'Well, I'd say you're having a stroke, Seamus.'
'Am I going to die?'
'I'll be honest with you, man: if I took us straight back down, right now, all the way down, I might just save you.' This was true. Recompression was the only way to save a man dying from decompression. 'But do you know what it is?' The man in black tie took his time, cleaning the blood from his hand with a fresh handkerchief before finishing: 'My mother wasn't Irish.'
Malley s mouth opened as if to speak. He looked at the man who had killed him. Then his head jerked back, his eyes glazed over, and he moved no more. The man in black tie calmly opened the elevator door. No one was there. He returned to his car, found a bottle of whiskey in the back, and returned to the elevator, where he placed the bottle next to the slumped body. Poor Malley's corpse would be discovered in a few hours, to be mourned as yet another victim of the caisson. A good man, his friends would agree, but a fool to have been spending nights down there, in a place unfit for man or beast. Why, some wondered, had he tried to come out in the middle of the night, and how could he have forgotten to stop at the holding stages? Must have been spooked as well as drunk. On the pier, no one would notice the red clay footprints left by the murderer. All the caisson men tracked the same stuff, and the outlines of the man's elegant shoes were soon obliterated by the random treading of a thousand heavy boots.
Part 3
Chapter Eleven
I woke at six on Wednesday morning. I hadn't dreamt of Nora Acton — so far as I knew — but as I opened my eyes in the wainscoted white box of my hotel room, I was thinking of her all the same. Could sexual desire for her father really underlie Miss Acton's symptoms? That was plainly the thrust of Freud's thinking. I didn't want to believe it; the thought repulsed me.
I never liked Oedipus. I didn't like the play, I didn't like the man, and I didn't like Freud's eponymous theory. It was the one piece of psychoanalysis I never embraced. That we have an unconscious mental life, that we are constantly suppressing forbidden sexual desires and the aggressions that arise in their wake, that these suppressed wishes manifest themselves in our dreams, our slips of the tongue, our neuroses — all this I believed. But that men want sex with their mothers, and girls with their fathers — this I did not accept. Freud would say, of course, that my skepticism was 'resistance.' He would say I did not want the Oedipus theory to be true. No doubt that was so. But resistance, whatever else it is, surely does not prove the truth of the idea resisted.
Which is why I kept coming back to Hamlet and to Freud's irresistible but infuriating solution to its riddle. In two sentences, Freud had demolished the long-standing notion that Hamlet was, as Jung's 'great-grandfather' Goethe had it, the overly intellectual aesthete, constitutionally incapable of resolute action. As Freud pointed out, Hamlet repeatedly takes decisive action. He kills Polonius. He plans and executes his play-within-a-play, tricking Claudius into revealing his guilt. He sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. Apparently there is just one thing he cannot do: take vengeance on the villain who killed his father and bedded his mother.
And the reason, Freud says, the real reason, is simple. Hamlet sees in his uncle's deeds his own secret wishes realized: his Oedipal wishes.
Claudius has done only what Hamlet himself wanted to do. 'Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge' — to quote Freud — 'is replaced in him by self- reproaches, by scruples of conscience.' That Hamlet suffers from self-reproach is undeniable. Over and over, he castigates himself — excessively, almost irrationally He even contemplates suicide. Or at least that is how the To be, or not to be speech is always interpreted. Hamlet is wondering whether to take his own life. Why? Why does Hamlet feel guilty and suicidal when he thinks of avenging his father? No one in three hundred years had ever been able to explain the most famous soliloquy of all drama — until Freud.
According to Freud, Hamlet knows — unconsciously — that he himself wished to kill his father and that he himself wished to replace his father in his mother's bed, just as Claudius has done. Claudius is, therefore, the embodiment of Hamlet's own secret wishes; he is a mirror of Hamlet himself. Hamlet's thoughts run straight from revenge to guilt and suicide because he sees himself in his uncle. Killing Claudius would be both a reenactment of his own Oedipal desires and a kind of self-slaughter. That is why Hamlet is paralyzed. That is why he cannot take action. He is an hysteric, suffering from the overwhelming guilt of Oedipal desires he has not successfully repressed.
And yet, I felt, there must be some other explanation. There must be another meaning of To be, or not to be. If I could only solve that soliloquy, I somehow imagined it would vindicate my objection to the entire Oedipus theory. But I never had.
At breakfast, I found Brill and Ferenczi at the same table they had occupied yesterday. Brill was manfully assaulting a plate of steak and eggs. Ferenczi was not so hale: he insisted he was not going to touch a crumb all day. Both seemed a little forced in their conversation with me; I think I had interrupted them in private talk. 'The waiters,' said Ferenczi, 'they are all Negro. Is that common in America?'
'Only in the better establishments,' replied Brill. 'New Yorkers opposed emancipation, don't forget, until they realized what it meant: they would get to keep their blacks as servants, only it would cost them less.'
'New York did not oppose emancipation,' I put in.
'A riot is not opposition?' asked Brill.
Ferenczi said, 'You must ignore him, Younger, really you must.'
'Yes, ignore me,' Brill responded. 'Everyone does. Instead, we must attend solely to Jung, because he is 'more important than the rest of us put together.' '
I saw that Jung had been their topic before I appeared. I asked if they could give me a clearer sense of Jung's relationship to Freud. They did.
Quite recently, over the last two years, Freud had attracted a new set of Swiss followers. Jung was the most prominent. The Zurichers were resented by Freud's original Viennese disciples, whose jealousy had intensified when Freud made Jung editor in chief of the Psychoanalytical Yearbook, the first periodical in the world devoted to the new psychology. In this position, Jung had the power to rule on the merits of everyone else's work. The Viennese objected that Jung had not genuinely embraced the 'sexual aetiology' — Freud's core discovery that repressed sexual wishes lie behind hysteria and other mental illnesses. They felt Jung's elevation demonstrated favoritism on Freud's part. Here, Brill told me, the Viennese were righter than they knew. Freud not only favored Jung but had already selected him as his 'crown prince' and 'heir' — the man who would take over the movement.
I didn't mention having already heard Freud make this very statement to Jung last night, principally because I would then have had to describe Freud's mishap. Instead, I observed that Jung seemed highly sensitive to Freud's opinion of him.
'Oh, we all are,' Ferenczi answered. 'But, not to question, Freud and Jung have very father-son relations. I saw them myself on the ship. Hence Jung is very sensitive to any rebuke. It enrages him. Especially about the transference. Jung has — how shall I say? — a different philosophy when it comes to transference.'
'Really? Has he published it?' I asked.
Ferenczi exchanged a look with Brill. 'Not exactly. I am speaking of his approach to his patients. His — ah — female patients. You understand.'
I was beginning to.
Brill whispered, 'He sleeps with them. He is notorious.'
'Myself, I have never,' said Ferenczi. 'But I have not yet faced too many temptations, so congratulations in my case are sadly premature.'
'Does Dr Freud know?'
This time Ferenczi whispered, 'One of Jung's patients wrote to Freud, most upset, describing everything. Freud showed me letters on the ship. There is even a letter from Jung to the girl's mother — very peculiar. Freud consulted me for guidance.' Ferenczi was distinctly proud of this. 'I told him he should not take the girl's word as proof. Of course I already knew all about it. Everyone does. A beautiful girl — Jewish — a student. They say Jung did not treat her well.'
