The Way of the Couch - Walking The Freud Promenade

Dear Fellow Travellers,

So here are the couches - oops, benches! - and the quotes from Freud along the Freud Promenade. Each photo collage shows the bench and the view from the bench, so that you can both pause and settle down on the bench and take in the view. 

Should you like to walk the way of the couch, you will need to begin to associate freely with your own thoughts and perceptions, dreams, wishes (most especially those unfulfillable ones, squashed down to avoid conflict and reappearing in dreams and in waking life in a thousand masquerades and disguises.). You will see how impossible it is to translate into the thin thread of words the lush multi-dimensionality of what you see (not even the shape and color of one tree can be squeezed into words), what you hear (it is spring, there are the sounds of the birds, the workers in the fields, the construction workers, the passing tourists and local people of all ages), the scent of lilacs and so many other blooming flowers, wild and cultivated, for which you lack even a name), without even attempting to delve into the inward flow of emotion, of attraction and repulsion, of thought that is before or beyond words, of fantasy. So you see that free association is like walking along on a beach of thousands and thousands of wave-smoothed pebbles, and picking up one or two at a time, turning them over, touching them, noticing their shape and color. 

It is not like prayer. One asks for nothing. And the other to whom one speaks is, like oneself, an unknown and ordinary human being. 

 If you are lucky, you grow to trust this listener and believe him when he says “Just say whatever comes into your mind, don’t censor anything.” You grow to believe that he is willing to listen to all the boring trivia, the “on and on and on” of your mind (and even to suggest that the boredom you attribute to him may in part be your own), and to listen as you shine your flashlight of words into the darkest and most fearsome corners of who you are and have been. That he is willing to simply accept you and ultimately even (you feel this strongly in his presence in your body) to love you in the extremities of your unlovableness, with a detached love that does not demand that you change.  I learned to trust Freud in the years during which his imagined spirit presence acted as my psychoanalyst, and walking the “Way of the Couch” and revisiting the practice of free association I felt again that trust that I could be listened to and loved, that I could indeed listen to and love the truth of my own being - or whatever small pebbles of it I might pick up from that vast pebbled beach of my experience. 

I thought I might revisit my sense of falling and failure, the years of trying to turn my notes from the Freud analysis into a book that would effectively share that experience with others. The recognition that my memory loss and difficulty tracking made such a book impossible. I thought I might feel that pain or that I might miss Freud or feel guilt that in my role as his imagined/creator I had failed to give him a larger life in the imaginations of others, or to share with others what had been such a huge gift in my own life. But as I walked the “Way of the Couch” and practiced free association, I felt no guilt or regrets. I felt content with what was, content with walking and free associating. I felt content with the way the simple act of combining free association (and Freud) with walking in the natural world seemed to weave together my lifelong love of wild nature (beyond human civilization) and solitude with my love for Freud and psychoanalysis and therapy (which exist for me profoundly within human civilization.)

 I also liked Freud’s train metaphor for free association a lot (in my dreams trains have seemed to embody the thrust of human ambition and civilization - and the pun on training relates them to education and all forms of cultural transmission) I thought of it especially when coming home from and going to my “Stations of the Couch” walks by the little train that runs between Klobenstein and Suprabozen.  Just watch what goes by outside the window and report it to other passengers on the train. 

It helped a lot that I had picked out short phrases that had resonance for me from each of the quotes/aphorisms on the benches. They made good diving boards for my free associations and helped my faltering memory recall other quotes and interweave associations. 

I could go on and on. In fact, I did just go on and on. I suppose this little photo essay is in some ways for me the book I was never able to write, the tribute to Freud and psychoanalysis - and to the power of imagination. Just as you walk with me by the power of your imagination, I experienced years of a powerful psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud by the power of my imagination. So come, sit down on this first bench with me and gaze out at the view. Read the quote, and then just say whatever comes into your mind, don’t censor anything. And when you are ready, we can stroll along, free associating as we go, until we reach the next bench. 

