Nineteen Nineteen
Reviewed by Arlene Kramer Richards
The wind drew off
Like hungry dogs
Defeated of a bone
Through fissures in
Volcanic cloud
The yellow lightning shone-
The trees held up
Their mangled limbs
Like animals in pain
When nature falls upon herself
Beware an Austrian.
Emily Dickinson Poem 1703 in: The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by R.
W. Franklin. Cambridge MA: Harvard nd.
The storms clouds gathered in the presentiment of war and following
uneasy truce in Dickinson’s uneasy nineteenth century before and after the
War Between the States. They gathered again in Europe before and after the
First World War. And they gather now. Austria is the center of Europe-and
was especially so in 1919 when the divide between the Russian East and the
countries we know as Western Europe faced off against each other and
Russia’s revolution seemed to threaten the West as the West threatened
Russia. In that frightening atmosphere the Austro-Hungarian Empire looked
to Vienna for a center and a reason for being, Vienna trembled, and Freud
tried to figure out what was causing his patients’ anxiety and depression.
The first world war years were the background of the year 1919: war is
death and the anxiety of dying. That anxiety plays against the anxiety of
love. In Europe after the First World War as in Emily Dickinson’s New
England after the Civil War, when men go off to die, women are left to be
single for the rest of their lives.
The movie Ninteen Nineteen traces the journeys of two of Freud’s
famous patients of that year. It begins after World War Two has shattered
Europe again, fractured Viennese society and destroyed most of those who
were his patients, his family and his friends. Freud was a Jew and his
patients were mostly Jews. Only those who escaped to America or were Aryans
were left in Vienna. The movie shows one of each-a Jew who was exiled to
America by her family and a Russian Orthodox man who chose to stay in
Vienna because his family estates were confiscated by the Soviets and
because his Viennese wife hated the Russian winter and wanted to stay in
her home. Why were they patients? What caused their unhappiness and how did
their treatment affect their later lives?
The movie introduces us to two old people by pairing classical music with a
passageway in the Viennese style of the nineteenth century. We are entering
another world. In this dark passageway, the ornate details lead to an
office with an old fashioned fainting couch-an office that is instantly
recognizable as Freud’s office. Then we see the old woman in her home – a
New York apartment- watching first herself and then an old man being
interviewed on TV about their treatment with Freud forty years earlier. In
the black and white scene of the interview the old man says that Freud
claimed no cures, “only the possibility of converting neurotic misery into
everyday unhappiness.” An ad for Raisin Bran shows us that we are watching
television with the woman. Why is she watching this? And why are we
watching her watch this. Why are these two old people being interviewed
about Freud?
We next see the woman traveling through present day Vienna’s
airport, taking a taxi to a hotel; this scene dissolves to smoke. A young
woman’s voice tells a dream of having a husband and son when a thin grey
bearded creature comes up from the lake. Freud’s voice asks: “Were you glad
to see me?” We now know how he interprets in 1919. He talks about the
patient’s relationship to him. This relationship is what analysts call the
transference-this signals a big change from his technique in the Dora case
a decade and a half earlier. But she evades that; she says : “I dreamed
myself a family.” He says: “You dreamed yourself a cure. To deceive me.”
Having a family would be a cure. She must be someone for whom this was a
problem. Someone for whom having a husband and child would be deception. We
now see her to be the patient in the case known as “The Homosexual Woman.”
She says: “I came here in such a good mood.” He says “Now you are angry.
That is your unconscious.” He interprets her affect-her anger-and insists
that she is not aware of her own thought process. What effect does this
kind of interpretation have?
The camera follows her as an old woman; she carries flowers down a long
stone corridor bringing a gift of beauty to a hard cold world. She visits
the old man of the television interview. He is Alexander Sherbatoff, known
to Freud scholars as “The Wolf Man” another of the cases Freud was treating
in 1919. She is Sophie Rubin from New York. They meet for the first time.
The rest of the movie traces out their understanding of the treatment they
got and the effect of it on their lives. As far as I know, the descriptions
of the treatment are accurate as are the attitudes of the patients towards
their treatment, but their names are changed.
At their first meeting Alexander is suspicious. Sophie remarks that
everything in Vienna is changed. He asks why she is there. She says: “To
remember.” In this she follows the analytic way of understanding one’s
world. She tries to connect the past with the present in order to achieve a
coherent understanding of her choices now. She recalls her treatment. She
remembers that Freud had no money to heat the office in 1919. Patients wore
coats and covered themselves with Persian carpets to make lying still
bearable.
Alexander recalls a joke he told Freud. “Two little boys are
playing in the mud. A passerby asks: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Making a
church.’ ‘Where is the priest?’ ‘We haven’t enough shit for that.'” The
joke introduces Alexander’s anal concerns, his resentment of priests and
his contempt for them. As he shows his family photos, he casually remarks
that he told Freud an early memory of being a little boy defecating in the
woods while his sister laughed at him. The memory overlaps with the joke.
