymond Chandler’s totally multiply overdeterminately “forgotten” name, over and over for years, kept needing to be retrieved. I have mentioned the sharpening of senses, which influenced Dr. X’s and my interaction subsequently, I believe, especially of my sense of smell which was reborn to the days that Baby Tuckoo could be seen sniffing no end of flowers. But the most novel part of the experience until then was the discovery –that too a displacement - that I had been bi-handed, whereas by the time I came to the U.S., at age 12, I was so emphatically right-handed that it allowed me to use pitching a baseball as part of my Americanization - my seemingly vestigial left arm acquired the strength of a very strong right arm! What greater proof of the wages of repression can there be? However, it seemed a little late in life to become a novelty - one way of putting it – in the majors; or to take up boxing again. Shortly after that eerie forest floor interlude, inquiring about that very subject matter, claiming not to know how to pronounce the name of Karl May, the author of these adventure stories [which is that of the pronoun my and how the German month of Mai - May - is pronounced] Dr. X had intentionally mispronounced that name, not just mispronounced it, but equivocated over it in such a way as you would only if you really knew its correct pronunciation. That intentionality and mispronunciation – an ineptness that paralleled the interlude in the forest - must have been something that my ears, which had sharpened perhaps to the degree of my totally revivified sense of smell, picked up; at any event, this too registered; and was tucked away – where could it be tucked away into? Although a cop might have said, “Hey, I know you know German!” the moment was not enough to convict him. Polite me was lying on the couch, the alerted and playful cat was ready to strike and do so on the very ground it appears on which we were conducting our hide and seek: the grounds of the dream work. The now seemingly confirmed doubt was tucked away into what I call the “dream mine,” there it cooked and stewed where dreams are fashioned, about whose fashioning – by what? the entire self - we know not all that much more than when Freud so curiously claimed that we really knew very little about dream psychology at the beginning of Chapter VII of The Interpretations of Dreams. [8] Evidently, the now seemingly confirmed doubt as to Dr. X’s claimed inability to understand German led to the following dream, the first dream I remembered, on trying to figure out how we had gotten from X to Z, that was dreamt to catch the conscience of the king. This dream, dream Y, the Maquis Dream let’s call it - of which I became subsequently certain that it was at least one, but certainly the penultimate of a series of test dreams - concerned my cousin Ditloff and myself, both eight years old, lying on an embankment, very much as Karl May’s Old Shatterhand and Winnetou might have – which pairing I of course hoped to duplicate with Dr. X! and he in that strange interlude with me? at a time that I – who was aggrieved, say, that he, like the original governess, had been unable to repair my relationship with the lady disparu - had already withdrawn again? an uncertain analytic couple? – whence we had rushed to see, from our perch at the embankment, our very first real Americans [aside the one dead airman I had seen in his B-17 or B-29 that had screeched over our house before crashing a quarter of a mile off about a year before], in Jeeps and personnel carriers, driving on the slightly rounded, finely cut shiny, polished granite pavement of the Leuchtenburger [Glistening Castle] Chaussé, just north of Bremen, in those long ago sunny, halcyon days of early May 1945 at the end of World War II. Ditloff and I were like baby resistance fighters, among Oak trees, in an Oak maquis. Approximately fifty yards off – in the kind of complete clearing that acrid beech nuts create beneath these leaf shedders - there stood about as immense a beech tree as you can imagine, or any other kind of tree aside Redwoods that I have seen in my entire life; even then that giant was eight feet in diameter; it's trunk grew straight [be straight with me, let’s not fight like guerillas in the thickets of analytic brush warfare: The Spy Who Comes in from the Cold had been another wishful and self-state dream during the breakup – and I, at Dr. E’s suggestion was of course tester and spy on Dr. X] and smooth and beautifully beech-tree-light-gray up into the air, not one branch stuck out of its embraceable, smooth roundness, until at the very top a huge 100 foot wide umbrella crown of entwined branches spread to keep you safe from lighting strikes and from the rain: "Eiche weiche [avoid the Oak ], Buche suche [seek out the beech]" was the ancient musical proverb that went with this constellation, which I had sought for Dr. X to pronounce, to check whether he knew it, and if the so frequently so immediately responsive Dr. X uttered the proverb in its original tongue…. I had offered up a screen memory in the form of a dream. Upon reporting the Maquis dream I – who, by then, delivered himself of one or the other immediate analysis or comment on his dreams as he recounted them soon after becoming recumbent on the couch - recall expressing tempting and seductive puzzlement with the naïve but also genuinely puzzled query: "Hm, I am wondering why I am dreaming this now?" Dr. X didn’t know either, or if he did, refused to communicate what he knew; which, normally, didn’t bother me that much when he didn’t since, by then, I had very much caught on to the fact that one major aspect of analysis was for part of me to learn to listen and absorb and reflect upon what frequently so surprisingly and sometimes shockingly spoke out of me. I associated to this dream, translated the German proverb into English, was glad that my first real childhood friend – this was his first direct appearance in the analytic setting - had thusly reappeared, a true example of the master race: freckled and with a touch of red hair, just like Huck Finn, fleet as a greyhound and tough as Krupp steel as German boys osmotically absorbed the military-animist ethos of their elder propagandists! A descendant of a family that had produced a hundred Prussian generals for every poet! Surprising too, was that, subsequent to being so trapped, Dr. X did not apologize as he had frequently and usefully apologized before for sins of omission and commission that only the most delicate of souls, such as myself, would take umbrage at; for example, thinking that something was wrong in our relationship from one day to the next and inquiring whether I had taken offense at being called an idealist, something I suppose I ought to have gathered from his voice had been meant as a compliment. The impossible profession indeed! But I fancied myself an eminently practical idealist, no matter how misguided I may have been also in that self-appellation, and so he had hurt my self-image: to call me an idealist pure and simple was like calling me a fool! The narcissistic dimension [s] have the funniest ways of slipping in. No, I thought of myself as perhaps as practical an idealist as my mother, the charming, gregarious, secretly very private and probably unhappy, but if need be, steely Joan of Arc of the resistance against Hitler, the counter-spy for Canaris, who, too, had been entrapped, and briefly broken in one of the Gestapo's tiger cages. And who in fact, had no doubt been perhaps over-idealized, as Dr. X suggested, by being at such great, idealizable remove; just as I seemed to have some kind of pink sunset in me as a final product of an otherwise strictly melancholia-inducing and blues-singing abandonment. Nor did I hear Dr. X’s mind rustle through its filing cabinet subsequent to this moment of his being caught out as it did when something was off in our relationship, and frequently finding the source of the glitch – it was those few seconds and his changed breathing and a certain lisping that made me infer the “checking the mental filing cabinet” metaphor. Perhaps he was totally stunned. Being shoved down into a manhole will do that, if the dream in its entirety was transmitted-injected at that moment, as it may well have been. I was stunned at the violence I had perpetrated, if only in a dream. I might have been immediately vainglorious. I might have immediately expressed my outrage at the betrayal: “and in what other matters can I trust you, then?” He might have offered the proper explanation. I never asked, and he never offered - perhaps Dr. X was too shocked at what spoke out of himself, and more likely than not, at being caught by another’s dream; as I was shocked, the more so on contemplation, at the confirmation at how stupendously intimate he was with my dreams, with the depths of my being. Or it was all simply too much to fathom at that point. Now let us reread the poem not merely mindful of the deep knowingness that resides in animism, but also as a symbolic re-enactment and comment on this particular analytic situation in which Dr. X and I found ourselves: the disavowals, the attempts at disphantomization, the wanting to be held and the fear to be held too closely by a joined mother-father figure, the symbolism of flowers, which is also a reference to part of Dr. X’s name, the conflicted seductiveness, the prohibition against masturbation, the panickiness; and, moreover, the German word Wind is not merely cognate but means fart: as in the ancient “to break wind,” and a plethora of allusions to dreams and anxieties of the past. Who’s that's riding through the wind at night?/ It’s the father with his child./ Holding his boy safely in his arms,/ he's holding him surely, he's holding him warm. "Son, why are you hiding your face, are you afraid?"/ "Look father, the king of the reeds, look how near, / the king of the reeds with his crown and his tail?"/ “But that’s just a fog bank, dear.” "Dear child, come away with me!/ Wondrous games I'll play with thee/ Many-colored flowers grow on my shores;/ mother has many a golden fleece." "Father, my father, oh don't you hear /what promises the king of the reeds is whispering to me?"/ "Be still, you must stay still, my son;/ it's just dry leaves rustling in the wind." "Fair boy, don't you wish to come with me? / My daughters will wait hand and foot on thee, / my daughters lead the dances at night/and will rock and dance you to sleep." "My father, my father, oh don't you see/ the king of the reed's daughters over there by the sea?"/ "Son, my son, I see it all only too well, it's the old willows forever so gray." "I love you, I'm enticed by your beautiful shape; /and if you won't willingly I'll use force!"/ "Father, my father, he's touching me!/ The king of the reed has done me harm." Uncanniness seizes the father, he rides in haste, / he clasps in his arm his aching child, / reaches home in dreadful straits/ the child in his arms is dead. I expect that all the matters that had preceded the dream, uncanniness, the endless sense of deja vues, the fact that I was spying for the grandfather Dr. Eissler, also played deeply into its formation. Indeed, there were sufficient reasons for the uncanny and for eeriness. And to simply write the dream and the reaction to it off under the rubric “the systems u.c. of analyst and analysand are in communication with each other” begs the question why unconscious communication is as important as that which is verbalized. For certainly, aside being a test, the dream was a profound communication, to which I never received a response; and one step towards eventual disaffiliation from Dr. X, although I was not as spooked by this victorious dream as I would be by the incident that made for my withdrawal from this my first analyst some many months hence. If only I had known his dreams! Could there be any way of being closer than that? So fast, so unexpected: On the one hand: the wish to find out if he knew German had come to pass, yet as in that joke about having all your wishes fulfilled that Freud recounts: both Dr. X and I seemed to now have a sausage pinned to our noses. Instead of finding a speculative answer for his maneuver, I might also have asked: “So why did you?” The three sausages …there they hung, smelling sulphurically of falsehood, and it was a smoked sausage, and it stank like a NY City sewer. If the arena of truth on which you have been operating with someone whom you have known for a year and a half and to whom you reveal intimacies of which you yourself may not be aware until the other does, on the ground of absolute truthfulness, if that person from one second to the next turns out to have been made of whole cloth what, under normal circumstances, if you are not in an analytic situation, do you do? Your choices are: [A] to get up, say to that person: “Please send me your final bill,” turn on your heel never to look at the person again; slamming the door loudly would not be out of order; which, however; [B] as a spy, having found a weakness in the defense, maybe you hang around for further truth telling; particularly under the new circumstances where I had turned the tables and might be able to “run Dr. X, who was “giving me the run-around” a dream wish of quite a few months prior, and which evidently persisted. Moreover, too much had transpired, and an analytic relationship, that much I realized by then, was certainly like no other, even less like any at that point. Besides, having won my first victory I suspect I wanted more against someone who had now assumed the position of the policewoman governess, “the invisible police officer of the Fates” [Moby Dick] who was to be darkly mistrusted. One other element of the dream that requires noting is that the choice of a Goethe poem is not lacking in significance. I suspect that the unconscious spy catcher had concluded that Dr. X was not susceptible to something as down to earth as the common proverb Eiche Weiche, Buche Suche, musical