Radio Messages for Rosa: Installment 5

Rachel Neuwalder

Vienna, 1933

Rachel walked out of the university building into the rain and took a taxi to Dr. Weitzner’s office, which was in one of the massive grey stone apartment buildings typical of that part of the city.? She pushed through its heavy wooden double doors and climbed the highly polished marble stairs to the first floor. There were two doors on that landing.? The one to the left was for the family’s flat (“Weitznar”), the one to the right for the doctor’s office (“Prof. Dr. Weitznar”).? She rang the bell on the right.? After a decent interval a Czech maid opened the door.?

“I’m here to see Dr. Weitznar.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes I do.”

“In that case I’ll show you into his office.”

It was an office like many others in Vienna: lawyer’s offices, professor’s offices, bureaucrat’s offices, the offices of physicians.? There were dark brown mahogany bookcases against the walls—two with open shelves, one with glass doors—dark red oriental carpets on the floor, on the chaise lounge and on both tables.? The table lamps had nearly opaque dark yellow shades with braided fringes. There was a floor lamp, also heavily shaded, next to a large, deeply carved, mahogany desk facing one of the bookcases. Dr. Weitznar was sitting at the desk, reading from a green notebook. He waited just long enough to show that he was not overly eager to see her.

“Let me see.”? He looked at a page of the green notebook, then half-turned his chair to look at her.? “Your name is Neuwalder?”

“Yes.? Rachel Neuwalder.”

“You may sit on the couch, or lie on it, as you wish,” a gesture, indifferent.

“Thank you.” She sat in the middle of the couch, her knees and ankles close together.

“It is customary to begin with a case history.? Why have you decided to be analyzed?”

Looking back at his notebook.

“I would like to become a Psycho-analyst.”

“Are you a physician?”

“I am studying for a doctorate in psychology.”

“Then you wish to become a lay analyst.”

“Yes.? I understand that is permissible.”

“Permissible, but not encouraged.? We will see.? In that case we can begin with the analysis in a few days without preliminaries. My assistant will arrange the details.”

He looked back at the notebook.

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Rachel Neuwalder

Vienna, 1933

From the wide bourgeois street lined with grey stone apartment houses, through the heavy wooden outer doors, up the marble staircase to one of the doors of the apartment: the office door.

“I’m here to see Dr. Weitznar.”

“I’ll see if he is ready for you.”

Dr. Weitznar was sitting at the desk, reading from his green notebook. He again waited just long enough to show that he was not overly eager to see her.

“As before you may sit on the couch, or lie on it, as you wish.”

“Thank you.” She sat in the middle of the couch, her back straight, her knees and ankles close together.

“As you may know, the fundamental rule is that you are to say anything that comes to your mind, no matter how trivial it may seem or how embarrassing.”

Looking back to his notebook.? “You may begin.”

“Thank you. Let me see. There is this: I have reached a block in my studies.? Whenever I start to write I become nervous.? Sometimes it takes me a week to write a simple essay.”

“What form does this nervousness take?”

“My mind just goes blank.? I can’t think of anything to write.”

“Are there physical symptoms?” Another note.

“Yes.? My stomach.”

“Your stomach?”

“It hurts.? Then my insides go all liquid and I have to rush to the klo.”

“I see.”? He wrote in the green notebook.? “When you describe this, which appears to be a compulsion neurosis, what other thoughts occur to you?”

“Nothing important.”

“Then what thoughts you believe to be unimportant occur to you?? Perhaps you would be more comfortable lying down.? You may close your eyes, if you wish.”

She lay down on the couch; closed her eyes.

“You can say whatever comes to mind.”

“I can’t think of anything.”

“What comes to mind about this situation, here, now?”

“Nothing.? I am lying on this couch; you are sitting there.”

“And what do you think about that?”

“It is unusual for a man to sit looking at me while I am lying down, a man with whom I have not been intimate.”

“What would be your thoughts if the man were someone with whom you were intimate?”

“I suppose I would be aroused.? Is that what you want me to say?”

“It is what you have said.? Does anything else occur to you?”

