Significant Moments: Part 19

To Lou Andreas-Salome, Freud reported that Tausk's farewell letters to his former wife, to the woman he was about to marry, and to Freud himself threw no light on the suicide.

In his letters to me he swore undying loyalty to psychoanalysis, thanked me, etc. But what was behind it all we cannot guess. After all he spent his days wrestling with the father ghost. . . .

With one failed marriage behind him and a string of equally failed liaisons, it seems possible that the future, with or without Freud's support, was more than he could face.
Ronald W. Clark, Freud: The Man and the Cause.
There is a rustling of paper.
Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape.
HONORED MEMBERS of the Academy!
Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy.
I carry out with reluctance what some consider to be my duty, . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . as The . . .
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
. . . Secretary of an Organization . . .
Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape.
. . . dedicated to the service of . . .
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . psychoanalysis, . . .
H.G. Wells, The Secret Places of the Heart.
. . . because I am convinced of the futility of the undertaking.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
GENTLEMEN.
Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape.
No heed will probably be taken of the extensive documentation I have offered—which, if anything, is likely to strike the reader as being merely tiresome. On the other hand, . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
I have achieved what I set out to achieve. But do not tell me that it was not worth the trouble. In any case, I am not appealing for any man’s verdict, I am only imparting knowledge, I am only making a report. To you also, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report.
Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy.
___________________________________________________________________________

It has become fashionable these days to question Freud's character and personality.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Throughout history, there have been two opposing schools of thought about men and women of genius. The one portrays the genius as exceptionally well balanced; the other affirms a close connection of genius with insanity, or at any rate with mental instability.
Anthony Storr, Churchill’s Black Dog, Kafka’s Mice, and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind.
Although there is in fact no correlation between the type and severity of a genius's psychopathology and the quality of his achievement, most people react like the critic who recently said that, after learning the background of Richard Wagner's . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . bizarre and increasingly difficult relationship with a married . . .
T.J. Reed, Introduction to Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters.
. . . Mathilde Wesendonk . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
What can be the meaning of this detail?
Sigmund Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo.
. . . he (the critic) . . .
Mursi Saad El-Din, Plain Talk.
. . . was no longer able to enjoy the five songs that the master had composed for her poems, and that he was certain this would happen to anyone.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
I am one thing, my writings are another matter.—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
I should not have been surprised that when my book The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory appeared in early 1984, the attention of the reviewers was riveted on the character of the author rather than on an examination of the issues. . . . It seemed that neither the findings nor their implications could be regarded with any dispassion. I learned that people who criticize establishment dogmas are not accorded a serious hearing. I took some comfort in the recognition that the pain I felt over the personal attacks against me was due to my political naivite.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing.
I conjecture that in the same way a good many of the attacks against Freud's personality are aimed at discrediting
psychoanalysis itself.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
A visit to the opera where I saw Wagner's crooked dwarfs protecting the Rheingold suggested an analogy . . .
Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud.
. . . to the question of the connection between genius and mental illness, . . .
Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness.
. . . which a friend . . .
Jane Austen, Emma.
then commented on:
Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud.
This is what he wrote:
Edgar B.P. Darlington, The Circus Boys on the Plains.
When you speak of "the strenuous and crooked creatures bearing the precious Rheingold" . . .
Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud quoting Havelock Ellis, Letter to Joseph Wortis.
. . . my dear Joseph, . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
. . . I think you are symbolically describing what genius so often is. I have often referred to this aspect of genius . . . —its foundation in deformity, one-sidedness, unbalance, the ability to see the new things accompanied by the inability to see the old. You see I am not troubled by genius.
Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud quoting Havelock Ellis, Letter to Joseph Wortis.
I wonder whether you knew, dear friend, many years ago, when . . .
Alban Berg, Letter to Arnold Schoenberg.
. . . Anna Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . first knew me (I was 25) she thought I had genius; a few years later (without any change in regard for me) she came to the conclusion that I hadn’t. Your Rheingold symbol is admirable. I don't mean that it would necessarily apply to all men of genius. There is, for instance, Einstein, one of the greatest, who seems quite harmoniously developed. Do you know Michaelis's book on "Freud"? Rather interesting and suggestive. He admits Freud's greatness, compares him with Nietzsche, but emphasizes the "crookedness" and one-sidedness of his outlook, and regards him as a disappointed idealist who has taken to systematically repressing his idealism.
Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud quoting Havelock Ellis, Letter to Joseph Wortis.
A brief statement ought to be added here about psychoanalytic biographies of geniuses. Such biographies, if they are even half-way complete and undertake to discuss what makes the genius different from the rest of mankind, must be different in at least one respect from what one finds in psychoanalytic case histories. A person is called a genius only when he has realized his potential to an unusual degree. In that one respect he is to be considered fortunate, whatever his pains and anguishes might have been. Since most of what has happened with him, in terms of psychological processes, must have served creativity—or else he could not belong to the category of genius—what is examined in most instances requires a different evaluation than if the same things had happened in the life of an average mortal who undergoes psychoanalytic treatment.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
The problem of . . .
Jack London, The Race for Number One.
. . . QUESTIONABLE BIOGRAPHICAL TECHNIQUES . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . had arisen very concretely for me in the case of Paul Roazen. He had written what I regarded as a terrible book about Freud called . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk
Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives.
Roazen's book offers a splendid opportunity to confirm a connection that I had already assumed to exist, in a few instances, between a biographer and the person he has chosen as the subject of his presentation. The area of Roazen's biographical inquiry is, to be sure, defined by Freud and Tausk and their relationship, even though Tausk is the central figure of his book, with Freud providing the background. Yet the fact is that there is a triangle (which the author left out, even though he is at times preoccupied with the discovery of triangles); it is formed by the author, Freud and Tausk. Only it is a spherical triangle: its nature is such that a person who is standing at any one corner of the triangle would be unable to perceive the other two.

Roazen never perceived Freud as he was; at one point he even perceived him as Othello and Iago in one. I doubt that he understood Tausk. Just as he assumes that Tausk used Dr. Deutsch in order to reach Freud, so his own interest in Tausk is apparently focused on the opportunity the latter provides him for detracting from Freud. . . .

