The Interpretation of Murder

Chapter Nineteen

Carl Jung stood straight and tall in the doorway to Freud's suite. He was fully, formally dressed. Nothing in his demeanor suggested a man who had just been playing with sticks and stones on the floor of his hotel room.

Freud, in vest and shirtsleeves, begged his guest to make himself comfortable. His instinct told him this interview was decisive. Jung decidedly did not look right. Freud gave no credence to Brill's accusations, but he began to agree that Jung might be spinning out of his — Freud's — orbit.

Jung was, Freud knew, more intelligent and creative than any of his other followers — the first one with the potential to break new ground. But Jung undoubtedly had a father complex. When, in one of his earliest letters, Jung begged Freud for a photograph of himself, saying he would 'cherish' it, Freud was flattered. But when he explicitly asked Freud to regard him not as an equal but as a son, Freud became concerned. He told himself then he would have to take special care.

It occurred to Freud that, as far as he knew, Jung did not have any other male friends. Rather, Jung surrounded himself with women, many women — too many. That was the other difficulty. Given Hall's communication, Freud no longer could avoid a conversation with Jung about the girl who had written claiming to be Jung's patient and mistress. Freud had seen the unconscionable letter Jung sent to the girl's mother. On top of all this, there was Ferenczi's report on the state of Jung's hotel room.

The one point on which Freud had no qualms was Jung's belief in the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis. In their private letters and in hours of private talk, Freud had tested, prodded, probed. There could be no doubt: Jung fully believed in. the sexual aetiology. And he had come to his conviction in the best of all possible ways, overcoming his own skepticism after seeing Freud's hypotheses confirmed again and again in clinical practice.

'We have always spoken freely to each other,' said Freud. 'Can we now?'

'I should like nothing more,' said Jung. 'Especially now that I have freed myself from your paternal authority.'

Freud tried not to appear taken aback. 'Good, good. Coffee?'

'No, thank you. Yes. It happened yesterday, when you chose to keep hidden the truth of your Count Thun dream in order to preserve your authority. You see the paradox. You feared losing your authority; as a result, you lost it. You cared more for authority than truth; with me, there can be no authority other than truth. But it is better this way. Your cause will only prosper from my independence.

Indeed, it already is prospering. I have solved the problem of incest!'

Out of this rush of words, Freud fastened on two. 'My cause?'

'What?'

'You said, "your cause",' Freud repeated.

'I did not.'

'You did. It is the second time.'

'Well, it is yours — is it not? — yours and mine. It will be infinitely stronger now. Didn't you hear me? I have solved the incest problem.'

'What do you mean, "solved" it?' said Freud. 'What problem?'

'We know the grown son does not actually covet his mother sexually, with her varicose veins and sagging breasts. That is obvious to anyone. Nor does the infant son, who has no inkling of penetration. Why then does the adult's neurosis revolve so frequently around the Oedipal complex, as your cases and my own confirm? The answer came to me in a dream last night. The adult conflict reactivates the infantile material. The neurotic's suppressed libido is forced back into its infantile channels — just as you have always said! — where it finds the mother, who was once of such special value to him. The libido fastens onto her, without the mother ever having actually been desired.'

These remarks caused a curious physical reaction in Sigmund Freud. He suffered a rush of blood to the arteries surrounding his cerebral cortex, which he experienced as a heaviness in his skull. He swallowed and said, 'You are denying the Oedipal complex?'

'Not at all. How could I? I invented the term.'

'The term complex is yours,' said Freud. 'You are retaining the complex but denying the Oedipal.'

'No!' cried Jung. 'I am preserving all your fundamental insights. Neurotics do have an Oedipal complex. Their neurosis causes them to believe that they sexually coveted their mother.'

'You are saying there are no actual incestuous wishes. Not among the healthy.'

'Not even among the neurotic! It is marvelous. The neurotic develops a mother complex because his libido is forced into its infantile channels. Thus the neurotic gives himself a delusive reason to castigate himself. He feels guilty over a wish he never had.'

'I see. What then has caused his neurosis?' asked Freud.

'His present conflict. Whatever desire the neurotic is not admitting to. Whatever life task he can't bring himself to face.'

'Ah, the present conflict,' said Freud. His head was no longer heavy. Instead, a peculiar lightness had come to him. 'So there is no reason to delve into the patient's sexual past. Or, indeed, his childhood at all.'

'Exactly,' said Jung. 'I have never thought so. From a purely clinical perspective, the present conflict is what must be uncovered and worked through. The reactivated sexual material from childhood can be excavated, but it is a lure, a trap. It is the patient's effort to flee from his neurosis. I am writing it all up now. You will see how many more adherents psychoanalysis will gain by reducing the role of sexuality.'

