I’ll get in the water someday, my trick will fail, and then goodnight.
– Harry Houdini
Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
– Sigmund Freud
For a year now he’s been practising the escape from the Chinese Water Torture Cell and, every time he submerges, he is terrified, convinced he will drown. Yet he continues. He has told his wife, and his assistant, that he cannot rely on anyone but himself any more, else he is doomed, and so he does not permit them to institute what they have always considered proper safety measures. Now a group of suffragettes in England have challenged him to escape from a confinement of their design which is patently absurd, but will afford him, finally, the opportunity to consult Sigmund Freud in person;; he will be in England at the same time. The two men, nearly twenty years between them, Freud being the elder, have been exchanging letters for a year and, with each letter, they have become friendlier, warmer. An Anglophile, Dr. Freud’s English is impeccable:
Vienna
5 September 1912
Dear Ehrich,
I am, of course, delighted to hear from you again. Forgive the delay in my reply. I was on vacation with my family in the mountains for two weeks and, at my wife’s insistence, did not take my correspondence with me. It seems as though our wives would get along very well, my friend. Perhaps you will come to Vienna with Bess after your engagements in London and Berlin and be our guests. I will take you to my favorite café, and we can take long walks together. You will be amused by my gait, the gait of an old man, yet I limp along at a steady pace. I will, no doubt, admire your athleticism, which has made you so famous. A man who lives so much in and through his body is of great interest to me.
But I am troubled by your most recent complaints, Ehrich, and urge you caution until we can find a solution for you. This will not be possible by letter though I can make one or two suggestions until we meet in England in two months’ time. Firstly, of course, I urge you to abandon at once the particular stunt that is triggering your obsessive thoughts. Surely, there are others you can do at less risk. Secondly, reduce your commitments and do not answer any more challenges except for the suffragettes who are, thankfully, bringing you to England. So, you will be lashed to a mattress with bandages, how sublime. And how clever your manager is. Apart from the hilarity of this evening, the show you are planning for your tour in England should be simple, primarily illusion rather than stunt. Do you think this is possible? Is this not the way you began? I understand that the invitation from Scotland Yard may be difficult to decline. Can you perform a simple release from the handcuffs without jumping into water? I think you must eliminate water from your repertoire right now, Ehrich.
I look very much forward to meeting with you, at length, over a
period
of
a
week,
and
will
ask
my
colleague,
Ernest
Jones,
to
find
a secure location far from the reporters, the spiritualists, and the maddening crowd. We can follow-up on our analysis when you come to see me in Vienna where I hope you can stay for at least a month. Once again, you and Bess will be welcome as guests in our home. Please let me know if such an arrangement would suit you.
Fondly, Sigmund
New York September 25, 1912
Sigmund, dear friend,
Thank you very much for your letter of September 5th. I have taken what you said to heart but, unfortunately, my manager is insisting that water remain an element in the stunts. He has promised the Alhambra that the Chinese Water Torture Cell will be part of the program. I could ask my brother to take my place, but I worry that the audience would not be satisfied.
I am practising every day, obsessively, as you say. It is like Russian Roulette and I cannot stop. When will the mechanism fail? Why do I prefer to immerse myself in the tank without assistants? Why do I feel both safe and terrified in this watery womb? What has happened to me?