I do not mean to say that a psychotic condition is actually induced in a biographer by the subject of his story; yet the relationship between biographer and subject may have a structure that is equivalent to that of folie a deux.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
_____________________________________________________

The Wagner-Wesendonk situation has been called a triangle by those who forget Minna. It was actually an impossible piece of geometry . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: the Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . far removed from everyday reality—
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
The Wesendonck saga began in earnest in 1857, the year that saw the publication of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The husband in the case gets little mention, though it was Otto Wesendonck . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . a wealthy retired merchant, . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . who owned the houses, threw the parties, and footed the bills for everything.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
It seemed that as his leisure increased with his growing fortune he made use of it to . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . patronize struggling genius.
Wilkie Collins, A Rogue’s Life.
Wagner . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . who lived as . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . a semipermanent guest . . .
Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses.
. . . on the estate . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . of Otto and his wife . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . found his host . . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Outlaw of Torn.
. . . tiresome, as he concedes in his memoirs, in a passage whose obliquity does nothing to disguise the brazen presumption of his conduct. "I had often noticed," he says, "that Wesendonck, in his honest, unrefined way, felt disturbed by my making myself at home in his house. In many matters, such as heating, lighting, and the hours appointed for meals, I was deferred to in a way that seemed to encroach on his rights as master of the house."
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
But then, . . .
‹mile Zola, The Debacle.
—looking back—
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . Wagner’s . . .
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
. . . relations with . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
. . . his benefactors . . .
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.
. . . had always . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
. . . betrayed . . .
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde.
. . . excessive rivalry, insatiable ambition, ingratitude—and acting out, so as to humiliate those to whom he was indebted.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Between November 1857 and May 1858 Wagner set five of Mathilde Wesendonk's poems to music.
John Deathridge and Carl Dahlhaus, The New Grove Wagner.
The music mirrors the mystical nature of the poems, each of which deals with the themes of life slowly fading away and of eternal rest.
Brooks Peters, September Songs.
Well, in the end there came what the French call un denouement—what we in forcible modern English would call a smash,—and it happened thus.
John Strange Winter, Koosje: A Study of Dutch Life.
His first wife . . .
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies.
. . . Minna's interception of a . . .
John Deathridge and Carl Dahlhaus, The New Grove Wagner.
. . . love-letter . . .
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies.
. . . addressed to Mathilde (one of the few and most wildly interpreted documents to have escaped the grasp of Wagner's heirs) precipitated on 7 April 1858 a catastrophe that eventually led to his departure . . .
John Deathridge and Carl Dahlhaus, The New Grove Wagner.
. . . for Italy—
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (explanatory notes).
Yes—for a holiday, for a long holiday . . .
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
. . . altogether alone . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . in Venice.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (Diary entry, October 5, 1786).
Ah, Venice! What a glorious city!
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
There, there would I go with you, O my beloved!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister.
. . . (as he recorded in his journal) . . .
Booth Tarkington, His Own People.
If that cannot be, I would not dwell where you are, but rather be alone in that world into which I now go forth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Charlotte von Stein.
O Mathilde!
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.
Take my entire soul as a morning salutation!
Richard Wagner, Letter to Mathilde Wesendonk (April 7, 1858).
His letters were returned to him unopened: but he and Mathilde each kept a diary which was read by the other at a later date. Wagner’s diary, kept in the form of letters to Mathilde, gives us an incomparable picture of his inner life during his Venice sojourn.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
Leaving behind the growing frustrations of . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
. . . creative . . .
K.R. Eissler, Goethe: A Psychoanalytic Study 1775-1786.
. . . work, a difficult love-affair, and lack of time to write, he discovers himself again . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
. . . in the wondrous island city . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (Diary entry, September 28, 1786).
. . ..as a sensuous being and an artist.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
On his arrival in . . .
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister.
. . . Venice, the Serenissima of all Serenissime—
Erica Jong, Serenissima: A Novel of Venice.
. . . Wagner had, . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . to begin with, not a glimmer of an idea for a new composition.
Michael Steinberg, Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.”
Writing to Mathilde . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . Richard confessed . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . he was “haunted by the spectre of failing inspiration.” By his own account, he went to his studio, a tiny . . .
Michael Steinberg, Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.”
. . . chamber . . .
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.
. . . at the Hotel . . .
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
. . . on that first day . . .
Henry James, The Chaperon.
. . . in Venice . . .
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
“with the firm resolution of idling the holiday away (I needed to so much that year) and recruiting my strength. On the threshold of my old workshop . . .
Michael Steinberg, Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.”
. . . Tristan und Isolde . . .
Richard Wagner, Letter to Hector Berlioz.
. . . took hold of me and shook me and drove me on for the next eight weeks until my greatest work was done.”
Michael Steinberg, Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.”
—Oh, how lovely it is to love! And only now do I know what it is! Pain has lost its power and death its thorn. Tristan speaks truth: I am immortal, for how could Tristan’s love die?
Gustav Mahler, Letter to Alma Mahler (1910).
The inter-relationship of themes and particles of themes throughout . . .
Michael Kennedy, Gustav Mahler: Symphony no. 8 in E-flat.
. . . Tristan . . .
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake.
. . . is intricate and organic; and . . .
Michael Kennedy, Gustav Mahler: Symphony no. 8 in E-flat.
. . . the entire work. . .
Herman Melville, Typee: A Romance of the South Sea.
. . . elaborate and massive as it is, is a recognizable sonata-form structure.
Michael Kennedy, Gustav Mahler: Symphony no. 8 in E-flat.
It required more than vision and audacity—
Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times.
This, Tristan, . . .
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde.
. . . this extraordinary work . . .
Wilkie Collins, A Rogue’s Life.
. . . demanded also the quality of intuition, a feel for . . .
Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times.
. . . the Poetry of Earth . . .
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (quoting Keats).
. . . a feel for nature as indefinable as a poet’s sense of words or the artist’s knowledge of what his last dab of materialistic paint can unlock in the human mind.
Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times.
Wagner’s . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . interior monologue in . . .
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
. . . Tristan . . .
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake.
. . . dark, dense, profound . . .
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
—an experiment in density, really, as Venice is an experiment in water—
Adam Gopnik, The City and the Pillars: The Long Walk Home.
. . . embodied the composer’s . . .
BBC Online—Proms, Ludwig van Beethoven.
. . . paradoxical preoccupation with . . .
Christopher Knight, Peering Beyond the Edge.
. . . enchantment and . . .
