MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

The next morning, Rank served as Freud's tour guide. He accompanied him through Manhattan highlighting the prodigious heights that reached the buildings, calling each one by name: the Singer Tower, the Empire State, the Flatiron, the Woolworth ... From all that looking up, Freud got stiff neck, being unable of lowering his head just as they crossed Times Square in the middle of the intense traffic. He woke up hours later in a hospital bed. His head hurt, but that (the doctor reassured him) was normal after a concussion. Then Freud remembered being hit by a vehicle. Soon he would be discharged, the doctor added, and he could leave with his friends. ¿His friends?Then Freud knew that Oedipus was waiting for him downstairs in the hall, no doubt plotting some other plan to eliminate him. Without the doctor having time to stop him, Freud sprang to his feet and ran like a bat out of hell. He ran down a long corridor avoiding all kinds of obstacles. In an elevator he discovered a solita

When Freud received the letter in which Rank told him the premonitory dream he had witnessed, he feared that after all Jung was right and there was a supernatural component in the human psyche. “That’s all we needed!” he thought. Since his breakup with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Jung was also living in America. So Freud could not help thinking that maybe such supernatural component was only present there. So he decided to go to America and find out by himself. When, on his arrival in New York at midnight, Freud saw from the deck of the ship the Statue of Liberty with its illuminated torch, the Oedipus complex immediately came to his mind. Not the Oedipus Von Stroheim that had been the cause of his discrediting in Vienna but the authentic Oedipus: the one who had killed his father to marry his mother. The Statue of Liberty symbolized for him the mother for whom the Americans had get rid of their father Great Britain. Rank was waiting for him on the dock in the company of his pr

In the twenties, Psychoanalysis had much more prestige in America than in Vienna itself where it was conceived. In particular, the New York Psychoanalytic Society had so many members that it was said that half of New Yorkers were engaged in psychoanalysis and the other half attended their practice. However, most psychoanalysts lacked first-hand information about the theoretical bases and procedures to follow in psychoanalytic therapy. For example, the use of hypnosis was abused, and even the knowledge about it was incomplete: they knew how to induce the hypnotic state in the patient, but they were unaware of the way to get him out (which was used by unscrupulous politicians to guarantee the vote). When Freud learned of these shortcomings, commissioned Otto Rank to travel to New York with the mission of bringing order to the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Rank was fascinated by the skyscrapers. When he walked down the street he was always looking up, which several times was about to

Shortly after the Musikverein Golden Hall's incident, Freud said during the Wednesday meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that lately he had the impression of being followed. Otto Rank expressed his fear that the Master was becoming paranoid. But, on behalf of the Society, he took it upon himself to check it. And it turned out that Freud was right: a patrol of hussars in their colorful uniform and on horseback followed him wherever he went. They even performed the ceremonial relief every three hours. This confirmed Freud's suspicions that psychoanalysis was now in the government’s spotlight. His disciples were in charge of safeguarding all the case histories of patients analyzed by Freud in the last decade. Taking advantage of the ceremonial relief of the patrol of hussars, they managed to sneak all the files out and bury them in the Schöpfl forest, where they remained hidden until, in the middle of the 20th century, a poisonous mushroom picker found them by chance and

Sometimes Freud found himself in difficulties communicating with his patients. Deaf-mute people for example, or people who lost their speech as a result of trauma. In those cases, Freud turned to one of his most faithful disciples, Hanns Sachs, as he was an expert in non-verbal communication. Gesture or facial expression could reveal to Sachs the most recondite secrets of a patient's subconscious. For example, the way in which Mrs. Kilghorn smacked her husband revealed to Sachs the anger that this woman had accumulated against him over the years. In turn, the manner in which Mr. Kilghorn received the blows revealed the guilt he felt for allowing his wife to smack him for no reason without him resisting. The fact is that now Freud needed again his disciple's insight to interpret the non-verbal communication of his new patient. In Freud's extensive case history, this patient is called Bugle-Man, because of his almost exclusive means of communication. The Bugle-Man had lost h

