Unsuspecting Souls Read online

  That’s just what the Industrial Revolution promised—a miraculous dream. Do not snooze, for the revolution will surely pass you by—just as it did then, and just as it does today. The new machinery of capitalism seemed capable of making almost anything that anyone could imagine a palpable reality—it would bring to every American “undreamed”-of things. And it had made good on exactly that promise on a vast range of things: fast-moving trains and slow-moving films, startling photographs and talking machines, telephones and telegraph, anesthesia and aspirin. A great portion of reality had turned dreamlike.

  But then there are those other dreams, the nightly hallucinations—when we tell ourselves, one more time, that anything’s possible, that anything’s probable—in our own lives. Those are the moments when we are in control, and that’s why, in part, Freud decided that dreams offered the “royal road to the understanding of unconscious mental processes.”2 The Lumière brothers—so aptly named—along with Georges Méliès, the magician turned filmmaker, created, in a very immediate way, a mechanically induced and collectively enjoyed nighttime dream with their motion picture cameras. Under no other circumstances do masses of people enter an auditorium where they know they will see no live actors, where they do not expect a single live person to ever take the stage. When the theater went dark—moonless dark—the moviegoing audience got a shock. It was not something furtive that caught the corner of their eyes, but something right there, smack in front of them, a congeries of ghosts. And when they left the theater, not much changed. Ghosts and specters floated everywhere and seemed, at one time or another, to visit everyone, in the daytime and most certainly in the dead of night.

  Reviewing the history of the period, one might think that every last person was high on some kind of powder or smoke or gas or liquid, a good many of them, in their elevated states, dreaming up the latest outlandish invention. That’s another definition of a dream, a style of thinking that has shaken itself free of nagging restraint. Imbibe with me, inhale with me, snort with me, invent with me—that’s what the age sounded like it was saying to a whole host of expectant people. So much beckoning—art beckoned, drugs beckoned, psychology beckoned, the weirdly interesting and dangerous avant-garde beckoned—but most forcefully and most provocatively, in the end it was entertainment that got the attention of the great masses. And they came, the great American unwashed in droves and droves to the shore of New York, and specifically to that place that neither was an island nor had many conies—Coney Island.

  Freud wrote a book about the meaning of those nighttime dreams, but he plucked his subject out of a time filled with almost nothing but dreams and ghostliness and the hallucinations of opium or heroin or morphine. Freud himself found that he liked cocaine very much, offered testimonials for its continued use, and then wrote his book about dreams. He made a guidebook for the period, a manual, if anyone cared, about how to understand the strange workings of the mind. But it was hard work getting through the book’s five hundred or more pages; it took a long time for its initial edition, in German, to sell out its rather small run of six hundred copies. But, then, Freud did not intend his Interpretation of Dreams for the masses but rather for the genteel class, for the intellectual, and for those with the time and the inclination to read through its closely argued pages.

  Freud describes his method of getting at the truth of dreams in the opening sentences of the first chapter:In the following pages I shall prove that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted, and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a psychological structure, filled with significance, and one which may be assigned a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state. I shall further endeavor to explain the processes that give rise to the strangeness and obscurity of dreams, and to discover through them the nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or co-operation is responsible for producing our dreams.

  Freud called what happens in the space between our recognition and our forgetting “dream work.” That strangeness of our dreams comes from the way we repress memories so painful to us by transforming them—in a sense, keeping them by disposing of them. We turn them into disguised memories, as messages of desire; and for Freud desire, “the instinctual life,” could never be repressed. We repress those memories but they leave their scars; they cause us pain; they leave us with symptoms—which are nothing but defense mechanisms. They protect us from ourselves. “In symptoms, in dreams, in slips of the tongue, in free-association and, of course, in memories themselves,” to quote from Adam Phillips, “we are reminded of our disowned counterparts.” And thus the psychoanalytic encounter enables the patient to reach those memories that he or she has hidden away because they were too unacceptable, too unbearable, or just too painful to process. Adam Phillips again: “ . . . psychoanalysis is a cure by means of the kind of remembering that makes forgetting possible.” Or as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan put it, “The patient is not cured because he remembers. He remembers because he is cured.”3

  The patient’s first blush with those painful memories Freud called “falsified memories,” which do not further the cure for they aid the patient in the continued process of forgetting. Freud coined a name for this phenomenon in an essay he published in 1899; he called them “screen-memories.” Such memories occur in childhood and act as a screen against later memories from adolescence. But they represent a first step toward the goal of remembering in order to forget. So important were these memories that Freud made the following blanket statement about them: “It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood; memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess.”4

  We cover up our painful, repressed, cast-aside memories by narrating a consistent life to others. To get his patients unstuck, oddly enough—and reversals and counterintuition characterize a lot of the psychoanalytic enterprise—Freud had to interrupt the consistency of his patients’ stories, or listen for their own interruptions, where they typically “revealed” (lifted the veil on) themselves. Puns and pauses, errors and jokes, provided breaks in the narrative flow. As Phillips points out, “our unspoken lives press for recognition . . . in our pauses . . . through free-association the patient’s story loses its composition and becomes more like collage in which our favorite words unwittingly find alternative contexts.”5

  In an understandable way, because the unconscious is so filled with the craziest of images, Freud could more profitably mine those who had broken the rules—the odd and the marginal and the surreal. He cared a great deal about those who got paid attention only by, say, law enforcement. Since he took his cues from the bizarre and unexpected nature of the unconscious, it follows that he could learn more about the nature of human nature from those characters who lurk in the underbelly, from those who inhabit the demimonde of society, than from those who felt comfortably in control.