Bench 1.  AN INEXHAUSTIBLE DESIRE TO DO NOTHING

Klobenstein on Ritten, Hotel Post, 1911 September 1

  «Dear friend, (...) Your letter came on a beautiful happy day and has further raised my spirit. … Here on the Ritten it is “divinely” charming and comfortable, I have discovered in myself an inexhaustible desire to do nothing, except for the hour or two that I spend reading new things, and I hate to think that the beginning of the next month will bring me back to hard labour. (...)  yours ever, Freud».

(Letter to C.G. Jung)

It was great to contrast the quote with the workers in the building in front of me. I became keenly aware of the conflicting desires - to do nothing, and to work. To work in a way that calls for effort, focus, skill, discipline, practice. I was struck that these two blogs (about the “stations of the cross” and the “stations of the couch”) have involved a lot of work. Part of me, especially as I age, loves simply to lay it all down and rest - and part of me still loves the feel of ambition, craves challenge, has a lustful drive for hard work. 

Bench 2.  A CONSUMING PASSION

“A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer».

Letter to W. Fliess, 1895 Mai 25

I thought about some of my “consuming passions” - nature and wilderness backpacking (of course I thought of that as I gazed at the trees and mountains); therapy; poetry; the Catholic Church; the dream of a socialist revolution; Chris and our marriage. As I sat there it occurred to me that solitude may have been my most consuming passion,  but always poised against and in relationship with connection and belonging. The mountains in the distance are so beautiful and I thought how a goal - like climbing a mountain - shapes a life and gives a sense of distance and horizon the way the presence of those mountains shape the view. 

Bench 3.  AN UNFULFILLABLE WISH

Klobenstein on Ritten, Hotel Post, 1911 September 1

«Dear friend, (...) Your letter came on a beautiful happy day and has further raised my spirit. Your kind wish that I would arrive at your place on the 15th is unfulfillable, as it would have been unfulfillable for the past 25 years”[Sigmund and Martha Freud’s 25th wedding anniversary was September 15 1911]

(Letter to C.G. Jung)

I thought of Freud playfully teasing and flirting with the young man Jung who was then infatuated with Freud as a teacher and with his ideas. The student’s longing to be the most special student, to stand alone in the spotlight of the teacher’s attention, echoing Freud’s theories about the unfulfillable wishes for complete (even sexual) union with the mother (and elimination of the father and any other inconvenient rivals). The teacher of course is both the intellectual mother (at first) and (later) the father-rival who must be killed to allow the student his own pure union with the realm of ideas. I thought of my own marriage and commitment, of anniversaries and the celebration of that continuity, and of the paths not taken, the lives not lived, the unfulfillable wishes (my own and others) because of the commitment to the ordinary human happiness and difficulty of domestic love. 

Bench 4.  THE DREAM’S NAVEL

“There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot in which it reaches down into the unknown.»  The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

The dream’s navel made me think of the temple to Apollo at Delphi and the idea of that as the navel of the world. I love the idea of a place that borders on the unknown or the mysterious source of what is. I thought that I am more interested in the navel where a dream meets the unknown than in the meanings we make through analysis. I am interested in that experience of meeting the unknown. In a life too I love that place. Freud’s presence was like that. So mysteriously real and also “only imagined.” The power he had over me as my psychoanalyst and then gradually discovering the power I had over him as his creator, the one whose imagination had summoned him into existence. His sense of humor - how could I have created him when humor has been one of my challenges? How could I have created someone whose love and acceptance and humor so surrounded and held me? He was bigger than I was. But I also thought that people who have direct experience of God or Jesus are having a similar experience. Strange and wonderful happenings at the navel of the dream. 

Bench 5.  AN EXALTED FATHER

The work Totem and Taboo:Resemblances between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics was conceived and undertaken in 1911 on Renon. It is a collection of four essays: The Horror of Incest; Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence; Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts and The Return of Totemism in Childhood». Marchioro Francesco, La passeggiata Freud (2019)

Freud: “At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.”

What does to stay on “Freudian bench”mean? A bench is not a decorative object but is intelligent, visionary; it is a visionary machine.