When Freud spoke for the first time about the Oedipus complex, the Viennese society insisted that this enigmatic Oedipus was presented to it. But Freud believed that the Viennese society was not prepared to hear the true meaning of the "Oedipus complex". Psychoanalysis was just taking off and a concept like that (child's incestuous desire for the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent) could ruin everything that had been achieved until then. When Freud was invited to give a public lecture on the Oedipus complex, he panicked. He could not openly expose his theory without running the risk of being stoned or shot or both. So, when he learned that Viennese society believed that Oedipus was one of his star patients, a brilliant idea occurred to him. "If what they want is an Oedipus, they will have an Oedipus," he told his disciples at the Wednesday meeting. "Let's see: who volunteers to be Oedipus?". All his disciples ran to hide except

Another strange case in Freud's case history is the one known as that of “the Dinosaur-Woman”. In the absence of a patient to put on his couch, Freud had spent several days psychoanalyzing himself, but the constant change from the couch to the chair and from the chair to the couch had exhausted him. He tried to psychoanalyze his wife Martha but it turned out that she did not believe in psychoanalysis which she qualified as “idiotic act”. Suddenly finding out that his wife was skeptical about psychoanalysis plunged Freud into melancholy. But a bit later the doorbell rang, and soon after a very elegant and slender woman laid comfortably on the couch of Freud's consultation room. The woman didn’t want to identify herself: an unequivocal sign that she was the wife of a high dignitary of the regime (which meant that, with this woman, recourse to New Caledonia would not be feasible). With his nerves shot to pieces, Freud asked her what her problem was. "I am allergic to dinosa

When Jung, in an outburst of independent judgment, or what was the same for Freud, in a clear gesture of rebellion, acquired for his consultation room not a couch, as Freud had established, but a chaise longue, Freud hit the ceiling: how dared Jung, the chosen one to succeed him, to contravene his instructions concerning furniture? A year earlier, Freud had frowned on the choice by Jung of a vase of flowers instead of a portrait of the father of psychoanalysis to adorn his office. And now, the chaise longue! Was his favorite disciple a sissy? (Freud did not have anything against homosexuals, but he preferred to keep them away). With a chaise longue instead of a couch, Jung's work with his patients could never fit into the category of "psychoanalysis". In fact, Freud strictly forbade him to call his sessions “psychoanalysis” thereafter. He suggested instead the denomination of "chaiselonanalysis". Jung frowned and stared at him with piercing and narrowed eyes. Fr

At the end of the 19th century, horse-drawn trams were the main means of transport in Vienna. Therefore, if you had a phobia of trams, you had a handicap. If you had two phobias of trams you had two handicaps ... and if you had forty-five phobias of trams (as the new patient of Freud claimed to have) you had forty-five handicaps and a serious problem. To the patient this was evident, whereas to Freud such logic slipped away from him. “You can’t have several phobias of the same thing" he affirmed. But his patient insisted that his was not an ordinary phobia. He didn’t have phobia of trams. Through other cities he used to travel by tram and had never had the slightest problem, except once in Budapest when he fell from the streetcar and fractured his collarbone (but that did not stop him from getting up and running after it until he got on again). Of the trams of Budapest, Prague, Bucharest, he had no phobia at all. He only had phobia of the trams of Vienna. And not of the trams of V

Freud had a maternal relationship with his ideas. He made them little dresses with scraps and lulled them in his arms, just as a girl would do with her dolls. It was something moving to see. When they grew up, he used to take them out for a walk in the Prater Park every afternoon. The smallest one, the Libido, was carried in a stroller, but the others scampered around freely. However, he never let them get too far away. They were forbidden to play with other ideas, even if they were from the same neighborhood. Freud had towards his ideas an overprotective attitude that some would define rather as paranoid. Just as, in Nature, mothers defend their puppies tooth and nail of any real or imaginary danger that can threaten them, Freud, when some of his ideas was involved in a brawl with some other’s idea, not only rushed to separate them, but lunged at the other idea’s parent to pull his hair. Freud's ideas were not exactly choirboys. Especially the Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego, they w