Warmly, Ehrich
Freud notes that Ehrich has not answered his question about arrangements. It is obvious that the obsession has a firm hold and has become an obstacle to everyday life rendering Ehrich unable to reply to suggestions or invitations. Freud takes a paternal interest in his patients and he is worried about Ehrich in a way he cannot explain to his colleagues who are, for the most part, sceptical of his work. All except Lou-Andreas Salomé, the only woman among them. She understands best of all, it seems. As for the others, they preferred his experiments with hypnotism and cocaine;; the concrete effects could be measured. Now there is constant conversation about ‘the unconscious’, as a reservoir of memory, impulse and desire. And when thinking about Ehrich, Freud considers his background, the life he has led, his family, and what has been, shall we say, swallowed and then contained by his unconscious. True, there are physical reasons for his choice of occupation – an escapologist: he is acrobatic, supple, lithe, dexterous. By all accounts, his fingers are the most dexterous ever seen though this statement is probably the hyperbole of the tabloid press. A small man with a tender face, broad shoulders, wide cheekbones, smooth, beardless skin, attractive to women, Freud decides, because he is not threatening, he does not loom over them. A Victorian paterfamilias, Freud is self-conscious – and how is this related to the unconscious, he wonders – about his own stooped stature and capacious belly, his white beard and tobacco stained teeth. He cannot give up his beloved cigars though his personal doctor has admonished him to do so and his wife, Martha, has shunned him in bed when he takes a late night cigar or schnapps. There have been many nights when he has slept in his office or in Minna’s bed performing his own tricky escape from the harridan who has borne him six children. Besides his wife and sister-in-law, and his favorite daughter, Anna, he has few admiring women in his life other than Minna, Lou-Andreas, and his patients, all hysterics with somatic symptoms who lie on his thickly draped couch week after week and lament about their philandering husbands, for example. He is bored with them, yet he needs them to write his papers, and as a basis for discussion in the salons and lectures in Vienna, Geneva and beyond. Freud by now is a famous man, a controversial thinker, Herr Doktor, revered, respected, and feared. He has even been to Clark University in America and it was there that his alleged friend, Jung, told a reporter about Minna, albeit obliquely without using her name and without specificity, and used the word ‘hypocrite’, with reference to Freud, which was both searing and slanderous. His analysis by correspondence with Ehrich has been a great relief from the overbearing criticism he endures. First Fliess and now Jung have abandoned him. But to be called hypocrite by a respected colleague, a man he had nurtured and trained, and to expose him to a reporter. Ehrich Weiss, aka Harry Houdini, a celebrity many admire, is just as famous as Freud and has more at stake every time he appears in public: his life. What does Freud have at stake? His reputation. A friendship with the famous Houdini may or may not enhance his reputation, though this is not Freud’s conscious motivation. No, he likes the man and is intrigued by his self-destructive obsession. Thankfully, there is no homoerotic undertow to their discussions as there had been with Freud’s first collaborator – Fliess. But, of course, Freud and Houdini have never met so there is no physicality to disturb the flow of their epistolary conversation. Their correspondence is crisp, polite, warm in a fraternal or paternal manner, but not seductive or competitive in any way. If Freud can help Houdini, he will be pleased. Surely, he will be pleased to meet him, to break the illusion of his tricks, to plumb their depths and expose the armature of the terror that has befallen him and threatens his livelihood.
But how can Houdini help Freud? Neither Houdini nor Freud consider this question during the period of their initial correspondence.
*****
One week before he packs his bags for the trip to England, Freud has a dream which he records in his self-analysis notebook: I am visited by a shadowy figure known as ‘the Prince of the Air’, who informs me of a volcanic eruption in Italy, a catastrophe that has taken many lives. As a doctor I am asked to assist in the hospital where all the survivors have been taken but I have lost my skill and am as helpless as a schoolboy.
Helpless as a schoolboy. Impotent. He puts the notebook down and though it is 3 a.m., he climbs the cold, uncarpeted stairs to Minna’s room. He will prove to himself what he can do and he knows that she will encourage him because she has always encouraged him;; it is the basis of her acceptance in the household. Her small attic room is warm, a low fire burning in the grate. She sleeps calmly, her thick graying hair loose on the down pillow. The embroidered initials on the fine linen cover – a long ago discarded dowry, yellow with age – are, ironically, or perhaps, intentionally, or perhaps, obviously, the same as Martha’s were before her marriage to Freud: MB, Minna Bernays.
Only Lou-Andreas Salomé knows all the details of Freud’s affair with his wife’s sister. ‘It was as though you married both of them. It was as though you needed both of them for yourself and to raise your children’, Lou says, and the simplicity of the observation is, in itself, a consolation. They are no longer teacher and student;; they are friends.
Their lives have been defined by their work, Lou always complains. And, for Freud, this is certainly true. When the two are together – rarely now that Lou-Andreas has completed her training and moved back to Germany – they open their notebooks and discuss their patients, the intrigue among other practitioners, Lou’s chaste marriage and her lover, Rilke, Freud’s ménage, and now, as Freud is about to set out for England in the fall of 1912, Houdini. What does Lou-Andreas think of Houdini?
