The Interpretation Of Murder (5 page)

    On the corner of Fifth Avenue and
Fifty-third Street, in a room no woman had ever entered, not even to dust or
beat the curtains, a butler poured from a sparkling decanter into three
etched-crystal goblets. The bowls of these goblets were intricately carved and
so deep they could hold an entire bottle of claret. The butler poured a quarter
inch of red wine into each.

    These glasses he offered to the
Triumvirate.

    The three men sat in deep leather
armchairs arranged around a central fireplace. The room was a library
containing more than thirty-seven hundred volumes, most of which were in Greek,
Latin, or German. On one side of the unlit fireplace stood a bust of Aristotle
atop a jade- green marble pedestal. On the other was a bust of an ancient
Hindu. Over the mantel was an entablature: it displayed a large snake curled
into a sine wave, against a background of flames. The word charaka was engraved
in capital letters underneath.

    Smoke from the men's pipes caressed
the ceiling high above them. The man in the center of the three made a barely
perceptible motion with his right hand, on which he wore a large and unusual
silver ring. He was in his late fifties, elegant, gaunt in the face, and wiry
in build, with dark eyes, black eyebrows below his silver hair, and the hands
of a pianist.

    In response to his sign, the butler
put a spark to the hearth, causing a thick set of papers therein to catch and
burn. The fireplace glowed and crackled with dancing orange flames. 'Be sure to
preserve the ashes,' said the master to his servant.

    Nodding his assent, the butler
silently withdrew, closing the door behind him.

    'There is only one way to fight
fire,' continued the man with pianist's hands. He raised his goblet.
'Gentlemen.'

    As the two other men raised their crystal
glasses, an observer might have noticed that they also wore a similar silver
ring on their right hands. One of these other two gentlemen was portly and
red-cheeked, with muttonchop sideburns. He completed the elegant man's toast -
'With fire' - and drained his glass.

    The third gentleman was balding,
sharp-eyed, and thin. He said not a word but merely sipped his wine, a Château
Lafite of the 1870 vintage.

    'Do you know the Baron?' asked the
elegant man, turning to this balding gentleman. 'I suppose you are related to
him.'

    'Rothschild?' the balding man replied
blandly. 'I've never met him. Our ties are with the English branch.'

    I graduated from Harvard in 1908,
with a degree not only in medicine but also in psychology. My professors,
impressed by my industry, brought me to the attention of G. Stanley Hall, the
first man ever to receive a Harvard psychology degree, a founder of the
American Psychological Association, and now the president of Clark University
in Worcester. Hall's ambition was to make the upstart, fabulously endowed Clark
the leading institution of scientific research in the country. When he offered
me a position as an assistant lecturer in psychology, with the ability to begin
my medical practice - and get out of Boston - I accepted at once.

    One month later, I had my first
analytic patient: a girl, whom I shall call Priscilla, sixteen years old,
delivered to my office by her distraught mother. Hall was responsible for the
family's decision to bring her to me. More than that I can't say without
revealing the girl's identity.

    Priscilla was short and heavy but had
a pleasing face and an uncomplaining character. For a year she had been
suffering from bouts of acute shortness of breath, occasional incapacitating
headache, and a total paralysis of her left hand - all of which baffled and
embarrassed her. Hysteria was plainly indicated by the paralysis, which afflicted
the whole of her hand, including the wrist. As Freud had pointed out, paralyses
of this kind do not conform to any genuine derma- tone innervation and hence
can claim no real physiological basis. For example, genuine neurological damage
might cause certain fingers to be incapacitated, but not the wrist. Or the use
of the thumb might be lost, leaving the other digits unaffected. But when a
paralysis seizes an entire body part across all its differentiated neural
reticulations, it is not physiology but psychology that must be consulted, for
this kind of seizure corresponds solely to an idea, a mental image - in
Priscilla's case, the image of her left hand.

    The girl's doctor had naturally found
no organic basis for her complaints. Nor had the chirologist, brought in from
New York; his prescription had been rest and a complete withdrawal from active
endeavors, which had almost certainly exacerbated her condition. They had even
called in an osteopath, who of course accomplished nothing.

