May 11 and 12. Salzburg.

Saturday and Sunday, May 11 and 12. Salzburg. 

Dear Trail Friends,

I am writing Sunday night, our second night at the Hotel Bristol in Salzburg. Photo 1 shows the hotel (yellow building just right of center, slightky to the left of the three domes, one black and two green). 

This hotel is very special. Every room has a different theme and is decorated accordingly - ours is the carnival room with colorful geometric upholstery and paintings with carnival themes. Judy is in the “Mush Room” with botanical art depicting mushrooms. Pam is in the Asian room next door with decor that looks Japanese. The rooms are whimsically and lavishly  decorated. The staff are warm and attentive. 

But the real magic is knowing that we are in the very place where the first international scientific psychoanalytic conference took place. It is exciting to imagine Jung and Freud and others who were part of that early gathering in this very building, walking up and down these same stairs, some meeting Freud face to face for the first time, probably meeting in the very room where we met for Chris’s lecture. (I smelled cigar smoke as we entered the room - it is a smoking room now - and much as I dislike the smell of smoke, I loved thinking of Freud smoking his beloved cigars in that very space.) I wish I could convey the magic I experienced. The room felt rich and warm - rug and walls a deep velvety crimson, (a color that has had special emotional resonance for me ever since my parents divorced, when I began to imagine Harvard and Radcliffe - where my parents first met - as an intellectual haven where I would someday regain my lost paradise. The Harvard color was crimson - in high school my mother, at my request, sewed me a crimson wool coat to keep me warm in winter, a symbolic womb that I could take with me wherever I went.) If you were able to navigate that sentence, congratulations. Chris spoke in front of a large bookcase (filled with antique books) telling stories that seemed to bring past and present together. 

Chris spoke about Jung and Freud, their mutual attraction and their conflict, Jung’s ways of seeing the world and Freud’s ways. She talked about sex and embodiment and how essential the body was to Freud. She talked about Jung’s criticisms of Freud and acknowledged that they were valid, but insisted that they were not the whole story. She talked about sex in a way that brought  desire and pleasure into the room right along with theory. Chris’s ability to conjure intellectual spaciousness and sensual presence both at the same time thrills me. 

The mind-body divide has been a gap on the scale of the Grand Canyon in my life. Chris, with her “both/and” approach, not only reminds me that I don’t have to choose between Jung and Freud, she initiates me into the truth, the experience, that I don’t have to choose between mind and body. 

Bear with me, what follows are going to be some pretty loose associations. But after all this tour is about Freud, and free association is as much a part of his “royal road” to the unconscious as dreams are. 

We ate lunch today at a little vegetarian cafe called “Heart of Joy.” A woman eating alone at the table beside us helped us translate the menu and we learned that she came from Munich but was raising her children in Salzburg, where she works as a fashion designer. I was stunned. She was beautiful in a totally artless way and her clothes were about as fashionable as my own. She broke every stereotype I had about people in the world of fashion (pretentious, overdressed, etc) and made me aware of my prejudice and aversion. I had just come from the exhibit at the Leopold museum and all those Secession artists who wanted to do public art - posters, furniture, bring beauty into the world, make ordinary peoples’ lives beautiful - and I was so moved by that, why should I be prejudiced against fashion?

On my walk after lunch a poster (that seemed to me to relate to fashion) caught my eye and I photographed it. When Judy and I drew, I used the poster as my inspiration. 

My drawing became a meditation on fashion. I realized that in high school I associated fashion (and sports) with the popular kids, the in-group. Once I got to college, I felt an aversion to both sports and fashion (my iPhone just wrote that as “passion” - a Freudian slip?). I don’t think I realized it, but  I was rejecting physical bodies. Sports creates opportunities for physical play and communication; fashion for celebrating and elaborating bodily beauty. Toward the end of my college  years I was angry at my college for its one-sided intellectual life. I didn’t realize it was I who chose and created my one-sided experience. 

As I prepare for my 50th college reunion (immediately after this tour) I have been reading the class email listserv. I have been stunned by how different others’ experience of the same college was. For so many of them, sports and music and theater were vital and essential parts of the college years. They didn’t experience the college or those years as onesidedly intellectual. 