'Oh, eliminate it altogether — then we shall do even better,' said Freud. 'May I ask you a question? If incest is not actually desired, why is it taboo?'

'Taboo?'

'Yes,' said Freud. 'Why would there be an incest prohibition in every human society that has ever existed, if no one has ever wished it?'

'Because — because — many things are taboo that are not actually desired.'

'Name one.'

'Well, many things. There is a long list,' said Jung.

'Name one.'

'So — for example, the prehistoric animal cults, the totems, they — ah — ' Jung was unable to finish his sentence.

'May I ask you one thing more?' said Freud. 'You say this insight came to you through the interpretation of a dream. I wonder what the dream was. Perhaps another interpretation is possible?'

'I did not say through the interpretation of a dream,' Jung replied. 'I said in a dream. Indeed, I was not quite asleep.'

'I don't understand,' said Freud.

'You know the voices one hears at night, just prior to sleep. I have trained myself to attend to them. One of them speaks to me with ancient wisdom. I have seen him. He is an old man, an Egyptian Gnostic — a chimera, really — called Philemon. It was he who revealed the secret to me.'

Freud did not answer.

'I am not cowed by your hints of incredulity,' said Jung. 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Herr Professor, than are dreamt in your psychology.'

'I daresay. But to be led by a voice, Jung?'

'Perhaps I am giving you the wrong impression,' Jung replied. 'I do not accept Philemon's word without reasons. He made his case through an exegesis of the primitive mother cults. I assure you, I did not believe it at first. I put several objections, each of which he was able to answer.'

'You converse with him?'

'Obviously you are unhappy with my theoretical innovation.'

'I am concerned about its source,' said Freud.

'No. You are concerned about your theories, your sexual theories,' said Jung, his indignation visibly rising. 'So you change the subject and try to bait me into a conversation about the supernatural. I won't be baited. I have objective reasons.'

'Given to you by a spirit?'

'Just because you have never experienced such phenomena does not mean they don't exist.'

'I grant that,' said Freud, 'but there must be evidence, Jung.'

'I have seen him, I tell you!' Jung cried. 'Why is that not evidence? He wept describing to me how the pharaohs scratched their fathers' names from the monumental stelae a fact I did not even know but which I later confirmed. Who are you to say what is evidence and what is not? You assume your conclusion: he does not exist; therefore what I see and what I hear does not count as evidence.'

'What you hear. It is not evidence, Carl, if only one person can hear it.'

A strange sound began to emanate from behind the sofa on which Freud sat: a creaking or groaning, as if there were something in the wall trying to get out. 'What is that?' asked Freud.

'I don't know,' said Jung.

The creaking grew louder until it filled the room. When it reached what sounded like a breaking point, it gave way to a splintering crack, like a clap of thunder.

'What on earth?' said Freud.

'I know that sound,' said Jung. A triumphant gleam came to his eyes. 'I have heard that sound before. There is your evidence! That was a catalytic exteriorization.'

'A what?'

'A flux within the psyche manifesting itself through an external object,' explained Jung. 'I caused that sound!'

'Oh, come, Jung,' said Freud. 'I think it may have been a gunshot.'

'You are mistaken. And to prove it, I will cause it again this instant!'

The moment Jung uttered this remarkable pronouncement, the groan began anew. In just the same fashion, it rose to an unbearable peak and then erupted with a tremendous report.

'What do you say now?' asked Jung.

Freud said nothing. He had fainted and was slipping off the sofa.

Detective Littlemore, hustling up from the Canal Street docks, put it all together. It was the first murder he had ever uncovered. Mr Hugel was going to be in heaven.

It wasn't Harry Thaw at all; it was George Banwell, from beginning to end. It was Banwell who killed Miss Riverford and stole her body from the morgue. Littlemore imagined Banwell driving to the river's edge, dragging the dead body out onto the pier, and descending the elevator down to the caisson. Banwell would have had the key to unlock the elevator door. The caisson was the perfect place to dispose of a corpse.

But Banwell would have assumed he was alone in the caisson. How stunned he must have been to discover Malley. How could Banwell have explained coming down in the middle of the night with a dead body in tow? He couldn't have explained it, so he had to kill him.

The blockage in Window Five, and Banwell's reaction to it, sealed the proof. He wouldn't want anybody discovering what had jammed up Window Five, would he?

The detective saw it all as he raced breathlessly along Canal Street — all except for the big black and red car, a Stanley Steamer, slowly trading him half a block behind. In his mind's eye, as he crossed the street, Littlemore saw his promotion to lieutenant; he saw the mayor himself decorating him; he saw Betty admiring his new uniform; but he didn't see the Steamer's sudden lurch forward. He didn't see the vehicle swerving slightly in order to hit him dead on, and of course he couldn't see himself tumbling through the air, his legs taken out by the car's fender.