as that is too, and so tried to find out, hoping perhaps that he might be a Goethe Jude, as Dr. Eisler - although I did not know it at the time - had so famously been. What if he had not taken the bait at that point? What other language puns would the dream work have taken recourse to? As compared to the first two meetings with Dr. E, where I had sensed the possibility of two weather systems encountering each other, here two persons and their entire beings had, through the inadvertencies of the analytic situation, become deeply enmeshed. There is of course the alternative that Dr. X, once again, might not have bitten the proffered bait, might not have sung, but might have been alerted to my trying to catch him. After reporting the dream I probably would not have made the same pseudo-naif comment as to why I might be dreaming this extraordinarily graphic story of Dr. X being beaten for not singing well enough. A possible comment of mine, if I had been the first to comment, might have been: “You don’t seem to be singing as well as I would like you to.” “Yes, and you are angry at that.” Which would have left the unconscious very much at a frustrated loss how to proceed, unless I had said: “I suspect that you really know German.” To which Dr. X could not have possibly replied: “And why is it so important to you to know.” Dr. X, detecting from this dream that I was dreaming to catch him speaking German might of course have become a counter spy in the dream mine. What of the cat and mouse game then? My system u.c. is left bereft, certainly at this late date. Can this entire transaction be accounted for in the terms that an analyst and analysands unconscious communicate with each other? Only if the entire context and all the so far mentioned factors, and probable then some, are taken into account. But once most of those factors are taken into account, telepathy, two persons who know each other, knowing implicitly, as I had always assumed my mother and I had known what the other was thinking and feeling, would not have been that surprising. But what is noticeable, too, about this dream is its actionism, not only the manner in which the conductor treats the poor singer, but the force, the violence of the dream as an assault on the unconscious of its recipient: it did its utmost to get through and into him. Sing sing sing or I shall push you down into the manhole. Mouth and anus? Sing you asshole? Other notions derived from my by then very intense reading of the I.O.D. I would think entered into the fashioning of the dream. Perhaps even the apocryphal story of the Frenchman who had learned to play his anus like a trumpet! Loud and clear. There was a dictatorial and aggrieved Kappelmeister, fortunately a diminutive one, concealed within me. First of all, slow as matters can be to register in my consciousness at times, for a host of reasons, I had to absorb the fact of the uncanny intimacy that had developed between us, but also that his subterfuge, in which he had now been caught, constituted a tremendous insult, also to my prize intelligence! How were we to go on? Well, we did for another half year I think, until Dr. X was once again trapped, by a somewhat less subliminal inadvertency than this dream. I doubt that the Trapper dream would have taken the form that it did and have elicited the reaction it did and have had the consequences it had, had it been dreamt during a different configuration of the various spells. For example, if I had caught my mother in a lie, who detested lying – she once slapped me for it in my late 20s, [that too had come up at an odd moment in the analysis and Dr. X had said: at such a late age?] but joked about my father’s apparent compulsion to prevaricate about just about everything – I would have considered the knowing or not knowing of something crucial to have been part of a merely playful cat and mouse game, part of a flirtation. If my father had lied – big deal, he would have remained true to form. His speaking the truth would have surprised me! But the governess-policewoman-of-the-fates lying presented the opportunity to be particularly hateful to the actually lying analyst who, in the analytic situation, had by then become the projected governess whom I once thought I had killed at age 7 when she was force feeding me one again, which, even more stunningly, elicited absolute no punitive or other reaction from my father’s mother who had brought her into this family, a governess whom my mother, as she made very clear in front of me, detested, as the girlfriend disparu had detested Dr. X So Dr. X speechlessness, like my original governess’s nearly forty years prior, did not help resolve the fix we were both in now. I, part of me, was like the happy cop who had caught his criminal but then looked around and had to call for a backup. A friend and colleague – while agreeing that one purpose of the dream was to smoke out the analyst as a liar - has pointed out that, nonetheless, it is MY dream. In other words, the dream may be regarded as a self-state dream. In that sense, the theme of seeking safety, security through understanding – one of the original motives for entering analysis – linked up in the dream with the early childhood wish to be saved while in the feverish state that the perceived abandonment had produced then, and had re-produced not that long ago during the analysis. All other aspects of its animist allusions could also be found in my then current living situation in my downtown N.Y. boheme. The colleague also pointed out that the analyst by merely acknowledging that he did know German, in all other respects refused to engage me and the other communications that the dream contained. “Poopoohing,” as my very experienced friend puts it, “what I am saying in the dreams. Saying to you [me] ‘It’s all in your head’” the latter of which certainly was a common enough dismissive comment on Dr. X’s part and, as a common place, useful only when in fact I had projected a fantasy; however, analysis of fantasy is of course as major an aspect of analysis as is the interpretation of dreams. Whether I would have responded at that point to a deeper engagement on Dr. X’s part? # I had to deal, and unfortunately not just in a dream, trying to puzzle out on my own – since the catching went undiscussed - why someone who was so deeply counter-transferentially with me as to have been caught in a dream of my devising would want to stake the whole game on a cheap and grandiose if well-intended prevarication: yes, I was thunderstruck by the fact that he had been that closely attuned in every sense of the word yet did not seem to be aware of his own extraordinary, wounded capacities for empathy and that they might betray him, as they had initially, during our first two weeks of en face. Perhaps there is something to be said for an analyst, if he felt injured, saying at a moment such as this: “You have hurt me to the quick.” It would have been appreciated, he would have seemed human; the time was approaching for a different richer form of contact. Eventually, only very eventually I concluded, that the matter was stupid but was forgivable. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, paraphrasing Churchill's famous remark about the Battle of Britain: "Never have so few lost so much so stupidly and so fast." [regarding the Brits attitude to dealing with Mossadegh] which may be as good as Oedon von Horvarth's "There's nothing like stupidity to give you a foretaste of eternity." However, I sensed no overt ill intention, only analytic grandiosity, the Achilles heel of a profession that is best equipped to rid itself of it; the intention, I decided, had been to discern the resistance as it manifested itself between the telling of something in German and in English. It was a lie devised for reason of the valid experience of the revelation of such differences, to which the two consultations with Dr. E. and his claim that he didn’t remember from one to the next, had alerted me. Nonetheless it had been a lie, and every lie is risqué; it is a theft of the truth; and such injuries do not heal that easily. Wouldn’t there be sufficient other instances for discrepancies to manifest themselves? Aren’t there literally hundreds of other opportunities? It slid, he fox the viper anaconda cat… back into its cover, but no quite as deeply…. Its fangs…. I didn’t exactly let the incident pass: with some sadistic pleasure I asked without even using a derisive tone of voice I don’t think, whenever something in German was about to be uttered: “You do know German, don’t you.” “Yes.” I began to realize that here, too, the master slave sadism interfered with the relationship. How to get out of it? Play music? Say, Country Joe & the Fish’s Colors for Susan, the only solution that Handke found to ease out of the sado masochistic master slave demonstration in his My Foot My Tutor? However, the “incident” was not conducive to an analysis of the most deleterious of the spells I had brought with me from childhood into analysis. To what degree did the closeness derive from incestuous qualities, telepathy, the brother-to-brother proximity, the entirety of the accumulation of the uncanny? Two wounded musical beings had had an encounter, not on the Acropolis, but in the consulting room.
NOTES 1] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Harcourt Brace 2] Of whom I have no idea whether they, too, still spook around my memory bank. But I also learned Russian once under intense circumstances, and then forgot it only for it suddenly to come back after three weeks in Bulgaria 3] For example, see Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild, the essay Amorbach where he recounts his discovery of his love of the atonal on letting his hand pluck an out of tune guitar. I believe the year was the discordant 1915 and the precocious Adorno was 12 at the time. What traumas lay in his earliest background? 4] Witches Brew, Miles Davis [Columbia Records]; or say Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi 5] Goat is Bock in German, whence the adjective bockig, which means stubborn; Dr. X agreed at some point that the only way I could have retained my individuality was to be stubborn towards the governess/father combination; the implication remaining hanging between us being that at the very least I might be more discretionary about this at this point in my life. I recall a typical incident from highschool where, initially, I had been something of a wizard in Geometry and Math, teaching the class for the teacher as a Sophomore. At the subsequent school had imported the severest kind of headmaster from India, the way black Master Sergeants can then be worse then their white examples: we took one look at each other and it was all over with being a genius at math: I had to struggle to pass. 6-A] Among two of the richest screen memories is one of Christmas 1941, during which my mother’s father, it appears, was briefly between Concentration camps. It is the kind of screen memory that then makes you doubt the usefulness of photographs as anything but memory minders. In one half of the very large walled but well lighted part of a veranda, there is laid out a large semi-oval track for a toy railroad. In its center is placed Baby Tuckoo, that is I; to my left, or my right, depending which way I happen to be facing, sits my father, the engineer entrepreneur who has put down this major piece of engineering, allegedly his Christmas gift; at the other end, near a large make believe Alpine tunnel that is placed over the two sets of tracks, lounges my seven foot tall Grandfather, typically in his leather hunting knickers. The object of the game is to manipulate the electric control in just such a way for two trains to pass through the tunnel simultaneously in opposite directions, a demonstration of my father’s ingenuity and control, who is in charge of the electric knob. As the two trains approach the tunnel from opposite sides, my grandfather gives me a conspiratorial wink and then flips a switch on the Weiche, [which as an adjective means soft, as a verb evade or avoid, and as a noun railway switch] for the two trains, that have been made to on the same, and no longer on parallel tracks, to collide inside the tunnel, producing angry sounds of frustrated grinding electric motors running overtime. Turning to my father I see him look at my grandfather, a kind of charming shit-eating grin on his face, and say “Oh Werner, look at what you’ve done.” This recollection, indeed, has all the surface verisimilitude of something that happened. But how was it that, in evidently just a few days, my preference had changed from my father to my grandfather, the eternal child? Between the two of whom I am equivocating? Not without noting, I would think, the preference expressed for him, over my father, by a figure who is absent in the photo-realistic memory, my mother, who no doubt had reason to be disappointed in her husband. Absent, too, is the governess, except through some of the interdictions represented here, and their consequences. All other matters have all the usual heavy symbolic significance, as does the break in the narcissistic oval, I am at the center; the two figures are outside the oval. In other words, this was the kind of incident that could be remembered over all the other utterly forgotten events of those days because, it so happened, that the particular “facts” were capable of attracting rich symbolic and emotional significance. The grandfather’s sadism and complicit playfulness are there, as in real life; and in the numerous stories of his fabled adventures with which I was entertained as a child; some of which, subsequently, struck, and not just me, as showing me how I had picked up a sense of humor, but also his sense of the absurd. I can only infer this idolization of someone who within two weeks of being liberated from Buchenwald, but who was laughing and joking already then; as he had, to his own disadvantage, also in camp.