When I met my long ago college classmate for lunch in Vienna, she seemed unsurprised by how indifferent and ignorant we all were of each other’s stories and cultures at the time. (She moved to the US from Lebanon at age 12. It never occurred to me at the time to ask about her story, her culture, her religion). 

“We were all totally absorbed in ourselves” she said. 

“We were inventing ourselves,” my tour mate Stephanie said to me tonight when I mentioned this conversation to her. She pointed out that in college we were separating ourselves from all we had known and trying to invent ourselves out of nothing. 

This makes me think of Chris referring to Harold Bloom and the “anxiety of influence” in talking about Jung’s tendency to push away Freud and to deny (from Chris’s perspective) how important Freud had been to his development. 

This makes me think of myself pushing away my family, my high school years (those years in the “pep club” cheering st sports events, those years longing to dress as well as the popular girls dressed). I tried to propel myself into a new identity by pushing off and away from that with which I had formerly identified.  

Photo 2 is the poster that I associate with fashion and photo 3 my drawing-meditation in response to it. 

As I did the meditative drawing, I was intrigued by the reflection of the rectangular cobblestones of the wet road and how they made a design on the poster. And I kept thinking about the fashion designer we had met at lunch, how human she had seemed, not artificial and affected (as I tended to think of the fashion world). I noticed - through my very inability to reproduce it - how the curves of the woman’s profile in the poster , especially her lips and throat, express vulnerability and eroticism,  and the shape of her hand holding the purse communicates exquisite sensuality. I love the way line and color are a language so different from words.  I love how the only color in the poster is that of the earring and the ring. Somehow what I was noticing as I drew related for me to the fashion designer telling us that this time was her Mother’s Day gift: this time alone at the cafe. She was being given the day off. 

Which leads me to the most emotional moment of the day for me. Judy and I had exchanged emails about Mother’s Day. I knew it was only her second Mother’s Day since her daughter Josie Angel died. At breakfast she came and hugged me and said Happy Mother’s Day. I started to cry. 

Now, it’s true I wanted very much to be a mother and was not able to conceive a child, and that Chris was unwilling to adopt (and her concerns made sense to me - older parents, lesbian parents, being adopted - multiple stresses, more than she felt prepared to help a child navigate). Not being a mother has been a major heartbreak in my life. It’s also true that Judy was once my “little sister” and that I longed to give her the mothering both of us needed so badly when our own mother was unable to give it. When Judy adopted Josie Angel I wanted to support her and to be a back-up parent,  almost a second mother if I could, and I tried very hard to do that,l. 

I love that Chris talks about Freud’s cases being great not only because of his brilliant detective work and his writing style but also because he wrote about his failures. He said that he learned the most from his failures. Probably the two people I have learned the most from in my life are Judy and Josie Angel, two people I tried very hard to mother and often failed (in part because of the narcissism of wanting to be a good mother to them, and needing them to be different than they were in order to affirm me). 

Judy’s drawing today was a “selfie.” I love that it resonates for me with all the self-portraits we saw at the Leopold Museum, with the way analysis itself (that speaking into the silent and empty space with the analyst behind the couch) has a quality of creating/discovering a portrait of one’s self. 

The gaze in Judy’s drawing appears very alive and direct to me. The face, to me, looks sad and strong and also a little bit challenging, as if to say “I am who I am (and not who you want me to be.)” 

Here’s Judy’s drawing (photo 4). 

When Judy hugged me and said Happy Mother’s Day, I think I acknowledged myself as a mother. If Freud was a psychoanalyst even or especially when he was learning from his failures, could I not be be a mother even or especially when learning from my failures? 

And I keep right on making mistakes. I am walking on thin ice right now by writing about Judy’s self portrait. I risk intruding on her right to describe her own portrait in her own words. 

Chris spoke of Freud’s expanded understanding of sexuality in relation to physical pleasure and desire. She spoke of a baby’s longing for milk, which could be satisfied. She also spoke of a baby’s longing for love as an infinite and insatiable longing that could never be fully satisfied. There would always be a longing for more love,  more attentive, warmer (or more detached), more unconditional than an actual mother could provide. 