‘We will discuss Houdini later. Let us return to your dream, Sigmund’, she says, firmly. She is a great beauty, dark-haired, large boned, self-confident, and kind-hearted, a fatal mix for the men who adore her. ‘It was you who had taught me how exceptional the dreamer can be in interpreting his own dreams and how we, as analysts, must attend to the dreamer’s interpretation and take it further’, she continues. She is, Freud observes, most attractive when she gets down to business. He has never known such an intelligent, determined, emancipated woman.
She was waiting for him to speak. For, alas, even in this story so far, we have not heard Herr Doktor’s voice except through the prism of his affectionate and concerned letter to Ehrich. Now in the presence of his good friend and confidante, Lou-Andreas, at the Café Sacher, late one afternoon just two days before his departure, Freud cannot remain silent;; Lou-Andreas will not permit such silence. Yet, he is afraid. He lights his cigar, leans back on the lushly upholstered chair, and speaks slowly and deliberately, intent quite consciously upon not revealing too much: ‘The Prince of Thin Air, I recall, is one of the monikers attributed to Houdini by the tabloid press.’
‘And you have been preoccupied with Houdini?’ ‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘And that is all.’
‘And you are melancholy?’
‘Yes.’
‘The other night, in the attic, the fire in the grate blew out as soon as we began to wrestle under the covers’, Freud says ‘I took it as an omen.’
‘This fantasy, which you call an omen, is a reckoning, a resistance’, Lou- Andreas suggests, a gentle suggestion which she hopes will spur Freud into an awareness of his deep guilt about the long-standing affair with Minna and Martha’s complicity in the ménage. Indeed, there cannot be a ménage unless there is complicity, Lou-Andreas has said often. Does not her own husband agree to her affairs?
She turns to the waiter to ask for some sugar, a breathing space in the intense conversation. The café is becoming more crowded and noisy with all the five o’clock regulars unloading their leather briefcases onto the empty chairs and placing their orders imperiously. It is a tone of voice the Viennese have mastered. The seats are taken within minutes, no waiting line, grumbles, and the latecomers roll onto the street with dejected expressions. Though there are many other cafés, none are as coveted by the status-driven Viennese as the Sacher.
‘It is unimportant’, Freud says, referring again to the troubling dream, in the hope that his mention of it to Lou will be disregarded.
‘But you must not withhold any association, Sigmund, and this you know very well. I have heard you iterate this principle countless times in your lectures.’
‘Why do you press me, Lou?’
‘Because that is what you wish me to do, Sigmund.’
And so, on a rainy morning in early November of 1912, Freud sets out for London. The journey, by train to Ostende, ferry to Dover, and then another train from Dover to London, takes almost two days. He will break the journey in Ostende and rest the night at the Old Inn near the water where he has stayed many times before. He sleeps heavily that night, without dreams, and in the early morning, before boarding the ferry, he takes a long walk along the water. Two cats follow him to the quay, or he imagines he is being followed and, as he sits down on a bench, one of them, a Persian with a yellow streak down its forehead, jumps onto his lap. He does not want it there – he has never liked domesticated animals – and grabs it by its scruff. Unrelenting, like a bad dream, the cat returns, its black and amber eyes as piercing as Freud’s own. The two stare at one another a moment, and then the cat jumps away and disappears into the morass of quayside activity. The boats are being loaded with cargo, barrels of fruit, bales of tobacco. Freud takes out his cigar, but has trouble lighting it in the brisk wind. He has an uneasy sensation, almost a premonition, about the journey. What if I decided not to board the ferry? What then? But when has Herr Doktor ever abandoned his plans or allowed a patient to go untended? And though Ehrich waits for him, he is apprehensive. In the remaining minutes of his leisurely morning, he thinks about a life of adventure, a reckless life, utterly unlike his own, yet utterly his own. A life that belongs to him, without wife, mistress, children or professional obligation. If, at least, he had been a soldier, called to command troops in the furthest reaches of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, he might have been happier. He fantasises himself in uniform, a masterful, dashing figure. But there arrived an invitation to medical school and his parents would not let him turn it down. Jews do not become soldiers by choice, they had said to him. Freud had studied the Bible and knew this was patently untrue;; the Jews had been warriors for millennia. Not so in the European diaspora where all remnants of antiquity had been extinguished. And so he went to medical school and developed his theories about the unconscious and the practise of psychoanalysis.