Vladimir Nabakov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited.
. . . oblivion, . . .
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha.
. . .during his weeks and months in Venice.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
This inner life is not the words nor even the plot as conceived by . . .
George and Portia Kernodle, Invitation to the Theatre.
. . . Wagner . . .
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
. . . the playwright, but a dynamic sequence, constantly surging in rhythmic waves from the beginning to the end.
George and Portia Kernodle, Invitation to the Theatre.
This “birth of the modern” was an explosion of energy.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
For the past several months, since the middle of April, he has dreamed many dreams about time . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . a new dimension of time, quite different from anything before in music. It is a time which no longer ticks by, or even dances or saunters by: it proceeds imperceptibly, as the moon moves, or as leaves change their color.
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
His dreams have worn him out, exhausted him so that he sometimes cannot tell whether he is awake or asleep. But the dreaming is finished.
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
My sleep . . .
Richard Wagner, Siegfried.
. . . says Wagner, . . .
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
. . . is dreaming, my dream is searching, my search . . .
Richard Wagner, Siegfried.
. . . he says is . . .
Ivan S. Turgenev, Virgin Soil.
. . . for weapons of knowledge.
Richard Wagner, Siegfried.
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought—these are the artist’s highest joy. And our solitary felt in himself at this moment power to command and wield a thought that thrilled with emotion, an emotion as precise and concentrated as thought: namely, that nature herself shivers with ecstasy when the mind bows down in homage before beauty. He felt a sudden desire to write.
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
He mused awhile, sat down at the table, and wrote down the following lines in his sacred copy-book, without a single correction:
Ivan S. Turgenev, Virgin Soil.
My task is done, my song hath ceased,
my theme
Has died into an echo; it is fit
The spell should break of this protracted dream.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
On the afternoon of August 6, . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
Or, maybe, . . .
Albert Camus, The Stranger.
. . . it was the 5th . . .
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.
. . . I can’t be sure. . . .
Albert Camus, The Stranger.
. . . Wagner summoned . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: The His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . a young musician . . .
Hugo Wolf, Letter to His Parents.
. . . to his hotel room and invited him to look through the score of Tristan. It was almost finished.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
All . . .
Albert Camus, The Plague.
. . . the visitor . . .
H.G. Wells, The Stolen Bacillus.
. . . gathered was that the work . . .
Albert Camus, The Plague.
. . . Wagner . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . was engaged on ran to a great many pages, and he was at almost excruciating pains to bring it to perfection.
Albert Camus, The Plague.
“Eh? What’s that?”
Albert Camus, The Stranger.
. . . where are you?
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde.
. . . bar 28 . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
Can one imagine F sharp and G sharp accompanied by a chord in A minor!
The Beethoven Companion (quoting A. Oulibicheff, Beethoven, ses critiques et ses glossateurs, Paris, 1857).
He was bending over the manuscript.
Albert Camus, The Plague.
What key are we in?
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
. . . no sphinx ever imagined such a riddle . . .
The Beethoven Companion (quoting The Harmonicon, London, August 1823).
. . . it seems to elude analysis . . .
Hector Berlioz, A Critical Study of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies.
“Well?”
Albert Camus, The Stranger.
A minor?
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
“More or less.”
Albert Camus, The Plague.
‘Ah! Now I see,’ said the visitor.
H.G. Wells, The Stolen Bacillus.
“It’s my opening phrase, and . . .
Albert Camus, The Plague.
. . . it gave me . . .
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Parasite.
. . . trouble, no end of trouble.”
Albert Camus, The Plague.
The theme floats serenely . . .
Philip T. Barford, Beethoven’s Last Sonata.
. . . says Wagner, . . .
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
. . . like a planet in the void, a star born in the emptiness of that motionless moment which gives the clue to the whole work.
Philip T. Barford, Beethoven’s Last Sonata.
At half-past four . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . in front of this audience, . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters.
. . . Wagner . . .
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
. . . wrote in the final bars.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
That was all.
Elia W. Peattie, The Piano Next Door.
No agony and no ecstasy.
Judith Rossner, August.
Verily it is well for the world that it sees only the beauty of the completed work . . .
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
. . . the fair copy . . .
The New Cassell’s German Dictionary (entry for the German word “Rein”).
. . . of the completed work and not its origins nor the conditions whence it sprang; since knowledge of the artist’s inspiration might often but confuse and alarm and so prevent the full effect of its excellence.
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
But Tristan’s completion seemed bleakly disenchanting compared to the elation that had gripped . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . the composer . . .
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.
. . . while at work on it. Only then did he become conscious of the void that faced him on awakening from a long dream filled with music.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
It was . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . on the same Canale Grande where Wagner was to die 25 years later he realized that . . .
Klaas A. Posthuma, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”.
. . . the relationship between . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . the “wagoner” and his “mudheeldy wheesindonk ”. . .
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner quoting James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake.
. . . was all over; Venice became “the tomb of their love”.
Klaas A. Posthuma, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”.
Was liffe worth leaving? Nej!
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake.
There . . .
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
. . . in Venice, . . .
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
. . . it became perfectly clear to Wagner that Mathilde did not for one moment intend to play Isolde to his Tristan.
Klaas A. Posthuma, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”.
What . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . milady’s . . .
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake.
. . . real feelings for him were we have practically no means of knowing at present.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
—I have formed in my own mind the following reconstruction . . .
Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.
She imagined various versions of the final dramatic split-up, and discovered herself weeping bitterly in the midst of her engrossed imagining of the scene. She remarked how characteristic this was of her, that she was shedding those real tears with such intense feeling in a self-conjured-up situation that existed, as yet, only in her imagination. She predicted, quite correctly, that 'when that time came' she would feel nothing at all. Indeed, the actual ending of her affair came in a rather prosaic, dull way without comedy or tragedy. When it had finally ended, she was relatively quiet and serene for some weeks. Then retrospective dramatization began. She relived in imagination a past situation which had never been more than imagined. But retrospectively, the past imaginary situation had become the real one.
R.D. Laing, The Self and Others.
Let it be said that the whole matter of the relations of Wagner and Mathilde is wrapped in an obscurity that is at present utterly impenetrable. Those of his letters to her that have already been published . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . she was, in principle, opposed to publishing the letters . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . are only a selection made by the lady herself in her old age, with a natural insistence on the most ideal aspects of their relationship.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
Mathilde was no Emma Bovary.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
—or was she?