The body lay sprawled out on Canal Street as the car sped away down Second Avenue. Among the horrified onlookers, a number shouted imprecations at the fleeing hit- and-run driver. One called him a murderer. A patrolman happened to be on the corner. He rushed to the fallen Littlemore, who had enough strength to whisper something in the officer's ear. The patrolman frowned, then nodded. It took ten minutes, but a horse-drawn ambulance finally appeared. They did not bother with a hospital; rather, they took the detective's body directly to the morgue.

Jung grasped Freud under the shoulders and laid him down on the sofa. Freud looked to Jung suddenly old and powerless, his fearsome faculty of judgment now as limp as his dangling arms and legs. Freud came to within a few seconds. 'How sweet it must be,' he said, 'to die.'

'Are you ill?' Jung asked.

'How did you do that? That noise?'

Jung shrugged.

'I will reconsider parapsychology — you have my word,' said Freud. 'Brill's behavior. I'm deeply sorry. He doesn't speak for me.'

'I know.'

'For a year I have placed too great a demand on you to keep me informed of your doings,' said Freud. 'I know it.

I will withdraw the excess libido, that I promise you too. But I'm worried, Carl. Ferenczi saw your — village.'

'Yes, I have found a new way to rekindle the memories of childhood. Through play. I used to build whole towns when I was a boy.'

'I see.' Freud sat up, handkerchief to his forehead. He accepted a glass of water from Jung.

'Let me analyze you,' said Jung. 'I can help you.'

'Analyze me? Ah, my fainting just now. It was neurotic, you think?'

'Of course.'

'I agree,' said Freud. 'But I already know its cause.'

'Your ambition. It has made you blind, horribly blind. As I have been.'

Freud took a deep breath. 'Blind, you mean, to my fear of being dethroned, my resentment of your success, my unstinting efforts to keep you down?'

Jung started. 'You knew?'

'I knew what you would say,' said Freud. 'What have I done to warrant that charge? Have I not advanced you at every turn, referred my own patients to you, cited you, credited you? Have I not done everything in my power for you, even at the price of injuring old friends, conferring on you positions I could have retained for myself?'

'But you undervalue the most important thing: my discoveries. I have solved the incest problem. It is a revolution. Yet you belittle it.'

Freud rubbed his eyelids. 'I assure you I do not. I appreciate its enormity all too well. You told us a dream you had on board the George Washington. Do you remember? You are deep in a cellar or cave, many levels below ground. You see a skeleton. You said the bones belonged to your wife, Emma, and her sister.'

'I suppose,' said Jung. 'Why?'

'You suppose?'

'Yes, that's right. What of it?'

'Whose bones were they really?'

'What do you mean?' asked Jung.

'You were lying.'

Jung didn't reply.

'Come,' said Freud, 'after twenty years of seeing patients prevaricate, you think I can't tell?'

Still Jung made no answer.

'The skeleton was mine, wasn't it?' said Freud.

'What if it was?' said Jung. 'The dream told me I was surpassing you. I wished to spare your feelings.'

'You wished me dead, Carl. You have made me your father, and now you wish me dead.'

'I see,' said Jung. 'I see where you are going. My theoretical innovations are an attempt to overthrow you. That's what you always say, isn't it? If anyone disagrees with you, it can only be a neurotic symptom. A resistance, an Oedipal wish, a patricide — anything but objective truth. Forgive me, I must have been infected with a desire to be understood intellectually for once. Not diagnosed, just understood. But perhaps that is not possible with psychoanalysis. Perhaps the real function of psychoanalysis is to insult and cripple others through subtle whispering about their complexes — as if that were an explanation of anything. What an abysmal theory!'

'Listen to what you are saying, Jung. Hear your voice. I ask you only to consider the possibility, just the possibility, that your "father complex" — your own words — is at work here. It would be a terrible pity for you to make a public pronouncement of views whose true motivations you saw only later.'

'You asked if we could speak honestly,' said Jung. 'I for one intend to. I see through you. I know your game. You ferret out everyone else's symptoms, every slip of their tongue, aiming continually at their weak spots, turning them all into children, while you stay on top, reveling in the authority of the father. No one dares tweak the Master's beard. Well, I am not in the least neurotic. I am not the one who fainted. I am not incontinent. You said one true thing today: your fainting was neurotic. Yes, I have suffered from a neurosis — yours, not mine. I think you hate neurotics; I think analysis is the outlet for it. You turn us all into your sons, lying in wait for some expression of aggression from us — which you have made certain will occur — and then you spring, shouting Oedipus or death wish. Well, I don't give a damn for your diagnoses.'

