The White Hotel Read Free

1920
    Dear and esteemed Professor ,
    Forgive the postcard: I thought it appropriate in the light of your young patient’s “white hotel,” for which gift please accept my thanks! It passed the train journey ( again most apt ) speedily and interestingly. My thoughts on it are, I fear, elementary, her phantasy strikes me as like Eden before the Fall—not that love and death did not happen there, but there was no time in which they could have a meaning. The new clinic is splendid, not, alas, flowing in milk and honey like the white hotel, but considerably more durable, I hope! Letter follows when I have sorted myself out .
Cordially yours ,
Sachs
19 Berggasse ,
Vienna

18 May 1931
    To the Secretary
Goethe Centenary Committee
The City Council
Frankfurt
    Dear Herr Kuhn ,
    I am sorry to have been so long in replying to your kind letter. I have not, however, been inactive in the meantime, when the state of my health has allowed, and the paper is finished. My former patient has no objection to your publishing her compositions along with it, and so these too are enclosed. I hope you will not be alarmed by the obscene expressions scattered through her poor verses, nor by the somewhat less offensive, but still pornographic, material in the expansion of her phantasy. It should be borne in mind that ( a ) their author was suffering from a severe sexual hysteria, and ( b ) the compositions belong to the realm of science, where the principle of nihil humanum is universally accepted and applied, and not least by the poet who advised his readers not to fear or turn away from “what, unknown or neglected by men, walks in the night through the labyrinth of the heart.”
Yours very sincerely ,
Sigmund Freud

1
Don
Giovanni
     

 
    1
I dreamt of falling trees in a wild storm
I was between them as a desolate shore
came to meet me and I ran, scared stiff,
there was a trapdoor but I could not lift
it, I have started an affair
with your son, on a train somewhere
in a dark tunnel, his hand was underneath
my dress between my thighs I could not breathe
he took me to a white lakeside hotel
somewhere high up, the lake was emerald
I could not stop myself I was in flames
from the first spreading of my thighs, no shame
could make me push my dress down, thrust his hand
away, the two, then three, fingers he jammed
into me though the guard brushed the glass,
stopped for a moment, staring in, then passed
down the long train, his thrumming fingers filled
me with a great gape of wanting wanting till
he half supported me up the wide steps
into the vestibule where the concierge slept
so took the keys and ran up, up, my dress
above my hips not stopping to undress,
juices ran down my thighs, the sky was blue
but towards night a white wind blew
off the snowcapped mountain above the trees,
we stayed there, I don’t know, a week at least
and never left the bed, I was split open
by your son, Professor, and now come back, a broken
woman, perhaps more broken, can
you do anything for me can you understand.
I think it was the second night, the wind
came rushing through the larches, hard as flint,
the summer-house pagoda roof came down,
billows were whipped up, and some people drowned,
we heard some waiters running and some guests
but your son kept his hand upon my breast
then plunged his mouth to it, the nipple swelled,
there were shouts and there were crashes in the hotel
we thought we were in a liner out to sea
a white liner, he kept sucking sucking me,
I wanted to cry, my nipples were so drawn
out by his lips, and tender, your son moved on
from one nipple to another, both were swollen,
I think some windowpanes were broken
then he rammed in again you can’t conceive
how pure the stars are, large as maple leaves
up in the mountains, they kept falling falling
into the lake, we heard some people calling,
we think the falling stars were Leonids,
and for a time one of his fingers slid
beside his prick in me there was