  In Freud’s scheme, characters like Oscar Wilde and Georges Méliès, those who made a profession out of shocking the sensibilities, had more to teach him than those who lived narrow lives—even though most of his clients came from the upper classes. Freud merges with Coney, then, at the level of the fantastical, in the sideshow glimpses of the freaky and the feared, like Jolly Trixie (“Queen of Fatland: She’s so fat that it takes seven men to hug her”; six hundred and eighty-five pounds; five feet, two inches tall) and Princess Wee Wee (height, thirty-four inches).6

  Coney and the unconscious intersect at that border between land and sea—the thin line of here and there—where those characters who are hard to define always seem to hang out, like Coney’s spooky midget clown armed with an electric prod, always ready to pounce. Such a feisty clown is shocking to the sensibilities, but then so was Freud. But then everyone, it seemed, needed to be shocked.

  Maybe dreams represent that elusive seat of consciousness the period so eagerly wanted to find. After all, dreams so wonderfully and easily seemed to partake of the miraculous.
If only we could understand them. And so Freud devoted an entire chapter to “The Method of Dream Interpretation,” Freud tells us what to look for in dreams and what the clues might mean and, in the process, gives us a much broader lesson in how to understand the period. As we have seen, Freud believed that every gesture and every object in a dream gave up strict and significant meaning. Nothing was lost on him. Even the way his clients constructed their sentences, the grammar they used, the phrases they chose, the stumbles and mistakes of words, revealed to him a great deal about their personalities. In his “dream work” with patients, he attempted to fill out a narrative of that person’s life, to pick up their dropped threads and to help them reweave their own yarns. Metaphors provided a most potent way into meaning for Freud.

  And so in that seemingly disparate-looking nineteenth century, marked by morphine and machinery, by opium and opulence, spiritualism and science, Freud, in his method of detecting the truth, would dig beneath the surface and excavate the salient connections. And he would uncover those connections by looking at the century as if it were a collective dream, and by acknowledging that he considered nothing—not a single event or idea—as trivial or insignificant. That is, after all, the way social and cultural history gets written, the scholar or researcher connecting one detail with another until a theme begins to reveal itself.

  I end this book with entertainment because that’s the culmination of the one-hundred-year-long dream. As people found themselves losing essence, all that they had left was fun and the most basic ways of feeling alive. One of those very basic ways involved receiving a blast of adrenaline, and that’s what a good deal of thrill rides delivered—an unadulterated rush. Dreams come to an end, usually, when the sleeping person wakes up. And in America the sleepers woke up only in the most basic way they could, by pursuing various forms of fun: They felt alive for at least brief moments, quite ironically, in their bodies—in their viscera, in their nerve endings, in the way that the latest thrill ride toyed with their equilibrium.

  In Freud’s scheme, as well as in popular psychology, dreams announce our deepest wishes and desires; they reveal to us our close-held secrets and can make us feel through the course of an ordinary day like the most powerful and gifted person. Perhaps in dreams we find the truest, most naked expression of that internal creature we call the self. No one can stand in the way of that one short line, all monosyllables, “I have a dream!” I have a dream, but it is substantial as hell, and I aim to make it real. Stand aside, or stand up with me. In this calculation, dreams announce our aspirations—quite literally, our spirit—a signal of part of us as breathy and evanescent as our nighttime dreams. In America, at the turn of the century, while most people experienced both daydreams and their nighttime counterparts, they felt cut out of anything that the early twentieth century would call the American dream.

  The great majority of people did not feel refreshed and powerful. Most people—“working stiffs”—felt out of control, and that’s why they went to Coney, to feel out of control at America’s major amusement parks—with two added ingredients, safety and exhilaration. They wanted to feel out of control—after all, that’s what it means in part to be high—but only in the most controlled, most guarded way they could. They wanted bigger and faster and scarier, but they also wanted the assurance of a safety net. At Coney, the average man or woman could jump from a 250-foot tower, but the parachute was tethered to a steel rig; they could speed down a steep ramp into a pond of water, but the boat ran on a track. City dwellers went to Coney for thrills, for higher and faster and scarier, and Coney obliged by giving it to them: a huge Ferris wheel, the Wonder Wheel; the world’s highest and fastest roller coaster, the Thunderbolt; and the world’s longest steeplechase ride.7 But all the rides had been designed by safety engineers and sanctioned by city inspectors.