Shit and shitting, humiliating authorities and feeling humiliated by women
have contributed to his view of himself and the world. Unlike Sophie, he
does not seem to understand his own mental processes. He knows that Feud
thought that childhood events and the child’s reaction to them are
important. He remembers, but he resents what he recalls, he does not
connect it with his present. Nor is he willing to admit that the way his
family lived in Russia owning thousands of serfs had anything to do with
his or his family’s madness.
Alexander says: “You know, you don’t look Jewish.” She says: “Neither do
you.” He says: “I am not.” The exchange is important because it signals
what will be a major theme. Most of Freud’s colleagues, patients and
friends up until 1919 were Jews. While most of his colleagues were rescued
thanks to their colleagues in England and the United States, many of his
students, patients, relatives and friends were murdered by the Nazis
because they were Jews.
As he tells his story, it is clear that Alexander has had a sad
life. Having lost his family of origin and all of his fortune in the
Russian revolution, he lived as a waiter in Vienna for the rest of his
life. But he did marry the woman he loved and lived with her for decades
until the Nazi Anschluss. Only when she suicided did he learn that she was
a Jew. Yet it is also clear that he did not manage to overcome his
fascination with shit. The only women who excited him sexually were women
he thought of as dirty, shitty, degraded and depraved. His wife and women
he respects do not excite him; they are like sisters.
Sophie says that he is just like her husband. She married in New
York after her parents had sent her there to get her away from the love of
her life, a beautiful woman who lived off men. She makes it clear that she
was angry at her father for being a war profiteer and for not listening to
her or valuing her. She describes falling in love with this woman at a
train station where Sophie had gone to meet her father who stayed back
from a family vacation to take care of his business. Rather than look at
the father she despised, she turned to look at the beauty and fell in love.
She expressed her murderous hatred for her father by falling in love with
the woman. She accused Freud of treating her for falling in love with the
person of the “wrong” sex. Freud reminded her that he was treating her not
for falling in love, but rather for attempting suicide when her father
forbade her to continue to meet with her beloved. In that way Freud was not
just being politically correct. He was saying that her problem had to do
with aggession. It was about the anger at her father that she had turned on
herself when she attempted suicide.
Alexander boasts that he did not tell Freud everything. He
suppressed,, he lied, he got what he wanted-permission to marry his
beloved. Freud’s prohibition on a patient getting married without the
agreement of the analyst had led to a bad outcome. Who knows whether
Alexander would have been able to figure out his own way of feeling and
thinking and had a less crippled life? The result of the Wolf Man case and
others like it made for a change in analytic technique as important as the
alteration that led to transference interpretations. The idea of being an
authority in the patient’s life has had a stubborn long popularity
nevertheless, but the evidence that this leads to a compliant patient
rather than a self motivated self aware person had led to change. The movie
makes it clear why the change was necessary. It also hints at how difficult
and how ongoing the task of doing this actually is.
Meanwhile Sophie tells of her own lies and evasions. She invites
Alexander to the Prater, the pleasure park of Vienna. They see the beauty
and the scariness where the aggression and the sexuality are external, on
view and available to all. They talk and she tells him that she used to
meet her beloved Anna in the park. They called their love trysts “English
lessons.” She attempted suicide only when Anna showed Sophie her pregnant
belly and said: “The baby is not yours.” It was not her father’s
prohibition, but her beloved’s rejection that spurred her attempt at
suicide.
The scene of Freud interpreting to the young Sophie that she really
wanted her father’s love and she failed her suicide attempt because she
wanted to live for that is so interesting because it shows a very
intellectual Freud explaining her to herself. She reacts mockingly: “How
interesting.” Freud says: “You talk as if I show you something interesting
in a museum.” But what the viewers of the movie and later analysts
realized was that patients need the experience of discovering their own
fears and wishes, not to be told about them. The difference may seem small,
but the result of conducting an analysis by allowing the patient to
discover how the feelings and thoughts of the past affect the present is a
more genuine and lasting change.
The last part of the film deals with the events of the Nazi era
that both patients were able to survive. That Sophie survived and coped may
have been due mostly to the luck of having been sent to America to separate
her from her beloved. And Alexander survived because he was not a Jew and
too old to be drafted into the German army. But their mental toughness
surely made a difference also. He was able to live without his beloved wife
after her suicide. Sophie was able to marry even if unsuccessfully and to
have a career, to support herself and to see clearly that she is not and
never really was a part of Austria. She says about her murdered family:
“They thought they were Austrians.”
I love the last scene of the movie in which he proposes that she
stay and let him take care of her. He is clearly the prisoner of nostalgia.
She, on the other hand, refuses because she does not want to be so revered
and so sexless. She says she does not want to be a sister, but says it in a
gentle, respectful way. She does not blame him for his weakness. She flies
back to her own life. That the movie begins in Freud’s private office,
goes to Sophie’s home and ends at Alexander’s home makes the point that
private troubles can be dealt with by psychoanalysis, but the larger public
troubles pointed to in Nineteen-Nineteen cannot be. Psychoanalysis falls
short of making people happy. It can offer, as Alexander quoting Freud,
said in the beginning, “only the possibility of converting neurotic
misery into everyday unhappiness.”