6-B] Aside a half dozen or so “pea under the sheets” type screen kernels, which once explored provided a vista into the self, there was a second elaborate screen that must have been fixed in memory just a few months later. It is of two matters that stand as it were in a relationship to each other: One, the broken glass, or is it glistening dew drops, or is it tears on the flower beds the night after a bombing attack had shattered the window glass of our villa; and, two, of the German shepherd who had strangled herself on the fence of the Zwinger [a fenced enclosure, meaning enforce, Dresden has a famous, allegedly aesthetically redeemed on] in which Mara was kept, not that far from the flower beds, allegedly, so the apocryphal story went, because she had been so terrified by the bombing attack. This memory coincided with the equally shattering event of what was experienced as an expulsion from paradise; for, though I may have felt like an severely abandoned child at age nine months, I had meanwhile acquired such a sense of place that a goat might chase me to the farthest reaches of the forest, not all of which I crawled and toddled entirely on my own I suspect, to which my parents had occasionally returned. The departure in the clutches of the then already hated governess thus meant a leaving into great uncertainties and the departure from everything known. 7] I desperately needed someone I could trust. I had business partners whom I had the worst reasons not to trust, there was no reason to trust the current live-in girl friend, in as much as a romantic used to give a matter like that much thought, emphatically nearly all previous ones had proved untrustworthy – although there was, on later realization, something about me that seemed to make it, sometimes, not invariably, the point to chose lovers of such a problematic nature that I appeared to demand that they would prove so untrustworthy that I could thus replay a prior trauma, but who for being so problematic seemed beyond hurt, and who therefore provided easy cause, since cause I seemed to need, so as not to be entrapped; at least so it appeared in retrospective analysis of certain patterns of avoiding those who seemed unleavable under any circumstance and who therefore ought not to be in the least hurt by an involvement with me; and most, though by no means all, of the so-called closest friends were dubious propositions, too; especially some of the founding authors of the semi-revolutionary publishing enterprise of which I was the initiating founder. Nonetheless, you had to keep up some halfway intimate human contact! But how did you even find the time in New York to be truly close to someone? Besides, to what extent could I trust myself, one reason I was here in the first place, or was I completely trustworthy. My parents were deceased when I entered analysis. But neither my father nor my mother’s second husband, my guardian for a number of years, had been trustworthy; and the latter would prove even more dubious on some checking subsequent to my analyses that had turned me into something of a researcher of my family’s past; nor my mother in important respects. The only figures who had been trustworthy in my childhood had been my grandmothers, who however had little power, and whose responsiveness thus was too tolerant, and in one instance, since she had come to our house to die, ineffectual; my complicit grandfather had appeared once in my life during which brief visit he managed to become an idol; implicitly I felt I was in communication with my mother, just the way her mother felt she was when she heard birds cuckooing; my governess could be trusted to be a police woman who, also for overprotecting reasons, was an inveterate NO, onto whom I became far too adhesively dependent even while trying to remain independent from her and egotistically, totally selfishly so; my father’s delegate as it were; the expressed preference to the governess was invariably the milkmaid, Lisa, much liked by my mother as well; all of which however did not mean that I had decided to discard the possibility of this longed for trust altogether; at any event the longing for trust, mistakenly too perhaps, continued to exert itself; and during my childhood, in wartime Germany, under circumstances where a child not only was acutely aware of the danger of being blown to bits with shit falling from the sky, but sensed the all around cannibalism, and not only as a kind of pervasive paranoia that was painted on the walls of houses and that the populace emitted. 8] The girlfriend, as was clear within half a year into the analysis - about whose procedures she knew less than I had upon entering, and I excluded her from it - was jealous of the analyst, made disparaging remarks about his voice on that mechanical interposition, the answering machine, “He sounds like a typical Jewish analyst,” and envious, too, of the apparently pleased expression I bore after returning from the decompressing five mile walk that I took back downtown after most of my sessions. Subsequent to this communication from a girlfriend who was definitely being neglected, say in the same manner in which I was capable of neglecting all other matters analytic over my obsession with dreams, there came a dreadful dream in whose first act I chased an uncircumcised analyst, who was giving me a hard time, around his office. - “But all my friends are Jews!” was my own shocked response on telling this, which was pretty much true, and had been since my coming to this country, a matter of sensibility. [Moreover, this Chasing dream was dreamt even before my so whetted, post-analysis curiosity discovered that an uncle, for nefarious, selfish as well as what he thought protective reasons, had scotched the Jewish part of his and my father’s Jewish Danish German heritage during the 30s: A Wilderness of Mirrors is the title of a Max Frisch novel, a “Wilderness of Deceptions” might be a story of mine.] But with Jews, ever since seeing photos of the death camps, at about age eight, where my mother’s father who had spent nearly the entire twelve year Reich in four different camps, too had been tortured, my identity had been so total I had produced some of my best and emotionally laden, musical and exhausting and mourning work as a translator of some five dozen Nelly Sachs poems; the question of why I would have had such quick and deep empathy, in reading of his torture in 1947, with someone whom I had come to idolize during the one week I had spent in his presence during the one week he had been between camps in my early life, or why I could feel so tortured, being subjects whose exploration lay some time ahead. Moreover, the only physical fight I ever lost was to the son of a Nazi general, over that very matter: lost not for reasons of physical inferiority but because I had become so over-emotional that my heart gave out. Again, my fine class mates at this boarding school were astonished, how I could have succumbed so quickly, and to someone physically my inferior, but more negatively puzzled than by the stories that spoke out of me. To find myself to be anti-semitic, thus, was a total shock. - The harsh dream, not so incidentally, ended in wonderful kind of –then unanalyzed - pastel suburban compromise where Dr. X and I lived happily, collaboratively side by side a beige and mauve existence! That kind of suburb: in a dream of several acts, the first generally spoke most truthfully, the end realized the preferred wish. Dr. X, after double-checking the circumcision matter, responded that I seemed to be unaware of how badly I felt about myself. Then he ascertained what had elicited the dream: I had been talking about being in analysis to a friend, had praised the procedure and my analyst, and the friend then expressed the wish that this would be something he would love to do, too. These “facts” made the dream that much more odd to me as well as to Dr. X. Within a week of a very upset and puzzled me, focusing pretty much entirely on this dream, the equally puzzled Dr. X suddenly – out of that wonderful blue of his discoveries - uncovered the girlfriend as the source of this so astonishing anti-Semitism, not that the matter of “circumcision” did not point, so I felt, to more profound and troublesome wounds that I wished to have healed. It was by means of the analysis of that dream and of its so surprising sources and how it had cooked in the dream mine-mind that I learned how suggestible I had been, and obviously still was, the suggester, whoever she now was within the contradictory circus of spells, thus becoming suspect. Again: ought I not to have raised the matter also with her, instead of just letting it slide into the dream mine/mind? Into a reservoir of justifying resentments building up against her? Now there were two spells, in opposition to each other as it were. During my childhood, my mother on her occasional appearance, had always made it very clear how much she disliked the governess in whose clutches she nonetheless then left me once again. The two chief spells seemed both positively and negatively charged at present. 9] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams Yes how much more do we know meanwhile about the artist who fashions all this into a single production, that compromise artist, The Self - Your Whole Being - which exists in a culture within history of time and timelessness, who creates these beautiful or sometimes dark truth-bearing mares. FN-Denial: does the primary system have something that might be called “acceptance” 15] Though noticing the fact of the empty diaphragm container in my and the lady about to be disparu’s bedroom when she was off to work, the significance of this unmistakable fact if ever there was one, was as barely glimpsed nothing in a merely registering consciousness that only stewed unconsciously. One evening, bringing another couple home to our loft, I lifted the friend’s girlfriend on my lap – something I had never before done in my life - but when my lady, now made jealous at the so obvious hint at that I was as capable of infidelity as she, and I went to our bedroom that night I said: “I am so unhappy I don’t now what to do” and promptly passed out. When the lady came to her parent’s house that I was sitting in the country and I proceed to speak out of the just dreamt 747 dream [one of whose scenes had featured two bodies writhing in winding sheets] and I asked if she was seeing someone else and she answered “yes,” and I sent her packing back to the city whence she had come [there had been something in her voice the day before, and she had spent the evening dancing at The Heartbreak, a hall that a genius of a businessman had set in the perfect quarter for it]. If denial means out of sight out of mind and earshot, then the reply couldn’t be more emphatically in the affirmative. Segueing back into analysis after the first summer vacation at about the time that the girlfriend proceeded to disappear I had the most difficult time grasping whether such out of sight out of mind constituted denial! For some weeks I hemmed and hawed, one day agreeing, the next day it making no sense to me, equivocated, because I could not get a grasp on the “away”: it had made me feel so much stronger! “Of course,” said Dr. X, sounding astonished, it seemed, by such naiveté [FN-Denial]; and it of course was difficult so grasp for the spell that the girlfriend cast had become thoroughly equivocal, who was experienced more as governess, whom I wanted out of the loft, than girlfriend at that point, and governess so much more once you knew her severe and neglected mother; compacted and fractured, dithering, fluid spells as it were. As a matter of fact, I had shocked Dr. X not all that many months prior with a dream where I was having an affair with a virginal might-have-been who lived in Rockland County, a wishfulfilment occurring in a county where I guessed that he, who lived in New Jersey, resided too [!]: he had far stronger inklings than I allowed myself to entertain.