So I think of a mother’s longing to give milk (literal and metaphorical milk) as a longing that  lcan be satisfied. Then I think of a mother’s longing to give love, to give what is needed and wanted in the particular way in which it is needed and wanted, without the intrusion of her human finitude (her imperfection and mortality). A longing that can never be satisfied. It occurs to me that, even without having children of my own, I have this in common with all (men and women) who mother. I am not only a childless woman who longed for children and did not have them. I am also in my way a mother, perhaps most so by virtue of my failures. 

I am thinking of Chris describing Freud’s concept of sexuality and how important it was to him to see sexuality as central, and how important to Jung to see it differently. She spoke of human sexuality as unique among mammals (as is our breastfeeding)  because it can naturally and easily take place face to face, so that our eyes meet and our facial expressions mirror one another. 

This makes me think of all those self portraits, Judy’s and all the ones we saw in the Leopold museum...

And now I want to segue to our day. In the morning Chris and I climbed steps and a steep road to the fortress about 500 meters above the town. It was raining and our shoes and rain jackets got wet. Photo 5 shows Chris walking in the rain. 

After lunch I went for a solo walk and managed to discover a green area of town. On the way, I saw a large globe (representing the earth) resting belowva large green tree. I had the odd wish that I could bring the solace and shelter of the green world to our ailing planet (to the displaced and suffering humans, to other displaced and suffering species, to oceans choked with plastics, to disturbances of winds and atmosphere and melting glaciers). Photo 6 shows the image of the earth finding shelter beneath the branches of the green world. (A little like trying to mother oneself?)

My walk was utterly refreshing. The feeling of walking along through the green world, at my own pace, to my own rhythm, surrounded and embraced by beauty, is for new as good as life gets. 

Photo 7 shows the trees I walked through. 

And photo 8 shows a view looking back down between trees at the town and at the fortress Chris and I had walked up to earlier in the day. 

In a previous lecture, Chris read a quote from James Strachey describing Freud as analyst, in which he fescribed Freud’s extraordinary gifts as a performer and his ability to bring the whole hour’s adventure to a stunning conclusion and sense of wholeness. 

I remember when I was in analysis with my imaginary Freud I would often ask for interpretations at the end of a session. He would sometimes offer an interpretation, or encouragement, or a joke. He would sometimes just say that our time was up. 

I wonder what he would say right now? 

Probably he would say that it isn’t appropriate for a former analyst to visit a young lady when she is lying in her in hotel room bed in her nightgown, no matter how relaxed we have become in our “afterlife” as collaborators. 

But if he were going to offer an interpretation it would probably be that my obsession with self-portraiture and self-analysis and the tree that shelters the earth reveals (among endlessly many other possibilities) my desire not merely to murder my father and marry my mother,  but to murder both parents (and all who presume to nurture, support or influence me in any way, all upon whom I depend) and unite with myself (body and mind, conscious and unconscious) in that perfectly merged state we often think of as the lost paradise of the maternal womb. 

And while I entertain the fantasy of total self-sufficiency and perfect union, I also have the power to symbolically raise my murdered “mother and father” from the dead through transference of my feelings for them onto my readers, whose sole role in life it shall be henceforth (forever and ever of course since we are going to give up this foolish notion of mortality) to provide undivided attention and unemding love and applause. 

Nevertheless, he too would cheer me on, because he would say this particular wish fulfillment involves transforming my primal desire into (however humble) my contribution to culture. I am writing, I am sublimating, I am accomplishing that magical alchemical transformation of primal desire into cultural creativity that makes us human. It doesn’t matter that much at this stage in my life how well or poorly I do it. It matters that I participate in the magic of being human. 

Now if you made it through that, my friend, I think it is truly my turn to stand up and provide you with unending applause. 

Thank you for walking with me. I will see you tomorrow on the trail as we head for Bad Gastein (where Freud used to seek rest and healing at the baths) where, if weather predictions are to be taken seriously, you and I expect to go walking through the snow.