Invisible Women

~ ~ ~

The Great Freud’s methods flourished, and although there were others who disagreed, his ideas moved their way into even the most remote provinces. As such, it was as though Freud possessed an entire envoy, who would return periodically, to the International Psychoanalytic Congress, to tell of their lessons and struggles, and in those cold halls of sterility Freud strolled, listening to their long reports. The ambassadors were Persians, Armenians, Germans, Syrians, Copts, Turkomans; the doctor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through those objective foreign eyes and ears could their knowledge manifest existence to Freud. In languages incomprehensible to Freud, the envoys related information heard in languages incomprehensible to them: from this opaque, dense stridor emerged the histories of women and men, suffering with unknown ailments, forced to walk in patterns, bound by head and back aches, plagued with unrest. All of this, the Great Freud listened to with passing interest. But when Lou Andreas made her report, a different communication was established between herself and the doctor. Newly arrived but not totally ignorant of the language of psychoanalysis, Lou Andreas could express herself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings and hootings, or with objects she took from her purse — ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes — which she arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the patients to which Freud had sent her, the ingenious Russian improvised pantomimes that the doctor had to interpret: one woman who would only allow keys to sit in doors in the vertical position, another who could not leave her home without powder smeared across her eyes, a third who could love but only with frigidity. The Great Freud deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the women Andreas saw remained uncertain; he never knew whether his student wished to enact what her patient had experienced in reality, a dream designed through fantasy, their parents’ occupations, the prophecy of an astrologer, or a charade to indicate a name. But, obscure and obvious as it might be, everything Lou Andreas displayed had the power of emblems, which once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. In Freud’s mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for each patient, the words evoked in Lou Andreas’s stories.

As the seasons passed and her missions continued, Lou Andreas mastered the psychoanalytic language and the national idioms and tribal dialects. Now her accounts were the most precise and detailed that the Great Freud could wish and there was no questions or curiosity which they did not satisfy. And yet each piece of information about a patient recalled to the doctor’s mind that first gesture or object with which Andreas had designated the patient. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Freud thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.

“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Andreas, “shall I at least possess all knowledge of the human mind?”

And the Russian answered, “My friend, do not believe it. On that day, you will be an emblem among emblems.”