FN-resistance This outtake from A Patient’s Experience of his Analysis makes it apparent that the Dr. X handled the resistance in a rote, and for that reason alone, inappropriate and deleterious manner. At the first mention of the word, when my reading of the Interpretation of Dreams had fascinated me to a fairly single-minded pre-occupation with them, Dr. X had had the opportunity of doing what he proposed at the end of the analysis with him; that is. at a time that I no longer trusted him: to collaborate. This would have been not only a royal road for the analysis of my dreams, but obviously for the matters that came up in the dreams and for how my mind worked, that is for the defences it employed. No doubt I would have tired of focusing on dreams in my own good times, as I did eventually on my own. Since the unfolding of the transferences evolved into a duplication of the relationship, or rather non-relationship, with a hypercritical terrifying governess figure of my childhood, a handling of the analysis from a self-psychological perspective in general, specifically of the “resistances” [which cannot be really called resistances except from the point of view of the authoritarianism inherent in classical analysis] would have averted these major problems; although Dr. X understood that the governesses terror and all pervasive NO had an emasculating effect, he did not know how to avoid duplicating that in the analytic situation; nor how to elide the double-bind in which I found myself in finding any help from a governess figure to be an equally emasculating if not terrifying matter. Collaborators can be hard to find. On the other hand, in one instance of a now deceased fellow translator friend we worked very closely and happily together, until he went off the deep end and joined a Sufi sect and started lifting imaginary rocks in his head. In the instance of a director who derived from Brecht’s so collaborative ménage at the Berliner Ensemble our collaboration on plays as well as on translations worked wonderfully and professionally as long as his wife did not exercise her dictatorial control over him to the extent of ruining his career as a director. At any event, I then found a collaborator for matters analytic when I needed him. See, for example: Arthur Malin, The Analysis of Resistance¸ IJPA 1993. # 74 Pages 505-518
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Chapter I: A Parient's Experience of his Analysis
A Patients Experience of his AnalysesBy Michael RoloffThis excursus seeks to explore, from an analysands perspective, the transactions between analyst and patient.KEYWORDS: Patient-analyst interaction; dreams as communications; analysis of the analysis; second analysis.=La Vida est un sueno,= Calderon =The gradual passage of time [Lange Weile] is the Dream Bird that Hatches the Egg of Experience.= Walter Benjamin, from the essay on Leskov, On the Writing of Fairy Tales. What brought me into analysis? I had always been intrigued - not that the patients I knew [1], some of them graduates, proved enticing, mostly the opposite, to engage in what seemed like a mysterious undertaking, and whose mysteries, the more deeply familiar I became with them, become, in important respects, no less so, no matter that you seem able to account for them in technical and conceptual terms. For one year I had even lived with someone who had returned to New York to enter analysis full time about the time she moved in with me. We did not talk about her analysis, she neither reported what transpired in the sessions, nor did I make inquiry. I had a vague sense that her being in analysis with a man constituted a triangle of some kind; however, I had far more serious immediate triangular competitors to worry about with the then very avant-garde girl. [2] I had edited books in the field, Tilman Mosers Years of Apprenticeship on the Couch, whose revelations - if not directly opposed as contrary to the ethos of the discipline in the late 70s, went, best as I recall, unappreciated except by one member of the Southern California Chapter; and I got a vague sense of the discipline as being rife with sectarianism, which I knew other disciplines to stop being once certain fundamental matters were settled; as well as Ernest Bornemanns Psychoanalysis of Money. Yet I had not read any of the fundamental texts, such as the Interpretation of Dreams or The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defense or, except in college, any Freud aside Civilization and its Discontents and perhaps a few of his case histories; not that I had not been an avid but helter-skelter reader of lots of matters psychological since my highschool days. While I was an editor someone had tried to prevail on me to publish a Hans Kohut Reader, it was the same person who would button hole me at lampposts about =object relations= – as though I knew what he was raving about! – texts that seemed obscure at the time. I was living in New York and so was exposed to matters analytic. The concepts were concepts, upon the experience they acquired the weight of experience; without the weight of experience they would have remained mere concepts. I only learn from my wounds. Now that I have a fair amount of the experience I sometimes feel uneasy about wanting to confine it within concepts. But I have little choice, dont I?At the time I entered analysis, I was wondering about my judgment, especially about most of the people I became involved with, the chances I was taking, my over-optimism, my ability to do =everything on my own= - that is how I would put it then and still do now except for the proviso that my doubts could not have been better founded; the sense of apprehension was vague, but the consequences of my misjudgments, that much I knew, required safety; a certain kind of revolutionary life was taking its toll. Once I reached my decision, and decisively so, I contacted an author whose dissertation on stage fright I was going to help edit into a more accessible book, a manuscript it appears I understood. This man, a candidate, who seemed frighteningly deferential to the discipline, said to give someone by the name of Dr. Eissler a call. While dropping off a manuscript which we could not publish, a possibly prescient editor at this other publishing house, just happened to slip me a copy of Janet Malcoms The Impossible Profession – that indeed proved intriguing.Given long periods in early childhood spent under protective custody in a considerable variety of spacious rooms with high ceilings, sometimes filled with shelves upon shelves of books, fairy tales and sagas interesting me especially, Dr. Kurt Eisslers sitting room proved instantly attractive. The man was also of the height, age and courtesy that elicited European childhood memories. At our second meeting Dr. Eissler mentioned that, unfortunately, he always had a hard time remembering what people, under these circumstances, had said the first time around. Dutifully – a bit puzzled and annoyed, sitting en face - I recounted what I thought was pretty much the same family saga. Who knows whether my slight annoyance was what altered the telling? - Perhaps Dr. Eissler kept notes. This being my first serious conversation with an analyst [excepting the one who made a reluctant draftee into 4 F for sleepwalking in his late teens; and who, after hearing me out, pronounced me not all that incorrectly a fantast], who was I [there was one problem right there, one of them, anyhow] to pipe up in surprise - courtesy, too, which inhibition certainly was not always evident in my dreams; a certain over passivity, too no doubt. [3] At the end of the second meeting, Dr. E. stated that there =was a lot there,= to which statement - ominous had it come from an oncologist - I hadnt the faintest what to reply, though I could have asked for enumeration: not that, if the enumeration had been spelled out in terms with which I am now familiar, would have meant anything at all to me: borderline maybe, though that analytically so lazy, self-satisfied term had an entirely different significance for me then. [3] Yet how right Dr. E. was in retrospect, and what did I want =man or woman, dog or elephant= - it is good to remember that Joseph Haydn wrote his Surprise Symphony for his sleepy Austrian audiences with an occasional drum roll. I said I wanted a man, thoroughly experienced, about his age, which meant about thirty years my senior, and what about him - my annoyance of an hour ago apparently forgotten – =couldnt you take me on?= Dr. E. averred that he only treated adolescents, whereupon I failed to say, for example, that a recent girlfriend insisted that I was really Peter Pan; or: =I will prove to you how much of an adolescent I am= - and, later, when I began my real reading in the field - I appreciated Dr. Eisslers work: yes, he would have managed that part of me very well; how he would have dealt with the part of me that since a very young age was as ancient as he, is another matter. He said once he had found someone he would give me a call.Having noticed in Dr. E.s generous sitting room titles by an author whose work I published and another of whose masterpieces I was about to translate, I seized the opportunity to redress the conversational imbalance by making inquiry of my own. Dr. E. mentioned that he didnt cotton to Peter Handke – it was the early work - as I could understand once I read his writings and became familiar with his origins and tastes; whereas I shared his, he did not share my extension of them, but his so frankly expressed absence of a possibly shared interest then made it easier to forego this preferred high-ceilinged, literate venue with the spell that my grandfather cast on him from the past, telescoped though the age, by then, was roughly by half! The discovery of the significance of what is called =screen hungry= lay well ahead of me.Within the week Dr. E. called, to say that his first choice was over-booked, his second was a man, experienced, not his age, who however knew German. With my then firmly held notion, however I had arrived at it, that analysis meant a near total preoccupation with ones childhood, I knew the time would come when the relationship would have to be conducted in the language of childhood or, for the least, that the analyst needed to understand German, if not Plattdeutsch [Lowland German], which is like Nederlansk [Dutch], akin to Old English and a derivative of Gothic. I sensed this without understanding anything of regression. I had a notion, however acquired, that analysis involved an archeological exploration. Dr. E. also said during that telephone conversation, and the emphasis he put on the word was not as I had heard it before: =Well, we just have to make another compromise.= That was not a word I particularly liked, but one that I had never come on in reference to anything having to do with psychoanalysis, no matter that, in relationship with, for example, the partners at the publishing firm I invariably tried to find a fair way of splitting the differences; or, more typically, giving up half to get one real half for myself. Meanwhile, of course, I have a very different appreciation of what constitutes compromise than I did then, especially of the compromises that are reached in the strata where dreams are formed, tense as those, too, may be. Not that I had not the opportunity to say that I was not in the business of compromises when it came to my psyche before Dr. E. mentioned that I ought to send him a postcard down the line and let him know what I thought of Dr. X; he wasnt really sure about him. Far more confused, then, than however I may be now, I - with physicians in his family background and who had known quite a few physicians in my life, to all of whom, except for the occasional painful or mistaken moment, I had had a positive relationship, a me who felt that writer physicians were the best writers, and who had considered becoming a physician myself - had certainly never been referred to a doctor by a doctor about whom the good doctor had his doubts. But if the purpose of the suggestion was to put a sometimes extremely nonchalant me on an alert, an alert a preferably also sleepy me did not want to be in, that purpose, as well as the puzzlement introduced by the =second take,= to use a term from the recording industry, could not have been better served. I sent Dr. E. his postcard about the time that Dr. X announced to a baffled me that the =transference= had set in. I might [again] have asked Dr. X, what he was talking about, to me who, by then, had been talking away on the couch for some months. The word rapport I would have understood. =Yes, best as I can tell, he seems o.k.= But how and who was I to assess an analyst, as compared to someone who botched an operation? As to finding Dr. X to be o.k.: more on that anon. One matter that Dr. E. handled with seemingly greater aplomb was the question of money. Asking him at the end of the second hour how much I owed, he replied, =Oh, I never really know how much to charge for this kind of consultation,= which saying once again nonplussed someone who had paid fair sums to two fine European physicians during a twenty year period in New York, and who knew about set rates. However, the sum that, on some thought, I found fair recompense for these two hours, then became the sum set by Dr. X, obviating need for any haggling between us, an elegance that I, with a certain, typically European, certainly also class-based, distaste of talking about money, much liked. However, the sum that I – who had a thing about being =fair,= which automatic response, on later reflection, I concluded I had learned from my mother who indeed had always been as fair as she could be and had suffered the consequences – then decided was fair recompense for the two hours spent with Dr. E. was less than what I could initially afford and than the average going rate in N.Y. at that time; and it was less for the very reason that I found Dr. E., as a physician, odd; and so, had I not had a thing about being fair I might even have sent him considerably less for those two hours. By colluding with Dr. E. in arriving at this figure [I happen to be the not that unusual person who detests it if people he knows are speaking about him behind his back, and then are not up front to me about what they have said] all for the salutary sake of not interposing the hurdle of haggling at the opening of the race, much appreciated as that happened to be in my case, Dr. X was depriving himself. For all that Dr. E. knew, I - the co-publisher of a small firm - might be privately wealthy; the ambiguous mode of my then usual combo of jeans & Brooks Brothers herringbone jacket, was not susceptible of immediate interpretation, not that this person, who had explored the heights and the bowels of NY during the twenty years I had spent there, could not have enlightened him if he had asked. At any event, the aborted opportunity to discuss the fee, and matters relating to money, and what that might reveal, obviated anything but this one chancy peek – into an apparent realm of agreeability - into that so very revelatory realm. Moreover, the maneuver of establishing a sum by fiat, as it were, infantalized me, taking this decision out of my hands and the realm of discussion. Not that I could not have piped up – but I was getting a good deal, my analyst was coming in on the cheap! However, I regret not pointing out, at the time that I was so agreeable, that I really wanted to pay the average going rate. Nor that the time wouldnt come when the fee that I myself had accepted proved a real burden, and that I discovered that some occasional ways of being generous covered up an occasional niggardliness, when the pocket book became tight, that did not fit at all with my self-image! It could be said that the two parties, analyst and analysand, on the once, were entering a thicket of assumptions, which of course could be cleared up. I may have been far more naïve in the early 80s than I am now, but however sleepy or head in the clouds I may have appeared, I was not a complete dummy. It is my guess that maneuvers of the kind, even the last that Dr. E. worked on me, have a deleterious consequence for the reputation of the profession. There is a fine saying by Alfred Bion, to the effect that the encounter of any two persons is like that of two storms: so very much – or does not - come into play, as it so evidently did immediately in Dr. E.s and my weather systems, with consequences for the latitudes that Dr. X and I would travel together. Counter-transference existed before it was called that and is a two way street, or as the case may be, stomach. To take unfair advantage of the power of insight that the analyst enjoys on first encounter in the dyadic relationship is bound to be disadvantageous to the treatment, as it is to any serious relationship. On the other hand, both sides can always put all cards on the table at any time.