memories of sigmund freud

I first met Sigmund Freud in Berlin when he was little more than a young slightly precocious medical student with a few bright ideas about mental behaviours and experiential causality.
The era of his grand reputation was yet to come.
For a start, in those days he was still pronouncing his name Sigmund Frood.
It was much simpler.
The more famous pronunciation of his name (Froyd) was an affectation which came much later.
Berlin was an unusual place during that blighted and momentous period.
The collapse of the wienerschnitzel industry had forced the bourgeois middle classes to eat undiluted sauerkraut, and everywhere there were rumblings of discontent.
Frood moved through this miasma of discontent like the spectre at Hamlet's feast.
Occasionally he would shout "Achtung steinervortzels" in the street, but I think he did this as much for fun as for any other reason.
Perhaps in his own way he was testing the parametres of this turned in little universe.
There was a touch of destiny about the young man.
He had an air of unperturbable affability except when he got hit by a tram one day, and the mask slipped somewhat.
He had already begun to treat patients at rooms on the Wolkenkuckkucksheim Platz.
I remember one particular case he told me about.
An insane female called X.
Frood theorised that she'd been driven completely out of her tiny cotton picking mind simply because her father had named her X.
The shame of having just one letter in her name had been repressed from an early age, only to emerge now as full blown insanity.
Frood's treatment of her was considered revolutionary by the medical establishment of the era.
He would ask her to recline on a couch while he seated himself in an armchair behind her.
Thus seated he was completely out of her sightline.
He bristled and told me I was impertinent when I later suggested that this seating arrangement served no other purpose than to enable him to eyeball her breastensteiners surreptitiously throughout the treatment sessions.
The rest of the treatment was also, as I've said, unorthodox.
Once X had given a brief account of her recurrent symptoms, Frood would lean forward and shout in her ear: "Don't be such a stupid bitchenstein."
Her condition worsened considerably under a steady regimen of this type of treatment.
Soon she left Berlin, married a Nazi, and went to work for the Johnston Press.
To the end of his days, Frood did not consider her one of his successes.
He was undaunted by this early failure however.
Another of his clients at the time was a young radical philosopher called Nietzche who had been caught writing "God Is Dead" on a wall.
The Viennese were indifferent to such behaviour but Nietzche got into trouble because we were in Berlin not Vienna.
Frood treated him for a number of weeks during which time the great scientist of the mind abandoned the practice of asking his client to sit on a couch while he Frood sat in an armchair just out of sight.
Frood bristled again when I suggested he had dispensed with his former treatment methods simply because Nietzche was (a) not a beautiful woman, and (b) did not have splendidly appointed breastensteiners.
We were in the cafe Schnoob on the Gitner Kreuzung when we spoke about these matters.
His response was so strong that I realised our friendship was now definitively threatened by my refusal to take his methods seriously.
His exact words if I remember correctly were: "Get stuffed you schweinhund. Everyone uses what they've got."
I have no idea what he meant by this.
Although I think scweinhund means pig dog.
Outside in the street he demanded I retract any implied criticism of his work.
I answered that I wasn't criticising his work per se, and that a man is entitled to stare at Breastensteiners if he wants to, but why not call it Staring At Breastensteiners, instead of labeling it Psychotherapy.
This was in the days before the end of Weimar you see.
Cultural mores about breastensteiners, and the staring thereat or thereon or thereto, were in continuous flux, and at this stage, a laissez faire attitude prevailed in Berlin which was positively louche.
We were all going around the place with our eyes out on stalks.
I don't know why Frood even bothered to pretend he was looking at anything else.
But he was furious with me and I knew it.
He strode away up the Testicler Strasse muttering to himself in Hoch Deutsch.
This is a form of German that, like all other forms of German, involves a lot of spitting.
He looked oddly heroic as he strode into the night.
Angry though he was, he walked with a purposeful tread, as if heading towards a future only he could see and the rest of us remained unaware of.
Touched by destiny alright.
I doubted I would see him again.
However after a few days he appeared to have calmed down.
The aspersions I had cast on his methods were either forgiven or forgotten.
He met me at the Zorglevootzal opera a few nights later and soon we were chatting like old friends. It was as though nothing had happened. That was Frood you see.
Quick to anger.
Quick to forgive.
The foibleousness of the great I call it.
Yes, the young genius was not entirely unaware of the possibility of a certain stigma beginning to attach itself to his failures.
In any case he knew well that his treatment of Nietzche could hardly be said to have been any more successful than his treatment of X.
Nietzche withdrew further into his fantasy world, published a few utterly nutty books with occasional good one liners, and went to work for the Johnston Press.
He was never seen again.
But in spite of the setbacks, Frood was learning all the time.
This is the key to his character.
Unperturbed by failure he continued to accept patients. He was all the time honing his treatments to meet the incredibly diverse circumstances and predispositions of those who were mentally ill.
Sexy women would still be asked to recline on a couch while Frood occupied his arm chair just slightly behind them.
Men could sit wherever the hell they liked, as long as they didn't get in Frood's way while he ogled passing women with binoculars from his window overlooking the Snuddlebun Schwossensee.
And now at last Frood had his first success.
A young struggling artist called Adolf Hitler who could barely motivate himself to get out of bed in the morning called at the treatment rooms begging for help.
Frood gave him a good talking to, and sent him back out to face the world all fired up.
I'm told Hitler never looked back after that.
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