Psychology and Other Stories (25 page)

Then there was nothing, nothing at all for nearly a year. On May 17, 1885, he wrote:

When the letter came I was suffering from migraine, the third attack this week, by the way, although I am otherwise in excellent health. I took some cocaine, watched the migraine vanish at once, went on writing my paper as well as a letter to Prof. Mendel, but I was so wound up that I had to go on working and writing and couldn't get to sleep before four in the morning.

Then in January of 1886 he wrote from Paris:

Charcot invited me (as well as Richetti) to come to his house tomorrow evening after dinner. You can probably imagine my apprehension mixed with curiosity and satisfaction. White tie and white gloves, even a fresh shirt, a careful brushing of my last remaining hair, and so on. A little cocaine, to untie my tongue.

The next day he reported:

We drove there in a carriage the expenses of which we shared. R. was terribly nervous, I quite calm with the help of a small dose of cocaine, although his success was assured and I had reasons to fear making a blunder.

Devon noted that Freud had written “11
P.M
.” above the date of this first Paris letter, and in it he apologized for having so exhausted himself working and writing that he could barely hold the pen. The same thing had also happened the night before: “Last night,” he wrote, “I went on writing the outline of my anatomical paper till I just couldn't keep my eyes open.” Did this mean he was no longer taking cocaine in the evenings, that he had learned to avoid getting “wound up” too late in the day? He was evidently using the drug in Paris as a social lubricant—to combat shyness, to calm himself in company, to loosen his tongue—but not, perhaps, as an aid in his academic work.

Two weeks later, still in Paris, Freud wrote to Martha:

It is now 6
P.M.
and at 9:30 I am going to Charcot's, not without the fear of having a most unamusing evening. Needless to say, I have fewer preparations to make than for the first time, but I have felt so out of sorts all day that I haven't done any work.

Later in the same letter he suddenly admitted:

The bit of cocaine I have just taken is making me talkative, my little woman. I will go on writing and comment on your criticism of my wretched self …

And two pages later:

Oh, how I run on! I really wanted to say something quite different. Here I am, making silly confessions to you, my sweet darling, and really without any reason whatever unless it is the cocaine that makes me talk so much.

The letter included a postscript, time-stamped, as it were, 12:30
A.M.
:

Thank God it's over and I can tell you at once how right I was. It was so boring I nearly burst; only the bit of cocaine prevented me from doing so.

But in his first article on the subject Freud had written:

The effect of a moderate dose of coca fades away so gradually that, in normal circumstances, it is difficult to define its duration. If one works intensively while under the influence of coca, after from three to five hours there is a decline in the feeling of well-being, and a further dose of coca is necessary in order to ward off fatigue.

So, if he had taken that first bit of coke at 6:00, when he was writing the letter, it would have more or less worn off by the time he reached Charcot's at 9:30, three and a half hours later; in any case, it certainly couldn't have staved off boredom for the entire evening. Unless he was now taking
immoderate
doses, one had to assume he had taken a further dose before going to Charcot's. And when he returned to his room after midnight, he sat down to write a letter to Martha. He must have realized he was going to be awake all night.

Devon again had to pass Clyde's bedroom on his way back to the garage. This time he looked in, a solicitous but unworried smile on
his face. Usually Clyde lay on his back with his head propped up by two or three pillows, staring dolefully out the door, waiting for sleep as though for a visitor (or, Devon sometimes thought, for death). But the room was dark and Devon could see nothing. He lingered there in the doorway for a moment, his smile frozen, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Clyde had not been sleeping well since his return from the hospital, and Barb had asked Devon to keep an eye on him.

A grunt emerged at last from the darkness. “What is it?,” Clyde muttered.

“How you feeling?”

“Fine,” said Clyde.

“Good,” said Devon, sincerely. It
was
good that Clyde was feeling fine. It was no holiday being shut up in the hospital, even if you had someone like Barb there to look out for you, to bring you books and illicit snacks. Devon would never forget the one and a half days he'd spent “under observation” in that hospital, eight months ago now, after what Barb and others gently referred to as his “breakdown” but which he preferred to call his crack-up. But that had been different.

“Good,” he said again.

Clyde said nothing.

“Well, good night.”

“Yeah, all right.”

In the kitchen Devon gulped two glasses of cool, delicious water. He felt that he was on the verge of a major discovery. It was almost a physical sensation, this feeling that the world's doors were unlocking themselves and waiting for him to step forward and open them.

He did not need Barb's sly, condescending look of approval to remind him that he had not felt this good in months. Only now that he was feeling good again,
right
again, could he admit to himself that he had gone through something like a period of depression. At the time, he'd sworn that there was nothing wrong with
him
; it
was not
him
but
life itself
that was fucked up. But of course that was the tricky thing about depression: it so thoroughly blackened your view that everything you looked at, anything you turned your thoughts to, appeared black enough to be the cause of your unhappiness. It was all too easy when you were depressed to look at the world and say: No wonder I'm depressed—how fucking depressing it all is!