#After talking to Dr. X en face for eight sessions at a kind of beehive or apartment complex filled with shoe boxes full of analysts [which, moreunder - in lieu of moreover - housed the office of a nattering, delinquent author of mine, a would-be analyst who had infiltrated the complexs basement; and who, at some point served nicely, in a dream, as a heavily overdetermined day-residue for =the bad analyst=! - =Yes, right here, in your basement. Could I ever tell you stories! Funnee!=], Dr. X allowed that =I didnt understand my story,= an assessment with which I had no quarrel since I wasnt even sure that I needed to have a story, story teller though I was, preferring to tell everything, including this communication, mostly in story form, but which assessment, in retrospect, now that I know how comparatively complicated a story it may be, I emphatically endorse - and so why didnt I lie down on the couch? And after promptly doing so, I well recall the sound of surprise emanating behind me the first time I - who had no idea patients can be reluctant to submit to the couch – lay, oh so eagerly down on the couch: no, not to fall asleep - as a recently discussed case of a wonderful safety-and rest-seeking patient did [8] - but for the adventure to begin; an adventure on the couch, what dangers could it pose, particularly to someone like me who loved recumbence? Fly me to the moon! And, in no end of instances, the little noises, guffaws, sounds of surprise, groans of despair or the laughter emanating from behind me were as important as Dr. Xs interpretations; if only for reasons of maintaining some spontaneous living contact within what, at times certainly, seemed like going down four thousand feet into the Guaymas Trench in a bathysphere - something that I, whose dream metaphors were drenched with maritime imagery and who had spent time at sea, would actually do about ten years later in that kind of utter slightly rustling stillness, childs play compared to an analysis, nor in the instance of that adventure entirely by my lonely self; although, with time, and in some many respects entirely egotistical, I began to have an inkling that the experiment was a mutual one, that we were in the bathysphere together, as I would be in the future with a different kind of expert whose attention, however, hovered on very different kind of exotic fauna and flora and possible difficulties, at 4,000 feet under sea.However, for long stretches, during the analysis, I became most, if not too, comfortable on the refugio couch; there turned out to be an analyzable highly egotistical twist to that, too. During another, very long stretch, the couch turned into a rack, which a tad of masochism can make bearable, as can a touch of residual steeliness; curiosity, and love – since that was not to be had in that situation – stubbornly transformed into the love of understanding, however, being, in my instance, one of the chief motivators to seeing the process, ultimately, through most of its viscous and obscure mediaeval periods. Freud gave as reason for his preference of having patients on the couch that he did not like to stare them in the face for long periods of time, which makes a kind of perfect =natural= sense, although he of course knew already about regression from Hughling Jackson well before, if that is what it takes to know that people relax and regress and are more open, usually, once they are recumbent. Freud makes no comment as to the patients preference and what effects that may have on the treatment; nor, best I know, how that changed emphasis from the sense of sight to that of hearing - the first sense to develop intrauterine – alters the nature of the relationship between analyst and analysand. Bertram Lewis notion of the =dream screen= of course was not yet the succinct explanatory model for the state I would enter. - I, for one, departed the first analysis under the impression that I had absorbed Dr. Xs ear - I could listen so well into myself, especially into the well-springs of my dreams; with further travels, with a different guide, ahead of me. # The first two weeks eight sessions with Dr. X - and never again, except for those instantly formalizing arrivals and leavings at which, turning around for that last look, I caught sight of the same face ludicrously scrunched up into a gargoyle projection screen that tried so painfully not to disclose its feelings [FN] - were spent en face, telling him earliest remembered dreams and memories [invaluable screen memories they all turned out to be which, so much like my childhoods compressed Japanese paper flowers, magically expanded when nourished in the placenta of the analytic setting]. This obligating shower of offerings of mine, pretty much tossed pell mell, included an extraordinarily painful event that had cut me to the quick at age seven. It involved habited protestant nurses jokingly accusing me of my passion having killed my [subsequent to my mother of course!] first amour, a German jet fighters wife who had a heart ailment [and whose husband no doubt flew jet-propulsed Me-261s of the kind that I heard screaming overhead in my village but never could catch sight off - that fairy tale monster bird element, too, was playing into the animist fairy tale as which I experienced and digested this world] and with which luscious beauty I had played patiénce until I was released back into the clutches of my prison keep, leaving the heart patient and her bad ticker behind [just as I had played patiénce with my mothers mother when she refused to go down into the cellar of our house out in the country during the not-that-remote but invariably exciting bombing attacks] on our bunker-hospitals patio while recovering from tonsillitis when the weather that summer of 1944 was obliging and Bremen was not being bombed to smithereens, the trembling reinforced cement bunker providing foretaste of deeper tremors to come.At the communication of what the sisters had said Dr. X flinched, and I recall flinching at his flinching – the wounded curing the wounded it was going to be - the man had empathy, too much damn empathy if you asked me! But for that I could trust him, so I assumed. I needed someone I could trust. I had business partners whom I had the worst reasons not to trust, there was no reason to trust the current live-in girl friend, in as much as a romantic gives a matter like that any thought, emphatically nearly all previous ones had proved untrustworthy – although there was, on later realization, something about me that seemed to make it, sometimes, a point to chose lovers of such a problematic nature that I appeared to demand that they would prove so untrustworthy that I could thus replay a prior trauma, but who for being so problematic seemed beyond hurt, and who therefore provided easy cause, since cause I seemed to need, so as not to be entrapped; at least so it appeared in retrospective analysis of certain patterns of avoiding those who seemed unleavable under any circumstance and who therefore ought not to be in the least endangered; and most, though by no means all, of the so-called closest friends were dubious propositions, too; especially some of the founding authors of this semi-revolutionary enterprise. Nonetheless, you had to keep up some halfway intimate human contact! But how did you even find the time in New York to be truly close to someone? Besides, to what extent could I trust myself, one reason I was here in the first place, or was I completely trustworthy?That shared whatever pain, and whatever deeper pains collected around the flinching was the actual onset of rapport for me, and of too quick trust, [5] from my point of experience, as compared to the baffling announcement about =transference= that Dr. X would make some months down the road. I also recall that, before lying down, after the first two weeks, I duplicated the attempt to ferret information about Dr. X, as I had with Dr. E., so as to establish a =normal relationship.= But Dr. X stated that the less I knew about him the better it would be for the analysis – and who was I to quarrel with the expert, puzzling as I found that kind of arrangement between two persons who were going to spend much time with each other. However, in retrospect, I could not be happier, for the sake of this training bra of an analysis, except for one crucial instance, that the projection screen mirror that Dr. X presented remained unmuddied by personal information about him, comical as that gargoyle remained as a last sight after the resurfacings from such sometimes volcanic depths. The neutrality expressed in his voice, in most instances, proved sufficient reassurance that we were attuned, from which attunement, when we were attuned, I – being someone to who had felt since early childhood that most understanding was =implicit=! – inferred that he understood, however he had arrived at this understanding - through empathy or actual experience or expertise - being irrelevant. The one time I encountered Dr. X outside the consulting room – it happened to be outside on the street - he looked to have one shoulder considerably lower than the other: =Were you wounded during the war,= I asked with genuine concern from the couch, once again seeking to establish a =normal relationship= [between the wounded!], but his rebuff seemed so total as to obviate any further concern I might have for him as a human being, especially during the last stage of the unfolding spells, to which I had scarcely ever had feelings of any kind. [FN] Well, yes, when he had a cold – and no matter that at some point, despite everything that transpired, I was immensely grateful for everything I had learned during our probe. Also, I recall, asking Dr. X whether he knew German; which he said he didnt, and my saying, =Oh I thought that you did,= whereas, being a bit less polite - =calling him,= to use the poker term - I might have said: =Dr. Eissler said that you did.= And - in retrospect - then what? Or Dr. X might have said: =What gave you the idea?= which certainly would have kept that ball rolling, and might have obviated the coup that these initial moves were so fatefully setting up.But then, impulsively, it didnt seem all that important to make that much of an issue over whether Dr. X knew German or not! I would take a chance! Yet another chance! I wanted for the adventure to begin. So I would have to translate. Big deal! Half of my life had been spent translating, some of it the kind of work that required the most delicate of ears, deep musicality and sense of rhythm. Yet another instance of so many chances taken. Perhaps there had been a mis-communication between the two doctors? But for the reason that the first doctor had asked me to be alert to Dr. X, my preternatural alertness had now become doubly honed; it would become even more sharply honed as time passed. I suspect that Dr. X decided to take =his chance= of lying about not knowing German somewhere during our first eight face to face encounters: =You dont know your story.= I knew too little, I could be trusted to be fooled, and to mutual advantage at that!So this then was my =compromise;= moreover, it lacked a view of Central Park as well as a high, non-mind-benumbing ceiling, had far fewer shelves of books, was physically more on the ugly duckling than admirably tall side, and didnt even know German despite his mild, indefinable central European accent! All of which matters became pretty much irrelevant in the analytic situation I think, except for that German time bomb. Didnt the referrer and the recipient of the referral talk to each other? As I have said, I had a very fixed idea that analysis involved early childhood - the obvious matter that whatever troubling derivatives of that childhood would have to be addressed, would come alive in the here and now of the actual situation was something I only gradually allowed to dawn on me: I can be slow, even or particularly when it comes to the most obvious; derivative of deep resistances I expect not just of the brain processors: if there was a problem, well then let it lie like a sleeping, occasionally growling dog, dreaming of rabbit and deer, by the fireplace of the past! [FN] As to the matter of Dr. X being thoroughly experienced, which for me meant having confidence in his overall competence: I felt initially more reassured by him than by Dr. E.; and I expect that since he seemed to learn from some of the mistakes he made while I was with him, he will have learned, too. from some of his more grievous errors meanwhile, much as I have. Live and learn, never live long enough.I recall that upon lying down on the couch I knew the fundamental rule, though it was of course reiterated, and I very much knew what it meant, and knew it to the point of being sometimes socially obliviously impolitic; and knew its steely value, which was to be adhered to to such a degree that you reserved that one lie for that one moment that you needed it to save your skin, something I had needed to do - it had happened, with a partner at the firm - only once, and which I had learned from my mother whose savoir faire had saved her skin in that fashion when she, a dashing counter espionage agent, had been entrapped by the Gestapo; who detested lies, laugh as she might about my fathers lying even when he did not need to. Within the day of being on the couch I stated - subsequent to a confession of something important that I had until then concealed - in these very words: =This will only work if I am completely honest.= Not that I, much later, didnt learn to clam up at times.Dr. X and his indefinable, central European, slightly nasal accent [a feature amplified by the answering machine which, moreover, sheared his voice of its pleasant cushioning] had ample opportunity for the compromise solution of: =Well, of course I heard a little German in my childhood,= or, =I know some Yiddish, but it would be pushing it to say that I know German= so as to get himself out of what turned out to be the most dreadful of fixes of his own making; and I might have said; =Yes I know some Yiddish and there was a time I knew Middle High German;= the cake I assume being to trap what I wanted to catch myself, the conscience of the king, to catch it in the discrepancy between the original and the translation – to which the doubled consulting with Dr. E. had alerted me. Entry into the adventure, thus, already had its own prehistory, and so it was =off into uncertain waters.= [5]As from a treasure trove, now from the couch, I delivered my first memories and dreams to Dr. X scratching away on his notepad in the silence behind me: here, you unravel them, free me off whatever spell – the two narcoses, at age five and seven? - has been cast on me; and for that pro I, halfway consciously, expected a quid. Copyright by Michael and Stephen Roloff, 2003
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PART [1] PSYCHOANALYTIC MONOGRAPH ON PETER HANDKE
PART ONE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC MONOGRAPH ON PETER HANDKE ALSO ACCESSIBLE VIA: http://www.HANDKEDISCUSSION.blogspot.com with three photo albums: http://www.picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/POSTED?authkey=YeKkFSE3-Js# http://www.picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE# | | http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/POSTED?authkey=YeKkFSE3-Js# http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html A CONDENSED PSYCHO-BIOGRAPHIC MONOGRAPH on PETER HANDKE by Michael Roloff
"Das lässt sich alles vom autobiographischen aufrollen" …["That can all be regarded from an autobiographical perspective."] Handke to Herbert Gamper, Ich Lebe doch nur von den Zwischenrauemen. [But I derive my sustenance only from the inbetween, the thresholds."]