There was perfect silence in the room.

'Of course you will take all this as criticism,' said Jung, a note of diffidence creeping into his voice, 'but I speak out of friendship.'

Freud took out a cigar.

'It is for your own good,' said Jung. 'Not mine.'

Freud finished his glass of water. Without lighting his cigar, he stood and walked to the hotel room door. 'We have an understanding, we analysts, among ourselves,' he said. 'No one need feel any embarrassment about his own bit of neurosis. But to swear that one is the picture of health, while behaving abnormally, suggests a lack of insight into one's illness. Take your freedom. Spare me your friendship. Good-bye.'

Freud opened the door for Jung to pass through. As he did so, Jung had a final remark. 'You will see what this means to you. The rest is silence.'

Gramercy Park was unreasonably cool and peaceful. I remained on the bench a long time after she ran off, staring at her house, then at my Uncle Fish's old house around the corner, which I used to visit as a boy. Uncle Fish never let us use his key to the park. At first I had the confused idea that, since Nora went home with the key, I would not be able to get out. Then I realized the key must be for getting in, not out.

Though it was hateful to me in every possible way, I was obliged at last to concede the truth of Freud's Oedipus theory. I had held out against it so long. To be sure, several of my patients had produced confessions onto which I could have imposed an Oedipal interpretation. But I had never had a patient admit, point-blank, without interpretive gloss, to incestuous desires.

Nora had admitted hers. I expect I admired her selfawareness. But I was irredeemably repulsed.

'To a nunnery, go.' I was thinking of Hamlet's repeated injunction to Ophelia, right after 'to be, or not to be,' to get herself to a convent. Would she be 'a breeder of sinners'? he asks her. 'Be thou as chaste as ice… thou shalt not escape calumny.' Would she paint her face? 'God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.'

I think my heart's reasoning was as follows: I knew I could not stand to touch Nora now. I could hardly stand to think of her — that way. But I was damned if I would stand the thought of any other man touching her either.

I know how irrational my reaction was. Nora wasn't responsible for what she felt. She didn't choose to have incestuous desires, did she? I knew this, but it changed nothing.

I rose from the bench, running my hands through my hair. I made myself concentrate on the medical aspects of the case. I was still her doctor. Clinically speaking, Nora's admission that she had witnessed last night's assault from above was much more important than her acknowledgment of her Oedipal wishes. I had told her that such experiences were common in dreaming, but when combined with the very real cigarette burn on her skin, her account sounded closer to psychosis. She probably needed more than analysis. In all likelihood, she ought to be hospitalized. Get thee to a sanatorium.

Nevertheless, I could not bring myself to believe that she had inflicted the initial set of wounds — the brutal whipping she suffered Monday — on herself. Nor was I prepared to acknowledge as a certainty that last night's attack was an hallucination. Some memory associated with medical school flashed in and out of my head.

New York University was not far downtown. As it turned out, the gate to Gramercy Park was indeed locked shut. I had to climb out — and felt, unaccountably, like a criminal as I did so.

Walking through Washington Square, I crossed under Stanford White's monumental arch and wondered at the murderousness of love. What else might the great architect have built if he hadn't been gunned down by a mad, jealous husband, the same man whom Jelliffe was trying to have released from the asylum? Down the street was New York University's excellent library.

I began with Professor James's work on nitrous oxide, which I already knew well from Harvard, but saw nothing there meeting the description. The general anaesthesiology texts were one and all useless. So I turned to the psychical literature. The card catalog had an entry on astral projection, but it proved to be a piece of theosophical raving. Then I came across a dozen entries under bilocation. Through these, after a couple of hours of digging, I finally found what I was looking for.

I was fortunate: Durville provided several references in his just-published book on apparitions. Bozzano had reported a highly suggestive case, and Osty an even clearer one in the May-June Revue Metapsychique. But it was a case I found in Battersby that eliminated all doubt. Battersby quoted the following account:

I struggled violently so that two nurses and the specialist were unable to hold me… The next thing I knew was some piercing screaming going on, that I was up in the air and looking down upon the bed over which the nurses and doctor were bending. I was aware that they were trying in vain to stop the screaming; in fact I heard them say: 'Miss B., Miss B., don't scream like this. You are frightening the other patients.' At the same time I knew very well that I was quite apart from my screaming body, which I could do nothing to stop.

I didn't have a telephone number for Detective Littlemore, but I knew he worked in the new police headquarters downtown. If I could not find him there in the flesh, at least I would be able to leave word.