Thoughts of the exalted father. Of God, of the various people and causes I have exalted: the Catholic Church, the dream of a socialist revolution, the unknown, the natural world. Knowing that a few benches ahead is the quote that says that we revere our teachers but also feel a hostile rebellion against them. It occurs to me that part of my rebellion against the awe of nature has been my love of science. And I have rebelled against science insisting on a direct experience of awe, valuing mysticism over meaning. I look at the tree and the mountains and think of reverence. I look at the fence and think of the separations and dualities I make between for example reverence for the unknown and ambition for meaning. I think of the “fences” that cordon off the unfulfillable longings. To kill the father (who could be science today and a spiritual teacher tomorrow) so that I can have the mother all to myself (whether “she” be the exaltation of the wilderness or the skillful ambitions of science and careful experiment and precise mathematical and logical thought.) And the fences between them. Totems and taboos. Sex in there somewhere. And death. 

Bench 6.  A SCULPTOR AT HIS CLAY

The path of science is indeed slow,

hesitating, laborious. […..] We put forward

conjectures, we construct hypotheses,

we need readiness for any eventuality. In

the end our whole expenditure of effort is

rewarded. [Analysis] works like a sculptor

at his clay model, who tirelessly alters his

rough sketch, adds to it and takes away

from it, till he has arrived at what he feels

is a satisfactory degree of resemblance to

the object he sees or imagines.»

Sigmund Freud, New introductory lectures on

psychoanalysis (1933 [19321)

Even as I gaze at this one strangely fragile and eloquent tree, the fence in front of it, the mountains behind - I think maybe I wanted with my books (I had imagined a series of I think 5) about the Freud experience to sculpt something that gave shape to my own life. That showed its beauty and complexity (and darkness) that showed the shape of it like the limbs of that tree reaching in so many different directions. Did Freud as my analyst sculpt something that reflected the complex beauty of me? Was I really the creator behind the creator of that? 

Bench 7. NOT A MATTER OF CHANCE

Finally, with all reserve, the question may be raised whether the personality of the present writer as a Jew who has never sought to disguise the fact that he

is a Jew mast not have had a share in provoking the antipathy of his environment to psychoanalysis. [...] It is perhaps not a matter of chance that the first

advocate to psychoanalysis was a Jew.»

Sigmund Freud, Resistances to Psychoanalysis (1925/1924])

Jews, the holocaust, the powerful impact on my life. My teenage nightmares where my stepfather Jack was a Nazi and I was a Jew. Then when he was dying, suffocating as his heart failed, my youngest stepbrother Jimmy told me that Jack had worked toward the end of WW II in army intelligence interviewing survivors of the extermination camps. He had never spoken of it to anyone in the family until then. But in his own nightmares - gasping for breath in the extermination ovens - Jack himself was the Jew. The way Christians can defect their anger at Jews (thinking again of reverence and hostil rebellion - how easily the reverence for God and church leaders gets split off from the hostile aggression which gets deflected to Jews and other groups. How the whole theology of a God who is killed expressing that hostile aggression against God himself and then the Jews become the other who did it. And the Jews who claim to be God’s first love, the chosen people - killing them a symbolic killing of sibling rivals or of the father? So it maybe is not pure chance that a Jew - born and raised in that nexus of projected conflictual energy - might discover psychoanalysis? 

Bench 8. REVERENCE AND REBELLION

Our attitude to fathers and teachers is, after all, an ambivalent one since our reverence for them regularly conceals a component of hostile rebellion. That is a psychological fatality; it cannot be altered

without forcible suppression of the truth and is bound to extend to our relations with the great men whose life histories we wish to investigate.»

Sigmund Freud, The Goethe Prize.