"Stay in the picture."
"As if everyone, all over the world, had his daily visually artistic task; the task of being an image for others." Peter Handke
Preamble Peter Handke is what Harold Bloom would call a "strong author," a contender for the laurel wreath, who brooks little competition among contemporaries ["how hot blooded writers are amongst each other."] and seeks to demolish the greats of the immediate past while wishing to assume the pantheon even during his life-time, an ambition in which, with his several dozen novels, a dozen or so great plays, diary publications and what not, 65 books altogether in 40 years of writing he has by and large succeeded. However, Handke is not just a hugely ambitious and productive author, it appears that he is condemned to write, he is not healthy when he does not, already in the early 70s he started filling notebooks upon notebooks, flashing his pen in the presence of acquaintances and friends, always cooking [proud of how "geil" - German word where the English "hot" fails to include the implication of "lewd" - his formulations are], and as he states above in the hugely revelatory book length interview with Herbert Gamper, he uses his self - various versions seen through personae lenses - as his chief material to affect his audience. Handke is also a powerfully driven, compensatory exhibitionist - perhaps authors need to be exhibitionists as much as visual artists in however sublimated a fashion - both in socially and culturally accepted forms [plays, novels, films, autobiographical accounts, published diaries of the most intimate kind]. And if one wants to put the matter in a nutshell: Handke exhibits his self by means of conveying and producing states of mind - via his projective innerworld outerworld innerworld procedure - and thus affects his audiences more powerfully but also in a very different manner than authors generally do. He may also be the most photographed author ever, also posing, see http://www.handke-photo.scriptmania.com/ As to the socially unaccepted manner of Handke's exhibitionism to produce a reaction: not to worry, dear voyeur, we shall get to that too. Handke says that he "writes out of his wound." The chief reason it is possible to approach Handke and his work also from a psychoanalytic perspective is because he has exhibited so much of himself and left such a rich trail of data. I Peter Handke was born on December 6, 1942 in Griffen/ Altenmarkt, in the province of Carinthia, Austria. According to the midwife's extant report [1] he was carried to term and born head first without birth complications, which does not prove that Handke's subjective birth experience - no matter that our skins are desensitized at birth and is nicely massaged as we pass through the birth canal - pace birth trauma notions - may not have been experienced as a trauma: I cannot prove a negative. Handke might be able to evince memories of that experience if he underwent an analysis and experienced a complete regression; but to the best of my knowledge the only time he consulted a therapeutician - apparently of the Catholic persuasion - was during his crisis years in Paris in the early 70s; not on the couch but en face [see the first and most revelatory of his diary publications the 1975 Weight of the World/ Das Gewicht der Welt: [2]; and the memory of a "first heart beat" as we find it cited in his great work of the imagination the play Walk About the Villages [1981/2] cannot be taken as evidence of a personal memory of an intra-uterine experience at the fetal age of four or five months. His midwife's report [3] thus neither confirms nor disavows Handke's future speculation that something dreadful had happened already at birth; many other dreadful matters were to happen to Peter Handke in the future, subsequent to the first two presumably wonderful years as his mother's love-child. Handke's mother, whose sometimes exceedingly unhappy life he memorialized in Sorrow Beyond Dreams/ Wunschloses Unglück [1971] [4] shortly after she committed suicide, aged 52, derives from a carpenter farmer clan by the name of Sivec, of the Slovenian minority in Carinthia, who fell for a member of the German army stationed in Griffen, Handke's actual father, a Herr Schönherr, a German Army company treasurer and bank employee from the Harz Mountain Region in Germany, who was married, and who ["carried to term"] must have fathered our genius out of wedlock in spring of 1942. Since the love of her life, the aforementioned Herr Schönherr, did not leave his wife to marry Maria, we can presume that she was in a depressed state of mind during her pregnancy; and that the incipient depression that Handke has frequently mentioned - and which, from my perspective makes him more realistic than he might be otherwise - may indeed be an instance of what is called anaclytic depression, a state of mind absorbed intra-uterine, as so much else, as we are still finding out; quite aside the love child relationship that continued to fuse Handke to her subsequently to the point of considerable identification: to the extent that he said once, exaggerating as he can when he speaks, about his mother, the protagonist of Sorrow Beyond Dreams: "What did I really know about her life? Moi mere, c'est moi." Approving eye contact, smiles, joy. A love child imbibing love, confidence, approval. A resource to have recourse to, however a resource which, as we will see, that can be severely shaken. [///] Unable to marry Herr Schönherr, Maria Sivec, however, then married a fellow suitor for her affections, a surrogate from the same German Army company stationed near Griffen, a Herr Hugo Handke, the future monster in his stepson's life and psyche, who provided both her and her offspring with a last name that has now become famous, whereas we might more accurately think of Handke, if such names are needed, as Peter or Pyotr Sivec-Schönherr-Handke which would also serve as a hint at a complicated cultural identity of someone who was to write, in 1968, the play of the fatherless generation, Kaspar {"I want to be someone like somebody else once was."}; or maybe as "the one and only ever Count auf und von und zu Griffen" as which he appears in certain photos. At any event, by age two: a loving mother, perhaps overly loving, a doting stepfather … a rural environment… the immediate prospects are favorable, even during war time, even though the future "Keuschnig" - "Hoveler" Hardy would have called him - is living in just a Keusche…
One alternative that Handke has not imagined in all the various personae he has worn, tried out [5] as an author is what his life would have been like if he had had his grandfather as father from the beginning, no Hugo Handke to bring horror into his life… no Berlin from 1944 to 1948, no bombing attacks: He might have become a fairly well adjusted leader of the Slovenian minority, their pro se lawyer, a great one, a member of parliament; and not an obsessive writer. The mother's father, old man Sivec, the "Ote" as grandfathers were called in that region, would assume the father figure in H.P.'s intra-psychic world only in the mid-80s and be finally installed as such after impressive psychic labor ["labora verimus" - the quote at the beginning of "The Repetition" - in this instance too; not just in finally learning Slovenian well enough so as to be able to translated from it!] as we can read in Die Wiederholung [1986] The Repetition] Handke's 1980s rewriting of Sorrow Beyond Dreams [one of the chief sources for information about his early childhood]. This grandfather, notorious for fits of Zeus-like fury, during the 20s and 30s depressions repeatedly kept working his way out of near bankruptcy and during the 1921 plebiscite voted for the "Slavic option", that is for the first Yugoslav federation; and kept reaching under skirts until he died well into his 90s! However it is war time in 1944 and Maria Sivec, who seems to have taken marriage seriously, joins her husband, Bruno Handke, who was wounded and is unfit to return to the front and works on the tramways in Berlin, apparently already with another woman. At that point, in Berlin, in 1944, if we are to believe the account Handke gives in S.B.D./ W.U., there ensued Handke's decade long exposure to violent drunken primal scenes and it is to this exposure to this decade long trauma that we might sensibly trace the plethora of symptoms that Handke evinces subsequently in his behavior, as they trickle out in his autobiographically colored writing and as he enumerates them in his Essay on Tiredness [Versuch Über die Müdigkeit, 1988][6], the various rages and angers that made him tired as a young man, the numerous intense nauseas that did not start to abate until the mid-seventies, the emotional difficulties he has in living with women, right: one would not assume that someone who wrote the so empathetic Sorrow Beyond Dreams might end up a misogynist: you wouldn't until you gave some thought to the rage the love child must have felt as it kept seeing its love object violated and not entirely unwillingly. The ill effects of witnessing such violent primal scenes has been well documented [7], yet I keep thinking of medieval customs and where they persist with entire extended clans and their beasts procreating in one space: not violently, not drunkenly would seem to be the needed caesura in my thinking; Handke's need to show male visitors out of his house - unless it be the visiting media through whom he can exhibit himself;
he used to take friends for walks through the forest; now he does not even do that any more; and his recourse to a compulsive need, the being condemned to write, to write himself not only out of poverty into wealth but also into health, in both of which endeavors, the once "I am the new Kafka" has succeeded to a considerable extent, capitalist wealth being easier to acquire and maintain than psychic equilibrium in the world and literary environs such as they are. Among the derivatives from this exposure that are conceivably useful to a writer, as opposed to being problematic for a regular life, I can find only three: [1] the ability to dissociate, conceivably trained already during that decade, which lent Handke a head start in that requirement for a writer of his kind - think Joyce's pointing to Rembrandt's painting of the woman "paring her fingernails"; [2] to put a blanket over his head as he did as a child might point in the direction of the incipient wish towards transfiguration; to not represent the bloody drama head on; to disavowal; to states of dissocation; and [3] insomnia - you can always write or become one of the best-read persons on this earth: I once witnessed Handke devour a long poem - it was the German translation of a long poem by the considerable Bulgarian poet Lubomir Levchev - if it was a milkshake through one draught on the straw; and then to be judged to be good. At that rate….