Computer Forensics, Case Histories: Blackmail in the Chat Room.
The truth is:
Mathilde Wesendonck, Letter to W. Ashton Ellis.
She seems to have had few individual strivings or goals beyond providing for her husband and respecting his wishes. Her progeny never really belonged to her. She loved in them images of their father. She never interceded for them.
Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Idiot de la Famille.
She had moments of revulsion against her own meekness. . . . Sometimes she was surprised by the horrible possibilities that she imagined; and yet . . .
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.
She lacked the courage to desert her husband and children and dare all for Wagner's sake. . . . And so Wagner had to leave. . . . The loss would have broken another man.
Robert L. Jacobs, Wagner.
Would you believe it? All of Wagner's heroines, without exception, as soon as they are stripped of their heroic skin, become almost indistinguishable from Madame Bovary!
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
There is no need to explain the autobiographical element in the relationship Tristan—Isolde—King Marke . . .
Hans Gal, Richard Wagner.
. . . the identification between Mathilde and Isolde, Wagner and Tristan, Wesendonk and Mark cannot be successful . . .
Hans Mayer, Portrait of Wagner.
. . . and it is sheer idle speculation whether Wagner's passion was released by the artistic concept which was filling his innermost being, or whether to that passion must be ascribed the direct cause of the composition of Tristan.
Hans Gal, Richard Wagner.
I believe that we are here face to face with the outstanding characteristic of great tragedy—that it is the equivalent both of a historical record of real events and, at the same time, of a dream.
K.R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and HAMLET.
I am not sufficiently well-read to know whether this fact has already been remarked upon; possibly, indeed, some writer on aesthetics has discovered that this state . . . is a necessary condition when a work of art is to achieve its greatest effects. . . .

Let us consider Shakespeare's masterpiece, Hamlet, a play now over three centuries old.
Sigmund Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo.
Was Shakespeare expressing his own conflicts by having Hamlet act as he does in the tragedy? This question is of a different order of relevance. It is theoretically conceivable that a poet could create such personages without deriving the stuff for them from his own life history. Instead, the stuff of his personages could be derived mainly from his observations of others about him. Since it is known, however, that the process of observation also depends on the observer's unconscious, one feels inclined to assume, in this instance too, that the poet's own unconscious has been deeply involved.
K.R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and HAMLET.
The author directs his attention to the unconscious in his own mind, he listens to its possible developments and lends them artistic expression instead of suppressing them by conscious criticism. Thus he experiences from himself what we learn from others—the laws which the activities of this unconscious must obey.
Sigmund Freud, Jensen's Gradiva.
I have always sought not to put anything of myself into my works and yet I did put in a great deal.
Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet.
One of the memorable moments in Madame Bovary is the scene where the heroine seeks help from the village priest. Guilt-ridden, distraught, miserably depressed, the adulterous Emma—heading toward eventual suicide—stumblingly tries to prod the abbe into helping her find a way out of her misery.
William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.
Emma's disillusionment and its reconstructions are very similar to the chronic pessimism so characteristic of Flaubert. It was his profound belief that happiness is a myth and that attachments bring nothing but pain; one day they must all be relinquished or they will become draining. The outcome of such philosophy of life was to lead to a withdrawal, similar to Emma's, into his inner world. Hence, the inability to reach happiness through external reality and involvement with others is Emma's main problem, as it is Flaubert's. In this instance, then, when Flaubert was describing this aspect of Emma, he was really writing about himself.
Francis D. Baudry, On The Problem of Inference in Applied Psychoanalysis: Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
Until the onslaught of my own illness and its denouement, I never gave much thought to my work in terms of its connection with the subconscious—an area of investigation belonging to literary detectives. But after I had returned to health and was able to reflect on the past in the light of my ordeal, I began to see clearly how depression had clung close to the outer edges of my life for many years. Suicide has been a persistent theme in my books—three of my major characters killed themselves.
William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.
To Mathilde . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . Wagner . . .
The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865-1882 – The Brown Book.
. . . observed, "My poetic conceptions have always been so far ahead of my experiences that I can only consider these conceptions as determining and ordering my moral development."
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
Indeed, from a certain point of view (a very doubtful one), one may say that nothing can happen in a man's life without its acquiring the meaning or function of a wish fulfillment.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
One goes astray in trying to interpret an artist's life by his work, for it is exceptional to find one a counterpart of the other. It is more likely that an artist's work will express the opposite of his life—the things he did not experience.
Romain Rolland, Wagner: A Note on Siegfried and Tristan.
The idea of Tristan and Isolde was in fact conceived not by a man in love but by someone conscious of his lack of love. As early as December 1854 Wagner had written to Franz Liszt: . . .
Hans Mayer, Portrait of Wagner: An Illustrated Biography.
. . . to the devout Abbe Liszt, whose apartment in the Vatican had been steps from the Sistine Chapel . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
"Since in my life I have never enjoyed the real good fortune of love, I want to set up a monument to this most beautiful of all dreams, a monument in which from start to finish this love might for once be satiated: in my head I have planned a Tristan and Isolde, the simplest but most full-blooded musical conception; it is with the 'black flag' that waves at the end that I want then to cover myself, in order to—die."
Hans Mayer, Portrait of Wagner: An Illustrated Biography.
Was he contemplating suicide?
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
Wagner . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II).
. . . could readily imagine that he, like . . .
Arthur B. Reeve, The Poisoned Pen.
. . . Tristan was foredoomed to sorrow from the moment of his birth:
Ernest Newman, The Wagner Operas.
. . . doomed, since childhood, to live a miserable and unfortunate life that could all too easily lead to suicide, whatever the particular external circumstances of his later life might have been.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
He tried to occupy his mind with books; but his soul was gangrened with bitterness against the world, which, in his opinion, had cruelly denied him the simple right to live.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
My nights are often sleepless; I get out of bed wretched and exhausted, with the thought of a long day before me which will not bring me a single joy. The society of others tortures me, and I avoid it only to torture myself. Everything I do fills me with . . .
Romain Rolland, Wagner: A Note on Siegfried and Tristan quoting Wagner.
. . . this terrible yearning in my heart . . .
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde.
