I had the opportunity recently to give a talk at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, where an excellent and well-reviewed production of Mark St. Germain's play Freud's Last Session was playing. Mark Cuddy, the new Playhouse producer, had requested a psychoanalyst to present a special event featuring a discussion of the play, Freud's life and psychoanalysis.
Any psychoanalyst who has enjoyed the privilege of doing such a talk in a theater, or a talk-back after a play or film, is familiar with the tension between the wish to communicate something of the rich complexity of psychoanalytic ideas and the need to manage the sometimes surprising comments from an audience raised in the waning days of the influence of those psychoanalytic ideas in our culture. What follows reflects the back and forth between reality and reverie, between the wish to reach out and the temptation to retreat. Surely the challenge faced by analysts seeking to engage a contemporary community pales before the difficulty faced by the protagonists in this play.
The Cape Playhouse is a beautiful theater, the oldest continuously running theater outside New York. The audience sits in church pews. Immediately a hand went up.
“My friend told me about the sexual relationship that Freud had with his daughter. How could he do his work with patients if he was involved that way with his own daughter?”
Never happened.
I paraphrase here. I enjoyed many prolonged and interesting exchanges about psychoanalysis with this engaged group of theater patrons. Still, it can be unsettling to hear what the community, the object of our outreach, is thinking.
The play takes place in 1939. Freud and C.S. Lewis meet for a single conversation at Freud's invitation just three weeks before his death. Their talk, their debate, about the existence of God and, by implication, the existence of the unconscious, takes place against the backdrop of sirens and radio announcements describing Britain's entry into war with Germany.
“Was it Freud's cocaine addiction that gave him the cancer?”
Nope.
In 1939, at the moment of the Freud-Lewis colloquy imagined by the play, the Cape Playhouse was staging a production of the successful Thornton Wilder play Our Town. The summer stages were enjoying a robust season that year throughout New England, but it was to be the last uninterrupted run of summer stock for the many war years that followed.
Wilder wrote his play as a contrast to the ubiquitous millionaire playboy dramas of the day. Kitty Carlisle's performance at the Playhouse in A Successful Calamity earlier that summer season was a case in point. Wilder called for a sparse set and few props, anticipating the deprivations to come. The Stage Manager who introduces us to the lives and passing of the residents of Grover's Corners ultimately offers the same conclusions and the same counsel C.S. Lewis offers to Freud: “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people who ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal; about every human being.”
Lewis also focused on the risk of “losing hold” of his faith, his discovery of God. In St. Germain's play he tells Freud, “My idea of God; it constantly changes. He shatters it, time and time again. Still, I feel the world is crowded with Him. He is everywhere. Incognito. And His incognito—it's so hard to penetrate. The real struggle is to keep trying. To come awake. Then stay awake.”
Lewis's faith is represented as a hard-won discovery, fragile and slippery and ever at risk of being lost again, a victim of the temptation to take things as they are, to fail to appreciate what lies beneath the surface, providing meaning and purpose. He fights to remain awake to the evidence of things unseen when many around him are motivated to question his evidence and his reason. He wants to remain awake to a God who appears incognito, in disguise.
Would Freud speak any differently about the manifestations of a ubiquitous and wily unconscious? An epiphany, a something more, ever present, and ever at risk of dismissal and motivated re-repression? A disguised unconscious that must be rediscovered in clever rationalizations and rooted out from reality-bound hiding places?
“Why didn't he feel that the Irish could be analyzed?”
Never said it.
“When did Freud and Lewis first become friends?”
They only met once.
“When did Freud stop being an atheist?”
Never did.
Is there meaning to such apocrypha, the distortions and misunderstandings that constitute the contemporary grasp of Freud and his work? Perhaps there are fewer opportunities to correct these ideas
than there were when Auden wrote his 1939 elegy:
If some traces of the autocratic pose,
the paternal strictness he distrusted, still
clung to his utterance and features,
it was a protective coloration
for one who'd lived among enemies so long:
if often he was
wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now
but a whole climate of opinion
under whom we conduct our different lives…
What must it have felt like in 1939, only 20 years since the last war had ended, soldiers like Lewis still nursing their battle traumas, to know it was all about to begin again? We observe the troubles and forebodings of our own time and reach for what comforts and consolations we might allow. Freud described the tendency toward mysticism during periods of despair and disruption. The play illustrates the resilience of the rationalist and the deist, each in his own fashion.