Address delivered in the Goethe House at Frankfurt (1930)

[Beside Bench 8 stands a life-size cut-out of a photo of Sigmund Freud Anna Freud walking together]

In the deep cool shade of this bench thinking of the dance between reverence and hostile aggression in my life. I think of when I was in love with science and my father came to hear me present a paper (as part of my PhD qualifying exam at MIT) on the evolution of color in single cell organisms. How hurt I was when my father told me he preferred to experience nature directly rather than analyze it scientifically. A few years later I left MIT in hostil rebellion against Father Science. Yes sometimes I have been able to hold both the reverence and the rebellion. But often I split them off. Revere the holy unknown, the wilderness. Rebel against science. Look at that fence between the trail and the trees. Something there is that loves a wall… A walll between reverence and rebellion, between me and my unfulfillable wishes - to have it all, to merge with it all, and to destroy whatever gets in the way. 

Bench 9. CHIMNEY SWEEPING

The patient [Anna O.- Bertha Pappenheim] possessed an uncommon culture and was bubbling over with intellectual vitality. […….]I used to visit her in the evening, when I knew I should find her in hypnosis, and I then relieved her from the whole supply of phantasms which she had collected since

my last visit. In this state of mind it was not always easy even in hypnosis to induce her to talk. She aptly described this procedure, speaking seriously, as a "talking cure", and humorously referred

to it as "chimney-sweeping".»

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1892-1895)

Fire. What a perfect image for the dance/war between nature and civilization, between experience and language, between our acquired selves as civilized humans and our own given nature. Certainly taming and controlling fire is a part of civilization from its earliest beginning. Sweeping the chimney. The black sticky residue that accumulates that has to be removed for the fire to do the earl of civilization, to act as hearth and home and energy source. The ashes - yes chimney ashes and ashes at Auschwitz. As if hatred itself is as aspect of civilization. The more fences we build, the more we avoid simple direct aggression the more we become capable of hatred and violence inconceivable before cities and technology. All that is happening right now in Ukraine. The awareness of how easily it could all rip into all-out nuclear war. 

Bench 10.  PASSING AS THAT I AM NOT

“As You know, I suffer all the demons that can afflict an “innovator"; not the least of these is the unavoidable necessity of passing, among my own supporters, as the incorrigibly self-righteous crank or fanatic that in reality

I am not»

Siamund Freud, Letter to C. G. Jung, 6' Dècember 1906

Imagining that growing up a Jew is a lesson in having one’s identity constructed in part by the intense projections and hatreds of those around one. Freud’s story of his father’s story of being shoved off the sidewalk, knocked down, his hat knocked off his head. “What did you do? “ the child Freud asked. He wanted a father who was a powerful avenger. “I picked up my hat,” the elder Freud said. He went on. But Freud wanted a warrior - he developed an intense fascination with Hannibal (who conquered Rome, that symbol of Christian power) - someone who would not simply dust off his hat and walk on. So that incorrigibly self-righteous crank … that demon who possessed him … how we are not simply one thing or another, our own selves or the projection of others. Liking how the green works, the trees and bushes grow in so many different directions, relate in such complex ways. 

Bench 11.  AN OVERTURNED OIL-LAMP

The psycho-analytic therapy is a time-consuming business. Hence, from the very first, attempts have been made to

shorten the duration of analyses. L...] We

have not heard much about that attempt.

Probably not more than if the fire-brigade,

called to deal with a house that had been

set on fire by an overturned oil-lamp,

contented themselves with removing

the lamp from the room.»

Sigmund Freud, Analysis terminable and interminable

(1937)

The fire metaphor again! The overturned lamp - civilized mastery accidentally turned destructive. As if we could remove the cause - as if we could remove it once and for all, or live without it. Instead the long interminable labor of putting out the fire (in the individual’s neurosis or mental illness, in societies’ wars and hatreds) and cleaning up the damage and building again what will also be destroyed ….as a therapist I so wanted a cure of peoples’ suffering. I was never able to see listening and living people as they are as an interminable but valuable labor. Of course part of me was attracted to “evidence-based” therapies and the formulaic diagnoses and short term treatments. Reverenced the crisp rationality and authority of all that. And part rebelled furiously against it. So hard to make peace with it all. And no removing the overturned oil-lamp of our nature and our human-created predicament. Look at those trees, how their green branches flame up into the sky. They are part of the slow fire of life that made human life possible, and so the human development that now threatens us all. 