I awake with horror in the morning,
And bitter tears well up in me
When I must face each day that in its course
Cannot fulfill a single wish, not one!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
Ay me! Sad hours seem long.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.
At midnight
I awoke
And looked up at the sky.
Not a star in the galaxy
smiled at me
at midnight.
At midnight
my thought went
out to the limits of darkness.
There was no thought of light
to bring me comfort
at midnight.
Gustav Mahler and Friedrich Ruckert, Excerpt from the Song "Um Mitternacht."
What if her eyes . . .
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.
. . . Mathilde’s . . .
Martin Gregor Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.
O God, send peace and heavenly shining
On the dark desert of my heart.
Gustav Mahler, Symphony no. 8 in E-flat (quoting Goethe, Faust (Part II) (Final Scene).
This is how Wagner wrote . . .
Romain Rolland, Wagner: A Note on Siegfried and Tristan.
. . . in the diary he kept for Mathilde in Venice
Martin Gregor Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
In the same way Michelangelo wrote to his father in 1509: "I am in agony. . . . I am wasting my time to no purpose. Heaven help me!"
Romain Rolland, Wagner: A Note on Siegfried and Tristan.
'Verily, verily . . .'
Clifford Odets, Communication to William Gibson.
". . . to put up with living one has to be dead!"
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Monday, October 9, 1882).
Yet the very hopelessness of it all kindled a mystic hope in him. Only where there are graves, as Nietzsche says, are there resurrections.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
When he prayed, "Dear God, help me!" he was praying to himself, beseeching himself to have fortitude, to be invincible of body and spirit, to have the stamina and will to create mightily in a vision of a more heroic world.
Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Novel of Michelangelo.
He did not . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . after all commit suicide . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . tho thoughts . . .
Henry Van Dyke, Ships and Havens.
. . . of self-destruction were never far away.
William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; Visions of Glory: 1874-1932.
Sometimes . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
—sometimes mysteriously so—
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism.
. . . death is never quite a welcome guest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
Writing to Mathilde . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
Wagner
The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865-1882 – The Brown Book.
. . . confessed:
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
Among a considerable collection of weapons I possessed a handsome, well-polished dagger. This I laid every night by my bed, and before extinguishing the candle I tried whether I could succeed in plunging the sharp point a couple of inches deep into my heart. Since I could never succeed in this, I at last laughed myself out of the notion, threw off all hypochondriacal fancies, and resolved to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fiction and Truth.
Perhaps fate intervened this time on the side of right.
Brooks Peters, September Songs.
Wherever he went, conflicts speedily evolved; and he always seemed to achieve victory at first, only to hurt himself subsequently. He was forever achieving a new rise—until this drive toward self-destruction set the mortal wound. Yet even that final disaster . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . and subsequent . . .
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies.
. . . Flight to Italy . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters.
. . . was followed by an elevation, in the form of . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . a new trust in his perceptions and emotions and in his power to convey them
T.J. Reed, Introduction to Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters.
He is a prototype of Ambiguous Man, compulsively engineering his own destruction, and simultaneously flying on into the future.
Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question.
It was more biblical than Shakespearean—the story of a man who sinned, suffered, died, and rose again.
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
____________________________________________________________________

'Everything in life repeats itself.' – Old proverb. Awareness of this grows clearer and clearer the longer one lives.
The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865-1882 – The Brown Book.
Repetitiveness is inherent in mental life and is not limited to the undoing and mastery of trauma. In the smallest stages of perception, thought, and memory there is a moment-by-moment recapitulation of the development of these functions from distant past to present, a rhythmic alternation between blurring of boundaries and their redelineation. This melting down and recasting goes on subliminally. In perception it involves the merging of figure and ground and the re-emergence of forms and boundaries into the more or less familiar shapes of inner and outer, subject and object, self and other.
Gilbert J. Rose, William Faulkner's Light in August: The Orchestration of Time In the Psychology of Artistic Style.
In the end, a life art form will emerge. This tendency of life is expressed incredibly positively and meaningfully by music. – The common life of the ordinary person is represented in the 'canon': a theme, unaltered, constantly repeated, complementary to itself solely through itself: a character that remains ever constant, so keeping all around it constant. But now comes the 'fugue': the theme remains basically always the same; but it has free contrapuntal counterparts which cause it to appear always in a new light: the theme itself shortens and extends itself, and modulates; the course of the fugue does not let itself be determined in advance, as that of the immutable canon does – and ends only on the pedal note of death. The great, rich character does not take it beyond the theme of a fine Bach fugue: and at best, as far as a splendid counter theme; that is then the triumph, and if the double fugue always shows both themes . . .
The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865-1882 –- The Brown Book.
. . . sung simultaneously . . .
Gustav Mahler, Symphony no. 8 in E-flat.
. . . equally recognizably and significantly then life's finest course has been achieved. They interlace, part and unite; like a dance. But the piece remains always the same: it becomes highly varied but always repeats itself.
The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865-1882 – The Brown Book.
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
Robert Frost, The Secret Sits.
In music, vertical harmonics and horizontal melodics synchronize two kinds of time: simultaneity and succession. Moreover the statement of a theme is usually followed by variations on it and, finally, by a restatement and resolution. In both music and mind, recurrence in time permits the changing material to be worked through into patterns, on the one hand, of aesthetic form or, on the other, meaning. Changing thematic material in music may also be worked through many elaborations while rhythm maintains constancy in the midst of change. And in emotional life, endless personal vicissitudes may be worked through and navigated successfully as long as a reliable sense of identity provides inner stability inspite of change.
Rhythm and thematic progression, identity and growth are but particular labels for the age-old philosophical problems of constancy and change, being and becoming; and we have already pushed the analogy between music and mind too far.
Gilbert J. Rose, William Faulkner's Light in August: The Orchestration of Time In the Psychology of Artistic Style.
_____________________________________________________________

Philosophers have argued that . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . similar things repeat themselves in people's lives and always at moments of significance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
For the most part, people do not know they will live their lives over. Traders do not know that they will make the same bargain again and again. Politicians do not know that they will shout from the same lectern an infinite number of times in the cycles of time.
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
But you, . . .
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus.
. . . Dr. Eissler, . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
You:
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus.
How could . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . you not . . .
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus.
. . . know that nothing is temporary, that all will happen again?
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
Why did you think psychoanalysis would be any different? Why did you believe that somehow psychoanalysis would be exempt from these larger laws of nature, the struggle for existence?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
How interpret this?
