I
The psychoanalyst doctor was little and dark and while he was talking he looked not at Mrs. Hilary but down at a paper whereon he drew or wrote something she tried to see and couldn’t. She came to the conclusion after a time that he was merely scribbling for effect.
“Insomnia,” he said. “Yes. You know what that means?”
She said, foolishly, “That I can’t sleep,” and he gave her a glance of contempt and returned to his scribbling.
“It means,” he told her, “that you are afraid of dreaming. Your unconscious self won’t let you sleep. … Do you often recall your dreams when you wake?”
“Sometimes.”
“Tell me some of them, please.”
“Oh, the usual things, I suppose. Packing; missing trains; meeting people; and just nonsense that means nothing. All the usual things, that everyone dreams about.”
At each thing she said he nodded, and scribbled with his pencil. “Quite,” he said, “quite. They’re bad enough in meaning, the dreams you’ve mentioned. I don’t suppose you’d care at present to hear what they symbolise. … The dreams you haven’t mentioned are doubtless worse. And those you don’t even recall are worst of all. Your unconscious is, very naturally and properly, frightened of them. … Well, we must end all that, or you’ll never sleep as you should. Psychoanalysis will cure these dreams; first it will make you remember them, then you’ll talk them out and get rid of them.”
“Dreams,” said Mrs. Hilary. “Well, they may be important. But it’s my whole life. …”
“Precisely. I was coming to that. Of course you can’t cure sleeplessness until you have cured the fundamental things that are wrong with your life. Now, if you please, tell me all you can about yourself.”
Here was the wonderful moment. Mrs. Hilary drew a long breath, and told him. A horrid (she felt that somehow he was rather horrid) little man with furtive eyes that wouldn’t meet hers—(and he wasn’t quite a gentleman, either, but still, he wanted to hear all about her) he was listening attentively, drinking it in. Not watching tennis while she talked, like Barry Briscoe in the garden. Ah, she could go on and on, never tired; it was like swimming in warm water.
He would interrupt her with questions. Which had she preferred, her father or her mother? Well, perhaps on the whole her father. He nodded; that was the right answer; the other he would have quietly put aside as one of the deliberate inaccuracies so frequently practised by his patients. “You can leave out the perhaps. There’s no manner of doubt about it, you know.” Lest he should say (instead of only looking it) that she had been in love with her good father and he with her, Mrs. Hilary hurried on. She had a chaste mind, and knew what these Freudians were. It would, she thought (not knowing her doctor and how it would have come to the same thing, only he would have thought her a more pronounced case, because of the deception), have been wiser to have said that she had preferred her mother, but less truthful, and what she was enjoying now was an orgy of truth-telling. She got on to her marriage, and how intensely Richard had loved her. He tried for a moment to be indecent about love and marriage, but in her deep excitement she hardly noticed him, but swept on to the births of the children, and Jim’s croup.
“I see,” he said presently, “that you prefer to avoid discussing certain aspects of life. You obviously have a sex complex.”
“Of course, of course. Don’t you find that in all your patients? Surely we may take that for granted. …” She allowed him his sex complex, knowing that Freudians without it would be like children deprived of a precious toy; for her part she was impatient to get back to Jim, her life’s chief passion. The Oedipus complex, of course he would say it was; what matter, if he would let her talk about it? And Neville. It was strange to have a jealous passion for one’s daughter. But that would, he said, be an extension of the ego complex—quite simple really.
She came to the present.
“I feel that life has used me up and flung me aside like a broken tool. I have no further relation to life, nor it to me. I have spent myself and been spent, and now I am bankrupt. Can you make me solvent again?”
She liked that as she said it.
He scribbled away, like a mouse scrabbling.
“Yes. Oh yes. There is no manner of doubt about it. None whatever. If you are perfectly frank, you can be cured. You can be adjusted to life. Every age in human life has its own adjustment to make, its own relation to its environment to establish. All that repressed libido must be released and diverted. … You have some bad complexes, which must be sublimated. …”
It sounded awful, the firm way he said it, like teeth or appendixes which must be extracted. But Mrs. Hilary knew it wouldn’t be like that really, but delightful and luxurious, more like a Turkish bath.
“You must have a course,” he told her. “You are an obvious case for a course of treatment. St. Mary’s Bay? Excellent. There is a practising psychoanalyst there now. You should have an hour’s treatment twice a week, to be really effective. … You would prefer a man, I take it?”
He shot his eyes at her for a moment, in statement, not in enquiry. Well he knew how much she would prefer a man. She murmured assent. He rose. The hour was over.
“How much will the course be?” she asked.
“A guinea an hour, Dr. Cradock charges. He is very cheap.”
“Yes, I see. I must think it over. And you?”
He told her his fee, and she blenched, but paid it. She was not rich, but it had been worth while. It was a beginning. It had opened the door into a new and richer life. St. Mary’s Bay was illumined in her thoughts, instead of being drab and empty as before. Sublimated complexes twinkled over it like stars. Freed libido poured electrically about it. And Dr. Cradock, she felt, would be more satisfactory as a doctor than this man, who affected her with a faint nausea when he looked at her, though he seldom did so.