In 1948, shortly prior to the Russian sealing off transit to the West [Junes 24] and the inception of the famous "air bridge" to Berlin, Maria, Bruno and Peter Handke [and the younger half-brother?] cross the border from East Germany to the West, an event that appears to have left distinct memories of anxiety in Handke. Although Handke initially acknowledged Bruno Handke as his father, he evidently suffered from the relationship to this progressively more violent alcoholic; while his closeness to his mother's father, grandfather Sivec, provided some relief and future orientation. If we are to believe Handke it appears he withdrew into reading at an early age. On this photo, we see the future defender of the logos, nicely proud and throwing his chest out, protecting his two year old half-sister and four year old half-brother, dressed like an utterly Austro-German kid of the time, 1948-1950 I would guess. However, these two other children of Maria Sivec-Handke appear not to have been as welcomed as her first, and lived anything but illustrious lives. Peter Handke, it might be noted, for many years, mentioned that all his life he was haunted by the thought of suicide.
Prior to moving to Berlin in 1944, Handke's grandfather Sivec, a farmer carpenter, who will play such a significant future role in our genius psyche, can be presumed to have doted on his first grandchild. The mother's two brothers, whose deaths during the war and whose wartime letters [which became a family heirloom] will also play a highly significant if not central role in the future writer's psyche and in his writing - as absences, longed for - were presumably already off to war, in Yugoslavia during which they both perished. Stepfather Handke, so it appears, was despised by the clan in Carinthia; hating him became child's play for the jealous love child, poor chap, not a bad-looking fellow at all who must have regretted his wager to win Maria's affection. Handke's later hatred of the stepfather is unique for its lack of ambivalence; the hatred of the stepfather also manifests itself in fairly unambivalent decade-long hatred of all things German. Later in life H.P. will admit that a bit of self-hatred probably plays into those sentiments! The real father, Herr Schönherr, when he appears in Handke's life to go on the customary father son trip on High School graduation - cited in S.B.D. - is looked down upon with Handke's then customary arrogance - whose defensive nature I assume requires littler elaboration; a treatment that decades later elicits regrets [8] Thus Handke's oedipal constellation - the mother's first-born and love-child, the mother's father the father figure, dead uncles; no relationship to the actual or the stepfather's family - Handke becomes a kind of specimen case for the fatherless generation, a generation that more than usually fashioned itself after their grandparents. I have come on no mention of the other grandparents in Handke's so autobiographical work, except that he took the trouble to find out that there was no incidence of temporary color-blindness, one of his afflictions, or color-blindness of any other kind, among any related family member [The Lesson of St. Victoire] 1980. I spent much time tracking down the phenomenon, but came to no conclusive finding; it might be a matter as simple as the expression "seeing black" and a derivative of Handke's rages. However, the first time I talked to Handke he was wearing sun glasses an in an environment that could not have been more generously and soothingly lighted and he said it was a matter of his eyes, so it may be a combination of factors, genetic inheritance, hysteria, anger combining to produce the liability which must be one reason he never learned to drive: the affliction would prevent him from getting a driver's license.
Shortly after his birth, Peter Handke was baptized a Catholic. [For this, as so much else, see not only Sorrow Beyond Dreams + Adolf Haslinger's Jugend eines Schriftstellers]. During his "homecoming period" - from the years 1966 to 1979 in Germany and France - in 1979 Handke also resumed his relationship to the Catholic Church, especially to its sacred texts, that is until he left the Catholic for the Greek Orthodox persuasion subsequent to his unhappiness with the Pope's insufficient opposition to the bombing of Serbia during the 1994 Kosovo campaign during which Handke acquired no end of publicity and notoriety in expressing his preference for a continued Yugoslav Federation. Certain parts of the culmination of Handke's Homecoming Cycle [A Slow Homecoming, A Child's Story, The Lesson of St. Victoire] the play and dramatic poem Walk About the Villages is infused with Catholic imagery and feeling and in a manner that will touch all religious. His side as a possible country priest is expressed in the 1993 No-Man's-Bay in that the only actual person in that book who is also a side of the Handke's, and not just another elf of his self with all those elve in it, is his country priest friend from his early days in Carinthia. The inception of exposure to those violent drunken primal scenes in Berlin that he mentions in SBD coincided with the bombing attacks, that were to provide the title of his first novel Die Hornissen. Certainly, bombers and being bombed played a role in baby Handke's life, as they did for longer stretches in my own, where they elicited a traumatic dream that turned into a screen memory of events that transpired at the time that British bombers started to attack Bremen in 1940. -----------------------------------------
=PART II=
As of September 13, 1948 until June 1952 Peter Handke attended the classes of the village school in Griffen. Subsequently he attended the first two classes of the "Öffentlichen Hauptschule für Knaben und Mädchen" (14. September 1952 - 10. Juni 1954). On 7. Juli 1954 he absolved the admission test - upon his own wish, supported by the village priest - to attend the Catholic-Humanist "Gymnasium" Marianum [Tanzenberg], a school designed to produce priests, an alternative life Handke might have led and that is expressed in one of the six sides of the imaginatively autobiographical novel My Year in the No-Man's-Bay [1993]. Handke's invariable comment about his boarding school is that the bodies of the alien fellows there nauseated him, and he traces his nausea at fellow bodies to this experience!, and it is a noticeable defect of Die Wiederholung/ The Repetition that no matter how finely - Stifter refined by Vermeer is one shorthand way of putting it - an alternative yearning childhood is re-imagined there, the author's verbal imagination flags when young Filip Kobal, Handke's Slovenian alter ego, enters the seminary. This nausea is the first of numerous, including nausea at language, of his sequaelae nauseas that Handke mentions, culminating in what Handke in "Nonsense and Happiness" calls "nausea of the eyeballs." [More on "nausea" anon]. Also, no matter the unhappy making home environment that he had just managed to escape, Handke is filled with home sickness. There is also an all-important dream that Handke had at the Seminary and which he recounted in great and extant detail to his mother, of becoming her brother, his uncle Gregor, whose war time letters were a family heirloom for the Sivecs. Within the internalized oedipal world, the assumption of the avunculate, as anthropologists called it, is an unusual solution within the outward family constellation as I have described it, and it points not only to Handke's sublimated oedipal wishes but to his friendly protective attitude towards his mother. That the dream was noted down and communicated points not only to the relationship of intimacy with the mother, but of the author's own awareness of its importance.
In 1959, on the occasion of conflict with this seminary school, Handke changed over to the regular federal "Gymnasium" in Klagenfurt. During this period Handke composed a 16 page autobiographical report "My Life - Part II." He was also writing for the school paper, "Die Fackel" [The Torch, same name as Karl Kraus's famous journal] rather typically expressionistic things he has said. In 1961 Handke passed his matura with the highest marks. His interest in Slavic culture was evident even at that point, as he decided not to travel with his school class to Greece, but traveled to Slovenia by himself [see The Repetition's - the promised re-writing of Sorrow Beyond Dreams but in some ways also of his first novel, Die Hornissen - imagined reliving of that event, where his alter ego Philip Kobal, named after a 19th century Slovenian independence fighter, is on his way to visit an uncle who is studying horticulture in Ljubljana.
In fall 1961 Handke began his study of law at the University of Graz, the idea being, since he planned on being a writer even then, that a law degree would enable him to acquire the sinecure of an Austrian cultural attaché, which if not a sinecure has provided him with one of his chief alter egos in his writing, the suicidal Austrian Cultural attaché Gregor Keuschnig of A Moment of True Feeling [1974] who however, at that point, starts turning into the anti-Kafka, when love burst through [putting it bluntly: mother's love bursting through one could say] at the sight of a series of emblematic images; and as the now ex-attaché of the aforementioned 1992 major opus No-Man's-Bay who makes mention of that unforgettable moment. In Graz Handke initiated contact with the literary circle "Grazer Gruppe" and its leader Alfred Kolleritsch, who will remain a life-long friend [their correspondence just came out with Jung + Jung under the title of Schönheit ist des Bürger's erste Pflicht]; published things in the journal "manuskripte" and attached himself to the group of writers associated with "Forum Stadtpark," writes for Austrian Radio, apparently helped edit Ossie Wiener's Die Verbesserung Mittel-Europas, and by his early 20s, if you look at these contributions, goes about his business in a surprisingly professional manner. In the summer of 1964 Handke took time off and went to the now Croatian Island of Krk and completed his first novel, Die Hornissen, at his third try it appears; and after its completion said I will write another and then I will write another. Die Hornissen is suffused with longing for the missing uncles, whose war time letters were regarded a family heirloom, which may figure in the over-determination of Handke's choice of profession: his books, many of them, have a quality of letters in a bottle, also I imagine because of his autism, a matter to which I will come shortly, to which Handke confessed in his interview with Gamper [at which point of reading a whole series of clicks, little epiphanies - Eurekas, ahas - went through me!] the isolation of that position but also Handke's hyper-sensitivities. Die Hornissen is also drenched in fear as is Handke's second novel Der Hausierer [8] as are most texts of that period: but ending always in the victory over anxiety! The anxiety the fear is played away! At least in the writing: "I sit down and am in a state, and what I write is then so calm." Handke notes apparently to his own surprise!
If by nothing else, these early works are marked by an unusual ability to handle language in a serial form, to the point of virtuosity; and the creation of texts that stand in the unusual relationship to the world; that is, by means of an extra-ordinarily rich repertoire of grammatical maneuvers the world that the words refers to is placed into a conditional existence, exists as an "as if", the "as if" also being one of the forms of defence; and that, therefore, the world of words, of syntax, becomes a world with laws unto itself! In No-Man's-Bay Handke mentions that it was the ultra fie distinctions in Roman penal texts that brought some clarity into his angry noggin. He might also have mentioned Wittgenstein's whose Philosophical Investigations he certainly knew inside out and used to such wonderful discombobulating effect in The Ride Across Lake Constance.
