Hotel

Better keep my mouth shut.

III

FREUD

I began my discussion with a little experiment which was, as usual, successful.

Freud asks Dora to look for something on the table that is not usually there. Freud tells us that this is a match holder, a “large” match holder, such as stands on the desk of a hotel lobby. Dora had not noticed it, although “both Herr K and Papa were passionate smokers,” as are Freud and Dora herself. The match holder, most likely, contains matches, but, though Freud mentions the box, he says nothing of what is inside. When he asks Dora to look for something, he is asking her to look for the outside, which is what she would see first, if she were looking for the matches. He asks her to look for one aspect of a thing that relates to the whole. This is metonymy.

Freud is always telling me there is something hidden inside something else.

Inside Dora’s head is a dream. Freud asks her to relate it. Dora dreams her house will burn down. Her mother wants to save her jewelry; her father becomes angry and insists they leave without it.

Dora’s father says, “I don’t want me and my two children to burn to death because of your jewellery box.”

The fire instructions on the back of my hotel door say, “Assemble in the lobby.” They say, “Do not stop to collect any personal goods.”

“There was never a real fire at our house,” says Dora.

NO SMOKING says the sign on my hotel door. On the back cover of my copy of the Penguin edition of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE, inside which is hidden DORA, A FRAGMENT OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA, is a photograph of Freud, smoking, posed like Groucho Marx, cigar erect, as though he had just delivered the punchline: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Freud did not say this, although many believe he did.

Groucho Marx’s most famous joke is, “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member.” Woody Allen, in the opening monologue of his film, Annie Hall (1977), says this is “the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women,” and claims that Groucho got it from Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, but the joke cannot be found inside Freud’s book. In attributing the joke to Freud, Allen may have been mistaken, or he may have been pretending to make a mistake, or he might have been making a mistake knowing it was a mistake all along but was unable, somehow, to keep from making it.

The Groucho version of this joke doesn’t occur in any of the Marx Bros. movies. There is no proof Groucho made it. It is attributed to an apocryphal letter of resignation (not a refusal of membership) from — various sources claim — The Friars Club of Beverly Hills, The Delaney Club, The Lambs Club, The Beverly Hills Tennis Club, or The Hillcrest Country Club. The story was first repeated in Erskine Johnson’s syndicated Hollywood gossip column,¹ in 1949. Ten years later, Groucho recycled the story in his memoir, in which he claims to have sent a telegram: “PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.” There is no proof the telegram was ever sent. Dora would not accept the fact that she did not mention the matches as proof that her silence also concealed a desire for Herr K’s member. Though Freud suggested this, she would not even speak of it.

So Freud did not say the thing about the cigar, and he did not say the thing about the member. But then nor, perhaps, did Groucho. And Mae West did not say, “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime.” She said, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me.” It’s just we prefer to remember all these jokes otherwise. And, when I google, it appears that Hardy never said, “That’s another fine mess you’ve got me into,” and Nelson did not say, “Kiss me, Hardy.” All the best lines seem to be anon.

Rudyard Kipling really did say, in a poem called “The Betrothed,” “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

Some sources tell me that Groucho Marx said that too, though it seems unlikely.

Groucho did say (to a father of seventeen children, on a game show): “I love my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”

Or did he say it to a woman?

Who had nine children?

Or is this just another urban myth?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a good woman is a.

What?

“We can substitute a box for this,” says Freud. “A box and a woman go better together.”

Janet Malcolm, in her essays on psychoanalysis, “The Impossible Profession,” calls this a “feat of ratiocination.” Malcolm says that Freud thought Dora was Pandora, but, in her dream, Dora shows no interest in the box.

FREUD

(To Dora)

So far you’ve talked about the jewellery and said nothing about a box.

Freud shows no interest in the matches in the match stand. He only mentions the box. And Freud never tells us exactly why he wanted Dora to notice the box, and what was successful about his experiment.

Although Dora and her father suffer in the lungs, the throat, the mouth, no one, in Freud’s story, becomes sick from smoking.

Freud died from cancer of the jaw, attributed to his cigar habit.

“There is,” said Freud, “no smoke without fire.”

Or maybe that is a misquote.²

Groucho fictionalized the name of the club that would have had him for a member, which makes it more difficult to attempt to verify his telegram. Whether he really sent it is anybody’s guess. In later life, Groucho complained that he was unable to satisfactorily insult anyone because they always thought it was a joke. Freud fictionalized all the names in his Case of Hysteria, so that none of the characters could be recognized in real life.

Except himself.

IV

A FRIEND

Don’t question marriage. Once the box has been opened.

There were a few times I put our marriage box on the fire, but never quite set it alight. Inside were photographs, dried roses, cards of congratulation from dead people, cards of congratulation from people I’d never see again, cards from people who had turned into altogether different people since we were married. I hadn’t wanted roses. It wasn’t the season for the flowers I did want. The box was made of card and contained mainly paper. It would have burnt well.

Dora left Freud before the term of her treatment was up. Although she gave him notice, he still found this unexpected.

FREUD

She seemed to be moved; she said goodbye to me very warmly, with the heartiest wishes for the new year, and — came no more.

To leave, wrote Freud, was “undoubtedly an act of revenge on her part,” but Janet Malcolm said this was just “transference burn.”

FREUD

What are transferences? They are new editions, facsimiles, of the impulses and fantasies that are to be awakened, and rendered conscious as the analysis progresses.

Something is happening in relation to desire. I’m not sure whose. Dora’s sought in Freud (Freud claimed) “a substitute for the tenderness she longed for.” This is transference. Freud’s interest in Dora meant, perhaps, that she resembled something he longed for too. What?

Metonymy is something close to an object, a shorthand, something more convenient, as close as a box is to what is inside it. Freud found that the patient can become attached to the therapist because he is nearer to hand, and in some way resembles what is longed for, but, says Malcolm, also vice versa. When Dora felt a constriction in her throat, Freud may have longed for Dora to mean penis. Transference, says Freud, is not a cure, but can be a stage in a cure.