USER MANUAL In this blog you will find all the short stories that make up the books detailed below this presentation.  They can also be purchased on Amazon, either each book separately or all gathered in a single volume entitled "SILLY HUMOR FOR SMART PEOPLE". (The benefits also go to UNICEF.) For many years I've made a living on television taking advantage of my absurdist sense of humor. Like the books themselves, the intention of this blog is to continue making use of it with a philanthropic purpose. But it's free. Only at the end of each post I include a link to UNICEF just in case someone wants to contribute to help children in need in exchange for my stories.  Imagine that one of those children asks for a little help but he/she cannot offer anything in return. Well, I offer you these stories in his/her name.  At the end of each post there is a label with the title (in capital letters) of the book to which it belongs. Click on it and you will acc

Many of Freud's disciples, despite the veneration they professed to their teacher, describe him as a cold and distant man. "Icy" is the word used by Hostrich. But you have to keep in mind that, at the time that Hostrich knew him, Freud was recovering from a regrettable accident he suffered while skating on a frozen lake. It just so happened that, when making a cabriole, the ice broke under his weight, and when they took him out of the cold waters, Freud was made an ice cube. It took several months to thaw him, which was the time when Hostrich had dealings with him. But either way, in general when Freud was in a warm environment, he was even too effusive, and even slobbery. It is true that in the numerous photographs that are preserved of him, he is always seen with a sour face, frowning and looking very unfriendly. But the people closest to him say that he had a great sense of humor. Above all, he liked jokes about the sewer system… although there are some who think that

Another of the star cases of Freud was the one known as the "case of the Screw-Woman". The conversation of this woman was a pure incongruity. Everything she said didn't make any sense whatsoever, although at first Freud tried to find out whether there was any truth in what she said. Thus, when the Screw-Woman attempted to make him believe that she was a mermaid, she revealed herself unable to keep the head under water for more than five seconds. The goblins who appeared at night to lead her to the Fairy Kingdom turned out to be mice that did not even possess the ability of speech (contemplating the possibility that they were deaf-mute, Freud tried to communicate with them through sign language and not even then). After several failed checks of this type, Freud stopped trying to find out what was true in the statements of the Screw-Woman and cataloged her as a psychotic that had also made him waste a lot of time with useless checks. Curiously, when Freud stopped believing

Freud's decision to place the patient in a horizontal position to give the psychoanalyst an advantage over his patient in case he had to run away from him, was proved right the day Freud asked the Butterfly-Man to make a detailed narration of his last dream. The Butterfly-Man (so called in the analytic literature due to his pathological tendency to flutter) began to narrate a sordid story in which Freud played the role of evil. In the dream, the patient appeared as an innocent victim of Freud's desire to get hold of his nose. As he recounted the different episodes of that nightmare, the patient was getting more and more exalted. Freud took the precaution of stealthily approaching his chair to the door followed by the grim and increasingly threatening look of his patient. When the nightmare reached its climax (Freud climbed on his shoulders pulling his nose with all his strength), Freud was already running down the corridor like a bat out of hell. The minute of advantage he had

A famous case in the annals of Psychoanalysis is that which, in analytical literature, is known as "the case of the Quince-Woman." This woman liked the quince very much, nevertheless not to eat it but to wallow in it. Freud liked the taste of quince and was shocked to learn how she wasted such a delicacy. So he transferred the patient to Adler, who did not care about quince. In fact, in his first session with the Quince-Woman, he did not even know what a quince was, but he did not dare to ask and had to pretend to be an expert in quinces. At the end of the session he was convinced that “quince” was a kind of trampoline. However, Adler caused a very good impression on the Quince-Woman, who described him in her diary as "a true sage who has revealed to me the meaning of existence, closely linked (as I already supposed) to the voluble consistency of the quince.” This good impression was confirmed in the successive sessions, although Adler still didn’t know what the hell was

Rank returned from New Caledonia very deteriorated. He had been working as a gravedigger and that gave him a macabre perspective about the subconscious mind. Until that moment none of the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society had stopped to think seriously about death. Freud himself had dismissed death as an anecdotal fact of life that did not deserve to lose a moment thinking about it. The theory of "death instinct" was still far from being formulated. However, at one of the meetings of the Vienna Society, Rank took the floor to describe some of the death scenes he had witnessed, including the dead man who refused to be buried because he preferred incineration. The naturalistic descriptions that he made of the corpses and of their being buried several feet underground without any ventilation or amenities and, in general, the unhealthy conditions of the graves, generated great discomfort among the attendees, some of whom questioned his observations qualifying them as m