Bench 12. MIND REBELS AGAINST AWE

“Works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me. This has occasioned me to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way. […..] Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me. [.….] We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us.»

The Moses of Michelangelo (1914)

The power of art. I think of college and my fury at an zen flush professor who seemed to me to analyze the awe out of the experience of poetry with his “new criticism” theories that seemed to me as Susan Sontag would write to dissect the poem and destroy its life. But of course I too had both reverence for and hostile rebellion  against the poems that so moved me. How convenient to split off the rebellion and project it on this professor and imagine my reverence pure and unambivalent. 

Freud helped me to experience the truth that I love and hate the people and things that are most important to me. Isn’t analysis in part an aggressive act of domination? Getting back on the sidewalk and punching back, not just dusting off your hat and walking away - after a powerful work of art knocks it right off….all those dandelions remind me of blowing dandelion seeds in my uncle’s backyard with a sense of wonder and awe for nature. And his annoyance with me that I didn’t realize how hard he works to mow the lawn and keep the dandelions from spreading their seeds. The joy of expressing even the most unconscious rebellion against the father and his power. 

Quote 13. [A plaque with a quote but no bench] A CIGAR BUTT UNDER THE PINE NEEDLES

Dear Papa, [...] We are really well and are leading a lazy life, getting up late, not dressing up and going early to bed. Yesterday I sought out our old rocky site on the Föhnhügel and it is almost more beautiful than it was two years ago. The path up to it is almost completely overgrown. There is a cigar butt under the pine needles and I really think that it is one of yours. I would love to buy the Föhnhügel and build my house on the meadow between the two wooded sections. [...] Did you really meet the poet Rilke in Munich? I send you a kiss and lots of greetings, Anna»

Letter of Anna to Sigmund Freud, 14th September 1913, Klobenstein

My resistance to free associating on this last bench. My resistance to endings. How appropriate that this last is not a bench - no place to sit and pause - and not in Freud’s voice. The path almost completely overgrown. The cigar butt buried in needles. In the beginning of our work I insisted Greud not smoke cigars. Cigars were associated with my stepfather Jack, the man I hated (but did not realize I also loved) and feared. When I felt safe enough to let Freud smoke cigars and how powerful I felt to be able to give him that gift. Like handing him the symbolic phallus. How important cigars were to him, so he said when he finally gave them up “it will live, but it will not sing” (something like that - I don’t have the exact quote.)  Funny to think of the connection of cigars with fire. Chimney sweeping. The overturned oil-lamp. He had so much pain from the cancer of the mouth they caused, and the surgeries.  The mouth cancer finally killed him.  I could give him song and in my imagination he could smoke cigars without pain and without disease. Wanting to do that again - to give him a gift - by writing our book. Give him - my imaginary Freud - a book where he would live independently of me, where he could sing in the imaginations of others. Give him life. Set him free. Maybe I have done it in a small way with this blog? And when I helped make Chris’s lecture tour “Exploring Freud’s World” happen? 

Thank you for walking the Freud Promenade with me (and joining me for the earlier parts of the trip). Endings are hard for me. Chris and I are on the plane to Seattle as I write this. It’s hard to have our trip end. Will we, will our world, live long enough, and in a way that will allow future trips? I woke up early on our last full day in Klobenstein and took a sunrise walk. Having my goodbye to Klobenstein (and to this whole trip - and I guess to my journeys with the Catholic Church and with therapy and Freud too, in a way, with walking and blogging the Stations of the Cross and the Stations of the Couch) having my goodbye to all that be a dawn walk is beautiful reminder to me that endings are also beginnings. 

* Aphorisms are chosen by Francesco Marchioro. For photos and quotes see: Sigmund Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words (Ed. E. Freud, L. Freud, I. Gubrich-Simitis, Norton &.Co 1987); Sigmund Freud Anna Freud, Correspondence (Ed. I. Meyer-Palmedo, Polity Press 2014); F. Marchioro, Freud's Walk (Ebook 2021)