    After ruling out the various
neurological and orthopaedic possibilities - palsy, Kienböck's lunate disease,
and so on - I decided to attempt psychoanalysis. At first I made no headway.
The reason was the presence of the girl's mother. No hints were sufficient to
induce this good woman to leave doctor and patient to the privacy
psychoanalysis requires. After the third visit, I informed the mother that I
would not be able to help Priscilla, or indeed to receive her in future as my
patient, unless she - the mother - absented herself. Even then I could not at
first make Priscilla talk. Following Freud's most recent therapeutic advances,
I had her lie down with her eyes closed. I instructed her to think of her
paralyzed hand and to say whatever came into her mind in association with this
symptom, giving voice to any thoughts that entered her head, no matter what
they were, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, inappropriate, or even impolite.
Invariably, Priscilla responded only by repeating the most superficial
description of the onset of her sufferings.

    The critical day, as she always told
the story, had been August 10, 1907. She remembered the exact date because it
was the day after the funeral of her adored elder sister, Mary, who had been
living in Boston with her husband, Bradley. That summer, Mary died of
influenza, leaving

    Bradley with two infant children to
take care of. On the day after the funeral, Priscilla had been charged by her
mother with writing acknowledgments to the many friends and relatives who had
expressed their condolences. That evening, she experienced sharp pains in her
left hand - her writing hand. She saw nothing unusual in this, both because she
had written so many letters and because she had felt occasional pain in that
hand for the last several years. That night, however, she awoke unable to
breathe. When the dyspnea subsided, she tried to go back to sleep but could
not. By morning, she was suffering the first of the headaches that would plague
her for the next year. Worse, she found her left hand completely paralyzed. And
in that condition it had remained, hanging uselessly from her wrist.

    These and other such facts she would
constantly repeat to me. Long silences would follow. No matter how forcefully I
assured her that there was more she wanted to tell me - that it was quite
impossible for there to be nothing in her head at all - she steadfastly
insisted that she could think of nothing else to say.

    I was tempted to hypnotize her. She
was plainly a suggestible girl. But Freud had unequivocally rejected hypnosis.
It used to be a favored technique, in the early period when he was still
working with Breuer, but Freud had discovered that hypnosis was neither lasting
in effect nor productive of reliable memory. I decided, however, that I might
safely attempt the same technique Freud deployed after abandoning hypnosis.
That is what led to the breakthrough.

    I told Priscilla that I was going to
place my hand on her forehead. I assured her there was a memory that wanted to
come out, a memory of central importance to everything she had told me, without
which we would understand nothing. I told her that she knew this memory very
well, even if she did not know she knew it, and that it would emerge the moment
I laid my hand on her forehead.

    I did the deed with some trepidation,
for I had put my authority at risk. If nothing came of it, I would be in a
worse position than I had been before. But in fact the memory did emerge, just
as Freud's papers suggested it would, at the very moment Priscilla felt the
pressure of my hand against her head.

    .'Oh, Dr Younger,' she cried out, 'I
saw it!'

    'What?'

    'Mary's hand.'

    
'Mary's
hand?'

    'In the coffin. It was terrible. They
made us look at her.'

    'Go on,' I said.

    Priscilla said nothing.

    'Was there something wrong with
Mary's hand?' I asked.

    'Oh no, Doctor. It was perfect. She
always had perfect hands. She could play the piano beautifully, not like me.'
Priscilla was struggling with some emotion I could not decipher. The color of
her cheeks and forehead alarmed me; they were almost scarlet. 'She was still so
beautiful. Even the coffin was beautiful, all velvet and white wood. She looked
like Sleeping Beauty. But I knew she wasn't asleep.'

    'What was it about Mary's hand?'

    'Her hand?'

    'Yes, her hand, Priscilla.'

    'Please don't make me tell you, 'she
said. 'I'm too ashamed.'

    'You have nothing to be ashamed of.
We are not responsible for our feelings; therefore no feeling can cause us
shame.'

    'Really, Dr Younger?'

    'Really.'

    'But it was so wrong of me.'

    'It was Mary's left hand, wasn't it?'
I said at a venture.

    She nodded as if confessing a crime.

    'Tell me about her left hand,
Priscilla.'

    'The ring,' she whispered, in the
faintest voice.