Devon supposed one also had to guard against the opposite fallacy. Perhaps happiness bathed everything in a golden light, made anything you looked at seem the probable cause of your happiness. But no, his newfound optimism was not delusive or manic; it was simply normal.
This
was what it felt like to be alive and healthy. This was the way a well-fed cerebral cortex was supposed to feel. His depression had made him forget this feeling, made him forget that time could be relied on to unfold its promises. Depression was a sort of temporal cage: inside it, you simply could not imagine that anything would ever change or improve; you were chained to the wheel of this one endless moment of misery. But when you were not depressed, the future lay spread out before you like a landscape of possibilities. When you knew with an overpowering, bodily certainty that the present moment was
not
an isolated prison cell but a vestibule opening onto a vast field where there was fresh air and room to run, you felt almost omnipotent.

“Hey!,” Clyde called from his room.

“Sorry!”

Devon turned the light in the kitchen back on. Clyde needed the lights in all adjacent rooms and hallways to be on at all times, even while he slept. He also could not abide closed doors anywhere in the house (the bathroom door was his only grudging exception). He had, since his return from the hospital, become even more obstinate in these demands. As far as Devon could tell, Clyde did not
fear anything imaginary, like monsters or ghosts, but rather feared broken communication. That was also why he refused to be left alone, why he needed to have someone in the house with him at all times: he needed to know that if he ever called for help, someone would hear him.

“Sorry,” Devon said again, then returned to the garage and to Freud.

There were very few direct references to cocaine in Freud's published works. At least, the index volume of Winston's battered old
Standard Edition
listed only a handful of page numbers under that word. There were the confessional dream analyses in
The Interpretation of Dreams.
There was a potted summary of “the cocaine episode” in his
Autobiographical Study.
Then, tucked away in the
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
, there was this:

I had begun to suspect masturbation when she had told me of her cousin's gastric pains, and had then identified herself with her by complaining for days together of similar painful sensations. It is well known that gastric pains occur especially often in those who masturbate.
According to a personal communication made to me by Wilhelm Fliess, it is precisely gastralgias of this character which can be interrupted by an application of cocaine to the ‘gastric spot' discovered by him in the nose, and which can be cured by the cauterization of the same spot.
In confirmation of my suspicion, Dora gave me two facts from her conscious knowledge: she herself had frequently suffered from gastric pains, and she had good reasons for believing that her cousin was a masturbator.

The middle sentence was not actually italicized by Freud, but seemed nevertheless to Devon to be typeset in a special font. He read it through several times but it did not acquire a firmer foothold in the
paragraph. It did not belong there. It should have been relegated, at best, to a footnote. (And Freud, Devon had soon discovered, had no antipathy to footnotes.) It was bizarre enough that Freud believed that masturbation had something to do with stomach pains. It was equally bizarre that this Wilhelm Fliess believed that the nose had something to do with stomach pains. But what relation did the two beliefs have to each other? What did the nose have to do with masturbation? Who was Wilhelm Fliess?

Among the books that Devon had brought home from the McSeutor Library was, he was sure, the complete letters of Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. It took him a minute to find it; the garage was a mess, and he had not improved matters much by rescuing several boxes of Winston's library from storage. Tomorrow he would go out and buy shelves, and a little table, and a space heater. Tomorrow, after all, was not a hypothetical proposition, but a real place where things got done.

It gave him a thrill—a cool fluttering in his chest, as if from the wings of some giant moth—to see that the letters to Fliess spanned the critical years 1887 to 1904. He began to leaf through the book at random, allowing his attention to be drawn to paragraphs and sentences that a previous reader had bracketed in pencil and annotated in the margin with a question mark, exclamation point, or both.

Wilhelm Fliess was an ear, nose, and throat specialist from Berlin who had some strange ideas. According to Fliess, there was “in the nose, as in the cerebral cortex, a specific localization for the individual distant symptoms in other organs.” Swellings of the nasal mucosa and pathology of the turbinate bones and the sinuses were, in his view, responsible for such diverse symptoms as pain in most parts of the body, migraine and other types of headaches, heart problems,
respiratory difficulty, gastrointestinal upsets, and, finally, all manner of disturbances in the functioning of the female genitals, causing dysmenorrhea (painful menstruation), miscarriage, and more. In clinical proof of all this, Fliess cited the visible swelling of the turbinate bone during menstruation, the occurrence of vicarious nosebleeding during menstruation and pregnancy, and the fact (Devon had to read this twice) that cocaine applications to the nose were capable of inducing accidental abortions.

“The number of symptoms adduced is great,” wrote Fliess,

and yet they owe their existence to one and the same locality—the nose. For their homogeneity is demonstrated, not only by their simultaneous appearance, but by their simultaneous disappearance. The characteristic of this whole constellation of complaints is that one can bring them temporarily to an end by anaesthetizing with cocaine the responsible area in the nose.

In other words, thought Devon, the “nasal reflex neurosis” was a catch-all diagnosis for any malady whatsoever that seemed to clear up rather nicely when you put cocaine up the patient's nose.

This preoccupation with the same drug that Freud had more or less single-handedly brought to the attention of the European medical community must have been what brought the two men together. Even Jones (while airing the obligatory diagnosis of transference and latent homosexuality) had touched on the truth:

Both Freud and Fliess suffered from migraines, and the two men conjured up various theories, none of them very fruitful, to account for this distressing disorder. Then, as was fitting in his relation to a rhinologist, Freud suffered badly from nasal infection in those years. In fact, they both did, and an inordinate amount of interest was taken on both sides
in the state of each other's nose. Fliess twice operated on Freud, probably cauterization of the turbinate bones; the second time was in the summer of 1895. Cocaine, in which Fliess was a great believer, was also constantly prescribed.