“Nothing important, I just keep thinking of the Chinese baby.”

“What are your thoughts about the Chinese baby?”

“It was something that I saw when I was in Shanghai.? There was a dead infant in the street.? Someone told me it could not have been there long as its nappy was still wet. There were many corpses in the streets in Shanghai in those days, but for some reason the image of this poor Chinese baby keeps coming back to me.”

He wrote in the green notebook.? “Next time we can go into more of your thoughts about that.? The wet nappy may lead us to some more of your memories.”

She remembered another image from Shanghai, hand over hand, as it were, from the dead baby in the road with its wet nappy: Reinhardt, flayed alive by the Kuomintang secret police, never saying a word, true to his comrades to the end.

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Rachel Neuwalder

Vienna, 1933

Frau Professor Dr. Bühler lectured from the manuscript of her book?Der menschliche Lebenslauf als psychologisches Problem.?The course, like the book, was divided into a number of distinct sections. First, in her books and lectures, Frau Bühler considered human life in its basic biological and behavioral aspects. Then she considered the ideal-typical lives of “outstanding individuals” from the angle of their subjective experiences. She and her associates had collected two hundred biographies of people she considered to be outstanding individuals.? She was analyzing these, she said, in order to determine the goals towards which such persons attempt to direct their lives. This research, she said, was uncovering the fundamental tendencies, trends and structure of those lives: in other words, it was helping her to construct a Weberian ideal-type of outstanding persons. Dr. Bühler said that she had found that these outstanding personalities felt that their lives were integrated around a purpose, something they “stood for.” This goal may be personal or objective. But as individuals are often very limited in their choice of a goal, it is the way in which individuals give their selves to the cause they choose and subsequent successes and satisfactions in their lives that are the important considerations. People whose lives are perceived by themselves or others as failures, Professor Bühler found, lack this integration and purpose.

After her consideration of the whole set of these ideal-typical lives that she had collected, Professor Bühler had analyzed their phases, each, again, successively from the viewpoints of biology, behavior, subjective experiences and objective results, as well as the problem of their life’s final phase. Then there was an analysis of different types of lives and their phases. Finally, there was a discussion of childhood and adolescence as a preparation for life. Definite direction, she found, gradually takes the place of tentative experimentation, so that objective results become the fundamental facts of life.?She relied, to some extent, on the work of the Danish philosopher S?ren Kierkegaard, who wrote that the true self is the result of an existential act of decision transforming a mere personal history into a consistent project, a decision that must be constantly renewed, accepting the burden of the past and opening oneself to the possibilities of the future.

Rachel Neuwalder thought of Johnson.

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Rachel Neuwalder

Vienna, 1933

Many of the city’s bookstores had a political orientation.? Some were monarchist, some fascist, some socialist, some nominally socialist, but actually Communist. Rachel became friendly with a young woman, about her own age, who worked in one of the latter shops, who was not above doing a bit of match-making:

“Richard Greville. English aristocrat, politically on the Left, handsome.”

“Why is he here?”

“He doesn't know.? Trying to be helpful, he says.”

“Helpful?”

“To the Party.? I'm having a few people over tonight.”

“Oh, I see.? Thank you.”

Rachel Neuwalder

Vienna, 1933

“Shall we go for a walk, my pretty English comrade?”

“In the snow, Rachel?”

“Why not? You have boots and a warm coat, as do I.”

“Right.? Where shall we walk?”

“Have you been to the University’s botanical garden?”

“No.”

“We can go there.? We should have it quite to ourselves in this weather.”

She took his arm as they left the apartment house.? The garden was quite deserted, the lawns covered in half a foot of sparkling white snow.

“Have you ever made love in the snow?”

“Wouldn’t it be terribly cold?”

“I don’t think you’ll notice.”

He didn’t. It was his first time with a woman, with or without snow.

??A full life, as Marx did not quite say, includes political action, social group activities, work (but not labor) and intimate life as well.

“Intimate life?”

“Yes, this.? Keep still.”

Michael Holzman

#historicalfiction #1930s #Vienna #Communism #Psycho-analysis