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus.
Who can say?
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
Mysterious are the ways of the repetition compulsion.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Oddly enough, in an essay, "The 'Uncanny,'" which Freud completed in the spring of 1919, he wrote that "it is long since he has experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression. . . ." Elsewhere in that essay Freud alluded, in discussing the phenomena of the "double" and telepathy, to a problem that beset him and Tausk: "the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own." "[W]hatever reminds us of [the] . . . inner 'compulsion to repeat' is perceived as uncanny."
Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers.
In this world in which time is a circle, every handshake, . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . every trust . . .
Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday.
. . . every confidence . . .
Henry James, The Aspern Papers.
. . . every word, will be repeated precisely. So too every moment that two friends stop becoming friends, every time . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . men speak of . . .
Ralph Connor, The Doctor.
. . . their friendship as if . . .
Anne Midgette, Welcoming an Opera That Went Hiding From the Nazis.
. . . it were . . .
Henry James, Confidence.
. . . a Tristanesque betrayal . . .
Anne Midgette, Welcoming an Opera That Went Hiding From the Nazis.
. . . every opportunity denied because of a superior’s jealousy, every promise not kept.
And just as all things will be repeated in the future, all things now happening happened a million times before.
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
I tell you plainly that that is my opinion.
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset.
Some would agree. Others not. This much, at least, is true:
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
A historical process takes its relentless course and the average man is unable to give its drift a different direction; at best, he can merely slow down its speed.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (1971).
If anyone represented the link with Freud and Freud's Vienna, it was the formidable Kurt Eissler. . . .

We finally met in 1974, while I was a candidate . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . in training at . . .
H.G. Wells, Soul of a Bishop.
. . . Toronto, at an annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Society in Denver, where I was presenting my first analytic paper. . . . Eissler and I immediately hit it off, although our friendship began on a curious note. I had never seen Dr. Eissler, nor he me. When I caught sight, of a tall, gaunt older man—at the time he was in his late sixties—in the lobby of the hotel where we were staying, looking like someone who had just stepped off the boat from Europe, dressed severely in a black suit with an almost haunted look about him, I knew it was Eissler.
And so I approached him. "Dr. Eissler, I presume. I am Jeff Masson."
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
How do you know my name?
Francis Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Eissler was genuinely taken aback.
“How did you know it was . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . me?” he repeated.
E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Kingdom of the Blind.
I never saw you in my life!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
"Well, it was obvious."

"No, no, there is something else. There is something uncanny about this." He did not seem entirely certain that I had not used witchcraft to recognize him.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
I will say at once that . . .
E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Kingdom of the Blind.
. . . the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. How this is possible, in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what follows.
Sigmund Freud, The 'Uncanny.'
Jeffrey Masson . . .
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
. . . was an accident in . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . Dr. Eissler’s . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . life.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Eissler’s life . . .
Paolo Migone, Introduction to K.R. Eissler, The Effect of the Structure of the Ego on Psychoanalytic Technique.
. . . history would not have been different in any way, if . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . Masson . . .
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
. . . had stayed . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . at the University of Toronto . . .
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (editor’s note).
. . . and the old man . . .
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop.
. . . had never met him. On the other hand, posterity would probably never have heard of . . .
K.R. Eissler. Talent and Genius.
. . . Jeffrey Masson . . .
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
. . . if he had not joined . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . the Sigmund Freud Archives.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
In the eyes of posterity, . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . Masson . . .
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon.
. . . is little more than a reflection of . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . a great man . . .
H.G. Wells, The Star.
. . . a diminished double of . . .
Harold Bloom, Afterword to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
. . . the great man who was . . .
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son.
. . . Kurt Eissler.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
A precociously brilliant former Sanskrit professor . . .
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
. . . a Harvard graduate, . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 19).
. . . Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson had entered analysis in order, he says, to deal with his persistent promiscuity: By his own estimate he had slept with one thousand women . . .
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
. . . more women than Don Juan, . . .
The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume 1 – 1931-1934.
. . . by the time he left graduate school.
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
If all the data about . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . the young man . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Legacy of Cain.
. . . are gathered together, . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . they indeed . . .
William Shakespeare, King Richard III.
. . . create a dismal impression. Here would be the history of a person acting out wildly; using women unscrupulously for his own personal advantage and abusing professional opportunities.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Fascinated by the process of analysis, . . .
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
. . . Masson . . .
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon.
. . . started training to become an analyst himself.
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
His flamboyance, his dash, his seeming conviction of self—all that, if fitted into the requirements of the clinical situation, might have paved the way to a good many therapeutic successes.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
His panache and chutzpah quickly attracted the attention of Kurt Eissler, the . . .
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
. . . one-man movement of his own invention—
Hilton Kramer, Arresting Portraits: Oskar Kakoschka’s Unsettling Views of Well-Respected Figures.
. . . the elderly secretary (and only begetter) of the Freud Archives, who in the fall of 1980 appointed . . .
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
. . . Masson . . .
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon.
. . . to the newly created post of projects director and designated him his successor.
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
By the way, . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . the younger man . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
. . . could not have failed to appreciate . . .
The High Court of Justice--Queen’s Bench Division, Irving v. Lipstadt.
. . . that all that would ever be required of him in payment for this . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 19).
. . . privilege would be his . . .
George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.
. . . devotion . . .
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
. . . and blind obedience, . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 19).
‘But then, who knows?’
Emile Zola, The Debacle.
Slowly, over the years, my relationship with Eissler became closer. But Eissler was a very formal man, and remained so throughout our friendship. He never called me anything except Professor Masson, and I never called him anything but Dr. Eissler.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
In life, the give and take in relationships is not always mutual. A person may be mainly giving to one person, and receive nothing but thanks in return; in another relationship, the same person may be mainly the recipient and be giving hardly anything. Yet, friendship, I believe, presupposes a fair balance between giving and receiving. We may say that a father is his son's friend, and in some rare instances this may be true; yet while the general pattern of a father-son relationship ought to be friendly, it will not be friendship in the narrower sense of the word.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
The next summer . . .
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
. . . his ambition growing—
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
. . . Masson exploded a bombshell. In a paper delivered [in June 1981] to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society, he accused the founder of psychoanalysis of yielding to peer pressure to abandon his "seduction theory," which proposed that neurosis was caused by actual childhood sexual abuse.