A young English gentleman very elegantly dressed with frock coat, top hat and white goatskin gloves showed up at Dr. Freud's office. In his case history, he is called “The Carillon-Man”. He turned up for his appointment just one minute after the scheduled time, which for Freud was unimportant, but for the man it seemed to be an unforgivable discourtesy and he did not stop apologizing for that minute delay. Once Freud had reassured him about it, the man laid down on the couch and, at the request of the analyst, began to talk about his life. An hour later, Freud still could not understand what would be the problem that had brought this young man to his office. Until he suddenly stood up as if driven by a spring, and, to Freud's astonishment, began to chime the hour as if he were a carillon. Freud consulted his pocket watch while noticing that the man had not consulted his at any time, and yet now he was chiming the hour with the punctuality of a Swiss watch. Once this was done, t

In 1901, Freud began distributing leaflets with a summary of his theories among the “Wiener Prater” walkers. Then he started lecturing at the University of Vienna when it was empty at night. At first he had only five followers: Adler, Stekel, Jung, Rank, and the college janitor who facilitated their entry into the building at night. Soon Freud understood that, with such a scarce audience, there was no need to clandestinely occupy a university classroom with capacity for five hundred people. He began to gather his followers every Wednesday afternoon in the living room of his own home. There he openly exposed his theories while his disciples nodded. At that time, there were still no dissensions. Freud baptised the group with the name of Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and shortly after as International Psychoanalytic Association. As new members joined, Freud thought of rebaptising it as Interplanetary Psychoanalytic Society, but Rank convinced him that it would be a little too bombastic.

Known in the psychoanalytic literature with the name of "the case of the Microbe-Woman", the case that I am going to refer to next was for Freud a milestone in his knowledge of the mechanisms of the subconscious. This woman had a phobia about microbes. However, she was forced to live with them since her husband collected them. Freud anticipated that the analysis of such a case would be eternal, so he tried by all means to convince the woman to divorce. When this strategy failed, he planned the abduction of her husband and his transfer to New Caledonia. But Otto Rank, who was entrusted with the mission, accidentally broke his glasses, which led to a series of unforeseen incidents whose result was Rank kidnapped in New Caledonia. (It took him a year to escape from his kidnappers and another year to raise the necessary money to buy new glasses and a plane ticket back to Vienna.) While Rank worked as a gravedigger in New Caledonia, Freud had to agree to treat the patient of her

One of the main resolutions that Freud had to take at the beginning of his career as a psychoanalyst, was where to sit, on the assumption that he should sit down. What was clear to him was that the patient should be lying down, in a horizontal position. That would give a few minutes of advantage to the psychoanalyst if things got awry and he had got to make a swift escape. But what should be the psychoanalyst's position? He considered all possibilities: standing, sitting or squatting. Standing would give him an added advantage in case he had to run suddenly. On the other hand, in those early days, a session of psychoanalysis could be extended hours and even days, so he soon ruled out the option of standing. Squatting would provide the psychoanalyst with a psychologically strategic point of view: that of the foetal position that we all had in the maternal womb (for Freud, the first months is one of the two determining periods of life, being the other the one that goes from 5 pm to 8

Soon Freud realized that hypnosis had its limitations. To begin with, not all patients were receptive to his hypnotic power. In fact, in some cases, Freud ran into patients who opposed resistance to being hypnotized, either an active resistance (such as punching him in the face) or a passive resistance. This one consisted in that the patient opposed, to the penetrating gaze of the hypnotist, a still more penetrating gaze, engaging both in a duel of gazes that the hypnotist did not always win. When Freud was the loser in this duel, his wife Martha noticed it right away. Small details revealed to her sharp discernment that, on that occasion, the hypnotist had succumbed to the hypnotic gaze of his patient. She deduced it from her husband's nudity when he came home, or from his crawling like a snake, or from his goose-stepping. Or from his non-recognition of her (then he started shouting that there was an intruder in the house). Or from... Phenomenology is very diverse, no need to cont