How shall he greet Ehrich? With a handshake or a hug? They will be meeting in Ernest Jones’s office at University College, London, a more formal setting than Freud would have liked. Freud will stay with Jones who is married to one of his daughter’s Viennese schoolmates and close to the Freud family. This is, in fact, how Freud and Jones met. And now Ernest Jones wants to create the British Psychoanalytic Society and Freud has agreed to help him, the ostensible reason for his visit to London. But the main event, of equal importance, will be Ehrich Weiss, aka Houdini. The name Houdini itself conjures intrigue for Freud, intrigue and excitement. As soon as the arrangements were confirmed, the excitement became almost unbearable and Freud let slip the news to Lou-Andreas. It soon got round to his colleagues in Vienna and Berlin that he had been asked to help Houdini overcome a paralyzing obsession and that if he were able to cure the performer, all scepticism about treatment modalities might cease. Was it Lou-Andreas who gave him away? That dear woman, he certainly did not think so. But now that the name of his new mystery patient has been revealed, a lot is in the balance for Sigmund Freud. Some say he has taken on the case for the purpose of solidifying his reputation, others that he is bored by his clientele in Vienna. So many rumors, all because confidentiality was breached. And this is the source of the disquiet, the premonition, and the dream about the ‘Prince of the Air’, Freud decides. There is no way he can satisfy every one’s expectations, least of all his own.
*****
He had a dossier about Ehrich Weiss in his satchel which he hoped to read on the boat, but it was a rough voyage, and motion sickness got the better of him. He heaved over the side three times before he settled into a chair mid-ship but even then his stomach did not settle. He was grateful to be travelling alone and unrecognized;; he did not want to be observed by strangers in his vulnerability. Such vanity. How to explain it? Both Freud and Houdini felt a constant hankering for recognition. They had much else in common despite the discrepancy in their ages. Ehrich was Jewish also though his family had emigrated to America from Budapest when he was a boy. He had learned from his parents to remain invisible to the anti-Semites by changing his name and going into show business. Not that being Jewish mattered so much in America. Freud’s struggle in Vienna was more exhausting. The description of psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish science’ undermined legitimacy. Freud hoped that with the help of Ernest Jones, who was Welsh, and Carl Jung who was Swiss Protestant, the universality of their shared methods would coalesce.
All this was going through his mind as the boat swelled and dipped across the Channel. What a relief to be back on land and to board the train. The dreary English landscape with its endless postage stamp gardens, lowering sky, and empty streets were so lacking in charm and drama, that it was restful, almost hypnotic, to watch them slip by. He dozed and snored, most probably, as he woke with drool on his chin and a bad taste in his mouth. He had forgotten his mints and was relieved that no one would be picking him up at the station unshaven, unbathed, uncouth. He could not wait to have a proper nap and wash in the hotel before meeting Ernest Jones for dinner at his club. He thought of Martha’s comment about the men’s clubs in London, their rarified atmosphere and exclusion of women. She didn’t like them. She didn’t like them at all. How did the old saying go: ‘Men drink while women are at the sink’, she said. He had rarely seen her so angry. He rolled into sleep with Martha’s words in his head and awoke to the bells of a small church across the street at six in the evening. He had only an hour to bathe and dress which, strangely, did not seem long enough.
His first appointment with Ehrich took place on Monday morning at eleven. In an effort to feel insouciant, Freud walked from Baker Street to Tottenham Court Road. The air was brisk, misty with rain. He had forgotten his umbrella in Vienna. This forgetfulness was something new, either age related, or because he felt constantly distracted and tense. Why did he feel like an old man? His life, by all accounts, was placid and predictable. True, his ideas were still ridiculed at times but, by and large, he’d made a career and a name for himself. If only Martha had packed his umbrella. But she had been busy and said, ‘You must pack yourself, Sigmund.’ It was the first time she had let him down in this way. Like his forgetfulness, it was something new to digest and analyze. Why was she defying him? He put his mist-frosted spectacles into their case and continued walking into the tip of Regent’s Park, and then back out onto the Marylebone Road. The leaves lay desiccating and un-swept on the sidewalk. The British were not as tidy as the Viennese, he thought, but to what end? Neither were they spontaneous or fun loving, only messy. But not in their speech. The precision in the British language had engaged Freud since he was a schoolboy. As an adult, however, he noted an undertow in every conversation, or an edge. Freud couldn’t make it out exactly: hostility or privilege? Yet, oddly, he felt at home here and walked the streets unmolested. It was always good to get away from his practise and his domestic life albeit to an even more staid, repressed and anti-Semitic country than his own. Hadn’t Lou-Andreas always said, ‘We must take our pleasures where we find them, Sigmund.’ She was not Jewish so never felt that pressure. As for Ernest Jones, he was entertaining but the club itself was not. Formality in every introduction but not a sentence more. The response to Sigmund Freud bordered on condescension. Ernest offered an explanation: most of the men had never met a Jew. ‘And you disappointed them, dear friend. They had undoubtedly expected a person more exotic wearing veils and bindis with outlandish ideas and manners.’