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
The relationship of the younger man to the older, however—of the ambitious pupil to the accomplished teacher—harbored, even under optimal conditions, material for conflict, misunderstanding and disappointment.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Jeffrey Masson
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
. . . in his . . .
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon.
. . . lecture at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, . . .
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography.
. . . read aloud . . .
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
. . . for the first time an omitted part of a letter [that Freud had written to his friend Wilhelm Fliess dated] Dec. 12, 1897, revealing that Emma Eckstein, a psychoanalytic patient of Freud's whom Fliess nearly poisoned in an experimental nose operation two years earlier, was analyzing patients of her own.
Ralph Blumenthal, Scholars Seek the Hidden Freud in Newly Emerging Letters.
It was a delicious thought, to break the seals on documents that were . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . placed in . . .
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer Revisits a Haunted City of His Youth.
. . . the Freud Archives . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . on the condition that . . .
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer Revisits a Haunted City of His Youth.
. . . no one . . .
Franz Kafka, The Coming of the Messiah.
. . . be allowed . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
. . . to see the papers . . .
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
. . . for another hundred years.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Masson went up to the . . .
Albert Camus, The Stranger.
. . . lectern . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . with measured steps.
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop.
I moved into the lights, to the center of the stage. I took the paper from my pocket and held it. My voice trembled as I read:
David Evanier, The Man Who Refused to Watch the Academy Awards.
"Eckstein treated her patient deliberately in such a manner so as not to give her the slightest hint of what will emerge from the unconscious and . . .
Ralph Blumenthal, Scholars Seek the Hidden Freud in Newly Emerging Letters.
. . . brought her . . .
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Queen Yseult.
. . . by prompting her to remember . . .
Richard J. Welland, Review of Vai Ramanathan, Alzheimer Discourse: Some Sociolinguistic Dimensions.
. . . her forgotten past, to an understanding of her present position . . .
D.A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare: The Tempest.
. . . and in the process obtained, among other things, the identical scenes with the father."
Ralph Blumenthal, Scholars Seek the Hidden Freud in Newly Emerging Letters.
—including . . .
Francis FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
. . . a hint of her father’s . . .
Rachel Ann Nunes, Bridge to Forever.
. . . desire for incestual relations with his daughter
Francis FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
Masson said we . . .
Albert Camus, The Stranger.
. . . could find an underlying basis to the . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . doctrine of eternal recurrence . . .
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon.
. . . in the strange bond that exists between a person and his or her past suffering. Traumatic experiences are always at least in part repressed.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Repression acts . . .
Sigmund Freud, Repression.
. . . exactly like the censorship of newspapers . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
—just as when . . .
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd.
. . . a quantity of passages have been blacked out.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
The repression also contains an upward thrust, so that we can even speak of a "buoyancy" of the repressed.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
To make a Freudian pun, it gets past the Censor.
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
The need to remember, then, is also a self-curative gesture, and people who suffer from lacunae of memory are preoccupied with attempts to piece together their own past. Linking this to psychoanalytic theory, . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . Masson remarked that . . .
Albert Camus, The Stranger.
. . . the heart of the transference neurosis is its undoing, its unwinding into the past, carrying along, in its backwash, the compulsion to repeat. These repetitions were attempts to seek help and rescue, and therefore, interpreting material from a severely traumatized person as fantasies obscures past realities and is felt by the patient as a misunderstanding of the most important events of the past.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Instead of receding harmlessly into the past, the darkest, most frightening events of childhood and adolescence gain power and authority as we grow older.
Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness.
The past . . .
George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle.
. . . this ineradicable, inescapable, ever-recurring, hideously retrievable . . .
Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary.
. . . past drove rats’ teeth into the gray pulp of the present; it exasperated, it sowed wild dreams.
George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle.
The memory of these events causes us to depart from ourselves, psychologically speaking, or to separate one part of our awareness from the others. What we conceive of as an unbroken thread of consciousness is instead quite often a train of discontinuous fragments. Our awareness is divided. And much more commonly than we know, even our personalities are fragmented—
Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness.
. . . into a veritable . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . inner “gallery of characters,” . . .
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
. . . trying to cope with the past—rather than the sane, unified wholes we anticipate in ourselves and in other people.
Martha Stout, The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness.
I took a breath. I had finished.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . would they believe me?
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
The young man had . . .
Henry James, The Europeans.
. . . the flavor of the American West about him, and there . . .
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
. . . adhered . . .
Henry James, The American.
. . . to him something of the poignancy of the rough-hewn, morally fine Americans in Henry James’s international novels who find themselves embroiled with outwardly soigné, morally piggish Europeans.
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
I couldn't tell if I had bored them, or if they disagreed, or were angered, or disgusted.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
It had become very still—
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw.
All his life he had been pursuing certainties, truth: now he had "cried them out loud," alone.
Matthew Josephson, Zola and His Time.
I knew what I imagined psychoanalysis stood for: the breaking of taboos; fearless invasion into enemy territory, the enemy being ignorance; "speaking truth to power" as we had said in the sixties; abolition of denial; compassion for the suffering of others, especially for those who suffered in childhood; an uncompromising search for historical truth, no matter where this lead; finding the hidden injuries of class, sexism, racism. Such was my understanding of the thrust of Freud's creation of a new discipline, a truth-seeking instrument.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Would he have taken such a dangerous measure both for the cause of "truth and justice" and for himself, had he grasped the fury of the storm he would evoke?
Matthew Josephson, Zola and His Time.
After returning to Berkeley, I was called by the New York Times. They had heard about the paper and the response to it and wanted to send a reporter to Berkeley to talk to me about the issues surrounding it. Ralph Blumenthal came to Berkeley, spent a few days talking to me, left, and wrote a sober and intelligent account, sketchy and somewhat popular, but basically correct. I was completely unprepared for the storm it was to provoke within psychoanalytic circles. To this day I am not entirely certain what it was in the article that so infuriated the analytic community. But there can be no doubt about the severity of the anger, even rage, directed at me. The two-part article was published in the "Science" section of the Times on two successive Tuesdays, August 14, and August 21, 1981.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
"Had he perhaps after all been officially punished on account of the affair with the letter?"
Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Although the orthodox view of psychoanalysis is that Freud's rejection of the seduction theory liberated him from the tyranny of the literal and allowed him to discover the poetry of the unconscious, Masson dissented: "By shifting the emphasis from a real world of sadness, misery, and cruelty to an internal stage on which actors performed invented dramas for an invisible audience of their own creation," he said, "Freud began a trend away from the real world that, it seems to me, has come to a dead halt in the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis throughout the world."
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
(What could he mean by that?)—
Sigmund Freud, Notes Upon A Case of Obsessional Neurosis.
Freud's writings contain a new world, a cosmos comparable in its extension to those created by a genius before him—let us say, as in Shakespeare's plays.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Shakespeare's stage world is as wrong, composite, absurd and yet completely right . . . as an extravagant dreamscape, spawned by the flow of image and feeling in the words he speaks, in which tears fall and passions let rip in a way they can't in Denmark. "Things aren't like that," and yet on Shakespeare's stage, things are more like things than things themselves are.
Nicholas Hytner, Entering Shakespeare's Dreams.
But then, the paradox that a myth, a fiction, can be truer and more meaningful than “fact” is one that literature, rather than science, alone can understand.
Daniel Mendelsohn, Fun With Freud, Review of Israel Rosenfield, Freud’s Megalomania.
We find represented in this . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . brave new world . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
. . . Freud’s world—
Amazon.com, Review of Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women.
. . . almost all the phenomena of the real human world. They are described and viewed in a new way, which strikes the reader as being original, individual and interesting, even fascinating, independently of whether the content is true or false.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Of how many of our scholars can this be said?
Hermann Hesse, Sigmund Freud.
Even if Freud is (scientifically) “wrong,” as a writer—a mythographer of the soul, let’s call it—he produced rich and brilliantly textured narratives that help us to think about the world and our lives in it. Myth, after all, is a lie that tells the truth.
Daniel Mendelsohn, Fun With Freud, Review of Israel Rosenfield, Freud’s Megalomania.
Nowhere in . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . his follower’s . . .
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers.
. . . work, however, or in that of any other contemporary analyst, was anything visible that would have suggested that he was on the verge of recreating the analytic world, as it were, anew . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
His intelligence lacked the capacity for bold leaps into the unknown, the sudden flashes of thought that transcend barren, logical deductions.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
The younger man’s . . .
Jack London, White Fang.
. . . contributions to analysis were by no means great enough to have made him indispensable, or were they of a kind to have given the development of psychoanalysis a direction different from the one it actually took.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Within the esteem-culture of the . . .
Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, From The Restoration to The Present.
. . . analytic community . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . it is hard for . . .
H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon.
. . . an upstart Crow . . .
Robert Greene, Groatsworth of Wit.
. . . to win friends by pointing out deficiencies in the local totem.
Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, From The Restoration to The Present.
Of course . . .
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams.
. . . what the young man had done . . .
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge.
. . . was to turn the . . .
Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad.
. . . spotlights on a crisis in . . .
Dan Vergano, ‘Universe’ Artfully Juggles Theories: Review of The Elegant Universe hosted by Brian Greene.
. . . psychoanalysis, . . .
H.G. Wells, The Secret Places of the Heart.
. . . one invisible to the general public but increasingly embarrassing to the discipline.
Dan Vergano, ‘Universe’ Artfully Juggles Theories: Review of The Elegant Universe hosted by Brian Greene.
There is an expression . . .
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
. . . which you may have heard of;
Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved.
The climate of absurdity . . .
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
. . . in any enterprise . . .
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
. . . is in the beginning.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
I had an impression that . . .
Albert Camus, The Stranger.
. . . at the outset, . . .
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
. . . Jeffrey Masson . . .
Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives.
. . . the newcomer in . . .
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies.
. . . a kind of reversal of roles . . .
Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette.
. . . carefully manipulated . . .
Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
. . . Anna Freud and Eissler . . .
Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives.
. . . to do his bidding.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
The underlying melody is understandable.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
In fact it was Shakespeare’s The Tempest in reverse, with Caliban master of Ariel and Prospero.
Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette.
But it could not last.
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
He understood and accepted it.
Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Breaking Point.
The ultimate end, awaited but never desired, the ultimate end . . .
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
. . . could be foreseen, foretold—
Joseph Conrad, The Return.
The fall of the arrow is as much a segment of its arc as the rise.
Richard Eder, The Chemist and the Holocaust.
What he probably did not understand was that . . .
Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder, and the Building of the German Empire.
. . . Freud’s Truth, psychoanalysis . . .
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
. . . orthodox analysis . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . was viewed by the daughter . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . Freud’s Antigone . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . as a gleaming ring, with Freud himself the precious jewel set in a circle of eternal unity. But if the center could not hold (i.e., if Freud was devalued), the ring would lose its potency and chaos would ensue—
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
From one of the keepers of the Freudian flame, . . .
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
. . . Masson’s contention that Freud at a crucial juncture gave in to collegial criticism . . .
Douglas A. Davis, A Theory for the 90s: Traumatic Seduction in Historical Context.
. . . was heresy. In the fall of 1981 Eissler, Anna Freud, and the other trustees dismissed him.
Amanda Vaill, Seduction on Trial.
“ . . . He had a number of enemies who made trouble for him and the committee . . .
Philadelphia Press, Prof. Eakins Resigns: Trouble in Life Class Of the Academy of the Fine Arts Leads to His Withdrawal.
–-that’s to say . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
. . . Eissler and his colleagues . . .
Craig Seligman, Janet Malcolm.
—“the Fanatics,” he had called them—
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
. . . thought it best for the interests of . . .
Philadelphia Press, Prof. Eakins Resigns: Trouble in Life Class Of the Academy of the Fine Arts Leads to His Withdrawal.
. . . the Freud Archives . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . that he should resign.”
Philadelphia Press, Prof. Eakins Resigns: Trouble in Life Class Of the Academy of the Fine Arts Leads to His Withdrawal.
"You were so friendly to me for a time . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial – "In the Cathedral."
. . . I, thy Caliban . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
. . . and explained so much to me, and now you let me go as if you cared nothing about me."
Franz Kafka, The Trial –- "In the Cathedral."
"But why, Dr. Eissler, why? What did I do that was so horrible? Adopt a position about the historical importance of the seduction theory that is at variance with the accepted version?"

"Yes."
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.