    'Yes,' I said. 'The ring. 'This
yes
was a lie. I hoped it would make Priscilla think I already understood
everything, when in reality I understood nothing. This act of deception was the
only aspect of the entire business that I regretted. But I have found myself
repeating the same deception, in one form or another, in every psychoanalysis I
have ever attempted.

    She went on. 'It was the gold ring
Brad gave her. And I thought, What a waste. What a waste to bury it with her.'

    'There is no shame in that.
Practicality is a virtue, not a vice,' I assured her with my usual acuity.

    'You don't understand,' she said. 'I
wanted it for myself.'

    'Yes.'

    'I wanted to
wear
it, Doctor,'
she practically shouted. 'I wanted Brad to marry
me.
Couldn't I have
taken care of the poor little babies? Couldn't I have made him happy?' She
buried her head in her hands and sobbed. 'I was glad she was dead, Dr Younger.
I was
glad.
Because now he was free to take me.'

    'Priscilla,' I said, 'I can't see
your face.'

    'I'm sorry.'

    'I mean I can't see your face because
your left hand is covering it.'

    She gasped. It was true: she was
using her left hand to wipe away her tears. The hysterical symptom had disappeared
the instant she regained the memory whose repression caused it. A year has now
passed, and the paralysis never recurred, nor the dyspnea, nor the headaches.

    Reconstructing the story was simple
enough. Priscilla had been in love with Bradley since he first came to call on
Mary. Priscilla was then thirteen. I will shock no one, I hope, by observing
that a thirteen-year-old girl's love for a young man can include sexual
desires, even if not fully understood as such. Priscilla had never admitted to
these desires, or to the jealousy she felt toward her sister as a consequence,
which irresistibly led in the child's mind to the dreadful but opportunistic
thought that, if only Mary were dead, the way would be open for her. All these
feelings Priscilla repressed, even from her own consciousness. This repression
was doubtless the original source of the occasional pains she felt in her left
hand, which probably commenced on the day of the wedding itself, when she first
saw the golden ring slipped onto her sister's finger. Two years later, the
sight of the ring on Mary's hand in the coffin excited the same thoughts, which
very nearly emerged - or perhaps, for a moment, did emerge - into Priscilla's
consciousness. But now, in addition to these forbidden feelings of desire and
jealousy, there was the utterly impermissible satisfaction she took in her
sister's untimely death. The result was a fresh demand for repression,
infinitely stronger than the first.

    The role played by the thank-you
letters is more complex. One can only imagine how Priscilla must have suffered
at the sight of her bare left hand, ungraced by a wedding ring, repeatedly
conjoined with the act of expressing sorrow at her sister's demise. Possibly
this was a contradiction Priscilla could not bear. At the same time, the
laborious writing may have provided a physiological underpinning for what
followed. In any event, her left hand became an offense to her, reminding her
of both her unmarried state and her unacceptable wishes.

    Three objectives therefore became
paramount. First, she must not have such a hand; she must rid herself of a hand
that had no wedding ring where a wedding ring should be. Second, she had to
punish herself for her wish to replace Mary as Bradley's wife. Third, she had to
make the consummation of this wish impossible. Every one of these objectives
was accomplished through her hysterical symptoms; the economy with which the
unconscious mind performs its work is marvelous. Symbolically speaking,
Priscilla rid herself of the offending hand, simultaneously fulfilling her wish
and punishing herself for having it. By making herself an invalid, she also
ensured that she could no longer take care of Bradley's children or otherwise,
as she so tactfully put it, 'make him happy.'

    Priscilla's treatment, from start to
finish, took all of two weeks. After I reassured her that her wishes were
perfectly natural and beyond her control, she not only shed her symptoms but
became fairly radiant. News of the invalid s cure spread through Worcester as
if the Savior had brought sight to one of Isaiah's blind men. The story people
told was this: Priscilla had fallen ill from love, and I had cured her. My
placing a palm on her forehead was imbued with all sorts of quasi-mystic
powers. While this made my reputation and caused my medical practice to thrive,
there were less comfortable consequences too. There came a rush of thirty or
forty would-be pyschoanalytic patients to my office, each of whom claimed to be
suffering from symptoms disturbingly similar to Priscilla's and all of whom
expected a diagnosis of unrequited love and a cure through the laying on of
hands.