Word: freude
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...whom extraordinarily public things happen. During the course of her fictional life, Lisa Erdman, a modestly talented opera singer of Polish and Ukrainian descent, is forced to make two journeys that propel her around the perimeter of 20th century imagination. She is treated for sexual hysteria by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and, years later, murdered by Nazi soldiers at Babi...
...novel opens with some apparently random letters from Freud and an associate, then shifts to a 13-page poem that reads like a dream fugue of eroticism and premonitions of doom. A woman and a faceless lover fetch up at "a white lakeside hotel" and make love incessantly and imaginatively. Meanwhile, other guests drown when a pleasure boat on the lake goes down in a sudden high wind; a wing of the hotel burns to the ground, killing many others. The poem is followed by an expanded prose version of the same fantasy. This time the woman's lover...
...poem and its prose companion, it then turns out, have been given to Freud ,by Lisa Erdman, their author and his patient. She is suffering from i shortness of breath and debilitating pain in her left breast and left ovary. Conventional medical treatment circa 1919 has failed to cure her. Perhaps Freud's newfangled methods will help...
...story of Lisa's psychoanalysis is told by Freud himself. Thomas' imitation of a Freudian case history is uncannily accurate and convincing. It has the same whodunit intensity of the originals, the same bristling of symbols, the same gentle prodding to make the patient reveal more than she wants to know. Though Lisa resists him at many turns, Freud traces her problem back to a scene she accidentally stumbled across in childhood: a menage a trois involving her uncle, her mother and her aunt. Lisa does not accept her analyst's conclusion that she is a homosexual...
...Vienna of his day (1862-1931) was phosphorescent in decay: Schnitzler's contemporaries numbered Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler and Adolf Hitler. Schnitzler chose to puncture that neurasthenic society's pretensions to honor, its pursuit of frivolity and its moral numbness. He knew the absurdity of doubling one's speed when one has lost all sense of direction...