So he had broken a race barrier. That explained his mood, which was incendiary. He had wanted to pummel all the men who had so politely taken his hand.
Ehrich could not shake the repulsion he felt in Freud’s presence. Freud smoked all the time and his brown tweed suit was saturated with the odor of cigar. The vest reminded him of his grandfather, and it was not a fond memory. Ehrich asked to open the window and then sat as far away from Freud as he could. But the office was small and Freud insisted on moving the desk chair in front of the desk onto the carpet. The two men, who in their fantasy had become epistolary friends, were now in proximity with only a small coffee table between them, a no man’s land of confusion. Day after day, Freud pressed on with his questions as Houdini evaded. Was he meticulous in his personal habits, Freud wanted to know? How did he prepare for a journey? How would he describe his relationship with his mother? His sexual relationship with his wife?
Houdini was an escape artist and would not, could not answer. Yet, he knew that if he did not relax, the meetings Dr. Jones had set up would be futile and the obsessive behavior unresolved, threatening his livelihood. Odd, he never thought that the coda to the obsession might be death, death as he was flying into the water from a bridge, for example. And so, finally, he took Freud’s advice and recorded his dreams, when he could remember them, and he gave the dreams titles: The Sphinx, The Homecoming, The Elopement. During the fifth session, they discussed The Sphinx, a dream story about an animal with cloven hooves that is half-dog and half-lamb. Bowls of food and water are put out for the creature who runs down steep stairs and eventually disappears. Freud suggested that the dream story expressed the duality in Ehrich’s nature: his desire to be both manly and kind. But when Ehrich free associated on his own dream, he thought it meant something entirely different and that Freud was talking about himself. But Freud insisted that it expressed a duality in Ehrich’s nature, not his own, and this seemingly definitive explanation delivered with pompous certainty, was a strait jacket from which Houdini required escape. His mind moved as fast as his dexterous limbs and he could not be contained in this way or be bound by rules, walls, borders, traditions or dumb explanations, he told Freud. He cut the session short and told Herr Doktor that he was a fool and had not been able to help him. The obsessions were intensifying, new tricks surfacing in his day dreams everyday and he had hoped for a sudden solution which Freud explained was not possible, thus the invitation to come to his house and continue treatment in Vienna. Houdini refused and said again that Freud was a fool. He spoke directly but without rancour and ended with the projection that he would dance away from his death wish as he had always done by free-falling into the water, unlatching all bolts and chains, and swimming away to freedom. But Freud was concerned that all the manly, athletic skill would not save Houdini from a sudden and premature death.
*****
It was some thirteen years later, October 31, 1926, that Freud’s prediction was realized. During a lecture in Montreal, Houdini had mentioned his strong stomach muscles. A young student punched him without warning, and the next day Houdini’s appendix ruptured. He was only fifty years old.
Freud wept when he read the obituary in the newspaper. He was in the Sacher by himself and there was nowhere for the tears to go, no one to whom he could express his shock and remorse. He could not explain his strong attachment to Houdini, or the idea of Houdini, a man who escapes. Despite international recognition, Freud had only to think of Houdini to feel a strong sense of failure. Solitude amplified his despair and he prepared to leave, gathering his disordered papers into his satchel while calling for the check, and dabbing his eyes discreetly with a folded handkerchief that the maid had ironed only that morning. What was Martha doing all day now that they had hired this maid? Freud had already forgotten what Martha had said to him over breakfast. He took a walk into the Staadtpark and sat on a bench for a long time. It was autumn, the season of falling leaves and sharp winds. It was already snowing in the Alps. Freud, now seventy years old, had no energy to take long walks any more. He had grown into his own image of himself as an old man, stooped and limping along the streets of Vienna, the only home he had ever known and loved.