Invisible Women

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LOU: …Perhaps this room and all we have discussed exist only in the continual expanse of our mind…

SIGMUND: …and however far our troubled enterprises as psychoanalysts and friends may take us, we both harbor within ourselves this silent shade, this conversation of pauses, this evening that is always the same.

LOU: Unless the opposite hypothesis is correct: that those who suffer with dreams and aphonia, neuralgia and transference exist only because we two think of them, here, enclosed among these walls, motionless since time began.

SIGMUND: Unless toil, shouts, sores, stink do not exist; and only this azalea bush.

LOU: Unless the poor, hungry, wounded, dead exist only because we think of them.

SIGMUND: To tell the truth, I never think of them.

LOU: Then they do not exist.

SIGMUND: To me this conjecture does not seem to suit our purposes. Without them we could never remain here, cocooned in the safety of this room.

LOU: Then the hypothesis must be rejected. So the other hypothesis must be true: they exist and we do not.

SIGMUND: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.

LOU: And here, in fact, we are.

SIGMUND: But then all these women who live down the hall, where are they?