From the Letters of Ida Bauer to Her Mother¹
Vienna, c. 1898
by Heather Treseler
I.
Dr. Freud of the neat gray beard and muffled
sighs, the dark pressed suits and Ascot ties:
he promises, Mother, that the sharp pains
of all last summer—what cuts across my face
like sharded glass—will subside and with them,
my cough, if only I will talk freely of the fears
that crowd in, upon me, in the narrow dark.
If I bring myself into the lamplight or stippled
sun, filtering through damask curtains beside
his couch, if I examine what it is I have hidden
from myself like auntie’s dog, who feigns
forgetting until even he can no longer remember
where it was he put her folded fan or silk slipper,
what it was he stole and made an hour’s toy.
II.
Today, Mother, I told Freud about Herr K
cornering me in the garden, behind the old
woodshed. Insinuations at tea: all his fuss
about spoons and cream, the cup he insisted
on stirring for me. Then his leg, pressed
against mine, throughout dinner. Herr K,
married, jowled, nearly as old as father!
Yet the Doctor seemed to think none of it
mattered. Wasn’t it, he asked, flattering
to have attention from a rich, accomplished
gentleman? To be admired, found pretty
and worthy? To be sought out so gently?
Didn’t Herr K, he asked, make me feel
the least bit happy, womanly? Lucky?
III.
But is it luck, Mother, or the worst rub of fate?
Each girl is reborn a crisis when she is no longer
thought a child, deserving protection, but
a young woman, ripe and blushing, ready—
it is supposed—to be taken from her innocence,
made to travel the fabled journey from fruit
to fruition, courtship to love and children,
the repose matrons wear as honor or as mask
for exhaustion, an eerie stillness akin to death.
Isn’t the story often disaster? Hasty feeling,
crescendos of innuendo, coyness, castigation?
Can a woman say what she wants? I have no
interest in Herr K or old men sagging in their
bones like smug children in unkempt beds.
IV.
Dreams, Freud says, are the soul’s dialect
of desire. In analysis, I hear its whispering,
its intimations a secret language of my being.
How strange (or sensible) a dialogue between
the head and the body’s et cetera. How bizarre
that the mind can regard each limb, each run of
skin, each finger, as co-resident or perfect stranger.
The body, he claims, is already in communion,
but the mind is a minotaur of ideal and desire:
it thinks, we yearn; it obeys, and we ache
with hunger. To leave off my woolen terrors
and cure my pain, to find a love worthy of its
name perhaps I have only to listen to hear
my body speak, nakedly, to its own soul.
¹Ida Bauer (1882-1945) was Sigmund Freud’s patient, and he referred to her as “Dora” in his famous case study.
Heather Treseler’s chapbook, Parturition, won the Munster Literature Centre’s 2019 chapbook prize in Ireland, and her poems appear in Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, PN Review, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals, and have won prizes from Missouri Review, The Worcester Review, and Frontier Poetry. Her essays about poetry appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and in eight books about American poetry. She is an associate professor of English and the Presidential Fellow for the Arts, Education, and Community at Worcester State University. She lives outside of Boston.