Upon initial rejection by Luchterhand Verlag, Die Hornissen was accepted for publication in 1965 by Suhrkamp which published it in 1966. [Aside Suhrkamp, who have remained his chief publisher ever since, Handke also sought and found an Austrian outlet for specifically Austrian matters, such as the book about his mother's suicide, first Residenz, and when its editor-in-jefe Jochen Jung left with Jung and Jung; and initially he joined his Suhrkamp dramaturg in the founding of Verlag der Autoren and some of his texts were there for a time.] Subsequent to the acceptance of Die Hornissen Handke gave up his studies and has lived as a writer ever since. That same year he married the slightly older actress Libgart Schwarz and in April 1966 he wrote his first play "Publikums-Beschimpfung" [Offending the Audience/ Public Insult]. In 1966 his publisher Siegfried Unseld, as a kind of afterthought, also recommended to the Gruppe 47 that Peter Handke attends its Princeton meeting, and that is where I first set eyes [I seem to have missed Handke's reading], that is on Handke's back while sitting next to the famous West German journalist Erich Kuby whom I knew from Hamburg - "Handke, Handke heiß+t der" as he began to scribble in a small
note pad as Handke unloosed a rather hesitant, I thought, general [and thus, because non-specific, prohibited] attack on the innocuousness of the other texts that were read there, truth of which indictment was proved by his attack becoming the news rather than any memorable text. This play had its premiere, a success de scandale, at the "Theater am Turm" under the direction of Klaus Peymann, now head of the Berliner Ensemble, who was to do most Handke premieres over these now many years. I myself schlepped from venue to venue with my translation of the early Sprechstücke using a disheveled hippie troupe that had just returned from St. Miguel de Allende until I found a professional home for short performances at Herbert Berghof's HB studio, E.G. Marshall doing Kaspar. The first professional public performances did not occur until the early 70s in New York. Subsequent to the Princeton event, a hostess by the name of Pannah Grady, the German writer Jakov Lind [Soul of Wood] and I, gave a party at Pannah's swell apartment in the Dakota in Manhattan for the Gruppe 47 and American writers to meet, which was memorialized by the German writer Jürgen Becker in one of his books of the time, and where I talked to Handke twice, the first time inquiring about his sun glasses ["Was I dealing with a German who was affecting a U.S. gangster style, and a Beatle haircut, too?" was a thought in back of my mind.], the second time noting that no matter what kind of writer he might be, I, who had some German village roots too, was dealing with a grinning village sadist, and such a smell sticks, and what Abraham observes about the strength that sadism can provide holds true in this case as well. See anon. Handke's daughter Amina was born in 1969 in Berlin and shown to me, who adores babies, instantly seeks to ogle and make eye contact and no doubt wishing to revert, that year at a prince's rather unprincely-seeming news-paper-stacked apartment Handke had sublet on the Uhland Strasse. Handke then wanted quickly to go out of the house, to which I had no objection, especially not considering the kind of rather dark forbidding newspaper strewn apartment it was. I had persuaded the publisher I worked for to take on Handke, the contract was for two books, a collection of plays and the novel Der Hausierer, we sat at an outdoor restaurant on the Kudamm, a street I knew quite well, I had photographs of my elegantly dressed mother sitting at an outdoor restaurant there in the 30s, an aunt had a bookshop at one intersection where I had read up on contemporary German literature in 1965; I had lived in one room of the apartment of a grad student at the intersection of Fasanen and Kantstrasse in 1957, who also had an excellent, tennis ball catching - through its faux-sheep's-wool covered eyes Hungarian sheepdog, during my junior year abroad; and being born in Berlin, its dry cool air always perked me up. I was someone who, as I enjoyed and suffered a complete regression on the couch, came bursting out of the womb imbued with too much optimism; we discussed my translation of his Kaspar and Der Hausierer… Handke wanted to make sure that the sentence "I want to be like someone else" was as abstract as possible, and mentioned that Der Hausierer contained a lot of quotes from American black mask type detective fiction, and in German, and I lacked presence of mind to ask whether he could at least point them out to me and what U.S. titles they derived from, and maybe their places in their German editions, and if I had Der Hausierer might exist in English, but Goalie was then substituted for it as Handke's first prose work in English. Handke also participated in the founding of the "Verlag der Autoren" [a socialist authors' combine that concentrated on the publication and dissemination of theatrical texts which I later represented for some years in New York] which he left sometime in the late 70s, and when I asked why, called the group "fascist," his manner of saying "fascist" made me suspect that this was an excuse that his own righteousness would not maintain if pressed, and so I didn't, but suspect that Suhrkamp/ Unseld pressures and or enticements or obligations were the chief factors. Needless to say, this departure did not go over big with Karl Heinz Braun, his first dramaturg at Suhrkamp who was the moving force behind the founding of VDA. In 1971 Handke, his wife, the actress Libgart Schwartz, and his friend Kolleritsch came to the U.S. for a 21 reading 28 day cultural jaunt…I myself was easing over from being Handke's editor at Farrar, Straus to representing Suhrkamp through the Lantz-Donadio Literary Agency and it appears that this threesome of Austrian cultural good regarded my apartment as their home away from home. Handke quickly changed hotels from the one the Austrians had picked to the Algonquin, his taste for first class hotels was born with early success, there was the premiere of My Foot my Tutor and Self-Accusation at the BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music], well received by the critics, but not by Handke who thought it just as well that it transpired in Brooklyn, no doubt the German premieres under Peymann were far superior: I faced a far different problem with German plays in a city and country that was not exactly hospitable to things German. Shortly thereafter, however, The Ride Across Lake Constance had its premiere at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center, and Kaspar, once again at BAM with a professional director and an Obie winning actor in the lead. I gave a small party for Handke at my apartment and during the gathering there occurred the first event to which my memory took recourse when I read Handke's 1988 confession to Herbert Gamper that he still had moments of being over-come with autism, whatever he himself really meant by that. Engaged in conversation with two of his earliest fans in the United States, the critics Richard Gilman and Stanley Kaufmann and a listening me, Handke suddenly stepped away and squatted down by the record player in a corner and on the lowest shelf and put on a record, and I do not recall whether it was a Beatles record or not. No one said anything but I imagine that Gilman and Kaufmann were as puzzled as I. Nothing untoward had been said that I could recall, but I think the conversation could be regarded as the kind of literary bullshitting that one might engage in to find a common vocabulary among strangers, and who knows how much of it Handke had even understood: but I expect he was seized by what he would call nausea, that he had his fill of it, and lacked the knowledge to disengage elegantly or steer the conversation into different paths. As soon a the guests had departed, my man perked up to be the insulting self with which he would grace his host at the 21 venues in 28 days culturally representative trip that the threesome were about to undertake, behavior that produced scars that still spoke when I visited the same venues about twenty years later. On their return from their marathon jaunt, Kolleritsch was having a tachycardia attack and had to lie down exhausted on my marriage bed, Libgart, also exhausted, graced the cot in my study, but a seemingly inexhaustible Handke went off to the two nearby shops that carried international magazines and papers, I suspect to check whether the star's picture was in any of them, or perhaps he had heard of one or the other item and wanted to check it out at once. At some point we also met with a fellow translator and I witnessed for the first time Handke's disgust with physical ugliness: the fellow was not only physically ugly but turned out to have a character that fit his ugly face. Handke and crew went to see a Broadway play that starred Lauren Bacall and Handke expressed regret at seeing her having fallen so low. There was a reading at the cultural institute on whose grand staircase Libgart Schwartz demonstrated the entrance to Lake Constance. Handke subsequently wrote the wonderful novel Short Letter, Long Farewell which features an Austrian dramaturg [Kolleritsch] and a wife who pursues her husband, which I imagine was the case emotionally, since it was evident within moments that she was being ignored, taken for granted, neglected. Whether that theme of pursuit that lends a story to this rather French/ American novel, anyhow for me it has a Godardlike quality in its cutting, is based on a sense that he was being emotionally pursued and trapped is something only the author can say with greater certainty. However, the news that Libgart Schwartz had left Handke in the early seventies came as no surprise to me. She was ready for the splitting then while her husband, as in the novel, was engaged in literary theoretical discussions with Kolleritsch into which I was never sufficiently clued in: I still love talking literary theory. Short Letter was written quickly upon Handke's return to Germany, I think he had already moved to Kronenberg near Frankfurt. It was a big success in Germany. On 9. October 1971 Handke was arrested for "insulting the honor of the police" as he tried to enter an over-crowded hall for a reading of one of his own texts at the "Steirische Herbst" in Graz. His mother, aged 51, committed suicide that fall; he wrote Sorrow Beyond Dreams while drinking a fair amount of white wine so he has said. Libgart Schwartz left at about the same time; the "language regulation" for this separation became that Libgart Schwartz had decided to resume her career as an actress, which was true to the extent that she had never really abandoned it in the first place [she had acted in Vim Wenders' 1971 made released in 1972 film of Handke's Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick; and this represents one of two major lies that the otherwise so honest exhibitionist has maintained all these years, presumably for reasons of his sometimes delicate self-image, otherwise I find that he is right when he says that he isn't such a "softie" as which he used to look at one time. Nor is this tomcat any more. He was left to care for his baby daughter; Except for summer vacations Handke then tried his hand at raising his daughter on his own, see his book Kindergeschichte 1981 [A Child's Story] for this, a very honest book as best as I can tell, who saw Handke in Berlin, Paris and New York during that period, except that there is no mention of the child's mother!] and the girl seemed unusually quiet for her age when I saw her in New York in 1977 or so. Weight of the World contains an entry that notes that Amina had come up to her father and said she had to pee; whereupon Handke appears simply to have sat back and "waited what would happen now." Toilet training a la Handke! Young as she was, she too is recorded as noting: "Daddy, you are writing again already."
At the height of early success the roof fell in… and "the poetry in his life" disappeared for some years and he entered a crisis ridden period of some duration that is well recorded in the works of that period which I initially looked at most closely from every vantage point for the purpose of exploring Handke's psychic dimension when I had tired of my own in the late 80s. As a matter of fact, it was a disavowal in his 1984 novel Der Chinese des Schmerzens/ Across where the author obviously should have assented that set off my education in Handke's psychology which has evolved into the psychology of writing and reading meanwhile. In the Loser of Across I seemed to be re-encountering the same unhappy consciousness that I thought had vanished with the end of the first Paris Period [1973-1976] and his writing of the "Homecoming Quartet." The works of the period subsequent to the shock of his wife's departure [coming on the heels of his mother's suicide and having his style cramped by being house father to a young baby girl] are =end of part I= | |
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http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/2009/09/peter-hhandke-wounded-love-child.html http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/2009/07/trapping-trapper-crucial-event-from.html
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