The Saga of Freud's Dinner Jacket

In New Zealand, some 26 years after wearing Freud's dinner jacket, Dr Z became my patient. It was two more years before I learnt of this historic distinction of his - years which involved nerve-wracking experiences for both of us. One was my becoming the butt of medical faculty atrocity stories about psychoanalysis; another culminated in public embarrassment set up for me in a vengeful moment by Anna Freud. In this period, too, it came about that Dr Z had two close encounters with death.

My daughter Penelope, then at university, initiated this sequence. While she is now a lawyer, at that time she was studying Russian and given to blaming me for her predicament with her professor, Dr Z. Somehow, she had become a favoured student, uncomfortably privileged with special tutorials (alongside a shaggy and smelly dog) and, her father being a fellow academic, faced with expectations in Russian beyond any good sense. Partly this was because Dr Z was too foreign and off-beat to engage most other students, but doubtless all this was symptomatic as well of his mind being obstinately cast in St Petersburg and Vienna, despite having fled Europe years before and found refuge here within striking distance of the South Pole.

Suddenly, we had an emergency. Dr Z had some Russian literature research project in hand which, Penelope supposed, had to be crazy because he needed her father's psychiatric expertise to assist with it. Unless I gave him whatever enlightenment he required forthwith, her Russian exam results would be a fiasco. It was all up to me now and, prudently, she had already attributed to me a penchant for the obscurities of poets and literary creation, which had enticed him even more. Thus flattered and manipulated, I acceded to a paternal duty to seduce Dr Z into amiable collegiality with myself and hence promote leniency towards Penelope's faltering Russian.

Sure enough, my secretary soon greeted me with: ‘Do you know a guy called Block?’ Some character from Modem Language