  In their entertainment, as in their consumption, Americans wanted more and more. And businesspeople were only too happy to give it to them. Think for a moment about amusement spots in this country, how they have expanded into larger and larger venues, expanded just like capitalism or the military—from Coney Island to Six Flags Magic Mountain, to this or that theme park, to Disneyland, to Disney World. All that’s missing is Disney Universe, or Disney Galaxy. We Americans take over land so that we can spread out and colonize—that’s one of the underlying and repeating stories of the nineteenth century—and we annex land for the pursuit of our own personal enjoyment: It’s only in America that one finds the imperialism of flat-out fun. America, in 1910, had a population of ninety-two million people, and an astonishing 1,500 amusement parks. Fans of amusement parks gauge the credibility of the park by its key ride, the roller coaster. In 1920, the country boasted 1,520 roller coasters, in small towns and big cities, in virtually every state of the union.

  Wheeee!: so much fun, so much damned fun. Americans could not, would not, get their fill. Still, today, they cannot seem to get their fill—witness the monumental makeover of Las Vegas, now the premier destination for much of the world to grab hold of supercharged, barely legal fun for the parents and tame fun for the rest of the family. Mama and Papa hang out at the craps tables and the nightly bawdy shows while Junior splashes in the wading pool and watches television. Las Vegas makes Coney seem like a park for those in need of assisted living.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, people—the heart of the people—kept slipping away. How to put the brakes on, how to stop the fading away—that was the problem and that was the plague. Perhaps the only safeguard people have against such erosion is that elusive creature, the self. And maybe self is just a highfalutin way of talking about will. At any rate, the self receives special attention in the nineteenth century from a range of public figures, from historians to poets, from the human scientists to those in the hard sciences.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson was possessed of self-reliance. He would not let the new revolution in technology drain him of a single damned thing. Emerson seems like one of those persons today—we call them Luddites—who turns his back on technology and the machine and who refuses to have his voice reduced to a series of electrical impulses that run along a telephone wire or a transatlantic cable. For Ralph Waldo Emerson is transcendental, which means that all that really matters to him already resides in the universe; it is just not visible to the naked eye. And it cannot be counted or quantified. He needs to buy or own nothing more. He is already in possession of everything he desires. He merely wants to reveal, say, the all-seeing eye; it has nothing at all to do with the cinema or motion pictures or a camera of any kind. It has to do with the self and what he calls the over-soul; it is, for him, the transcendence of this realm for a higher one—a spiritual one.

  Emerson was self-reliance, and he was self-confidence, and above all, he was self-assurance. He needed nothing more than a hyphen to hold things together; that’s because he had stepped outside the regular order of language. Emerson forged a new language. Like Freud, he is difficult to read; he takes time. Like Freud, he writes but he does not communicate. Communication is for Samuel Morse or Thomas Alva Edison. Ralph Waldo Emerson will stand fast; he sees the signs of a higher power everywhere. People did not go on weekends to amusement parks to hear Emerson; they went to the Unitarian Church on Sundays to listen to his sermons. And when they did, they felt themselves back in control—those who went and those who listened and especially those who paid attention to his words and sentences and his spectacular images.

  The 1933 Oxford English Dictionary contains over seventy instances of the word self, dating from the middle to the late nineteenth century. Words like self-reliance, self-assurance, self-confidence, and so on appear for the first time during that period. (The overwhelming majority of self-words, in fact, appear in the nineteenth century.) Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet, the essayist, the minister of hope, coined many of those compounds. No matter the source, the idea of the self moves center stage in the nineteenth century.

  Here is one of his paragraphs from a key essay on the
subject, “Man the Reformer,” arguing for the fortitude of self:I will not dissemble my hope, that each person whom I address has felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man, who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him, to go in honor and with benefit.8

  But one must ask the following question: “Is there still an autonomous self capable of the act of living?” This is but a variation on the question that Ivan Illich asks, in an essay titled “Death Undefeated”: “Is there still an autonomous self capable of the act of dying?”

  If the self does stand as the ultimate barrier against total invisibility, then the question becomes how to hang on to it. That was the trick. It certainly did not happen at Coney—just the opposite. A visit to Coney Island overwhelmed one’s senses—from rides and food to noise and the sea; from alcohol to fright to sexual titillation. Every ride and attraction, along with all of the odors of cooking food, was designed to make one forget the nagging and dragging self. To hell with that effort to stay fully human and totally alert, let’s just have fun. Coney sold illusion, and the root of illusion is the Latin ludere, “to play.” It’s work all week long—hard and gritty work—until the moment of that brief respite, the weekend. But Coney offered fun in its own unique mode, as a way to “feel” totally alive—through the most intense and unambiguous of bodily reactions, including nausea, suffocation, unbalance, disorientation, and dizziness, and the ultimate reaction, the rush and whiff of death itself. The person feels totally out of control and can do nothing more than freeze up, and then give up.