Freud in Coney Island

Norman M. Klein (2004)

The facts are simple enough: In September, 1909, a relatively unknown Freud spent a week in New York City, en route to a lecture series upstate at Clark University. The air ranged from muggy to stifling. The museum exhibition on antiquities, the one he had high hopes for, proved substandard. The crowds on the street smelled of industrial fluids and sweat. Even friendly faces made him squirm. The conductor on a tram tried to be empathetic: he ordered the crowd to make room for “the old man.” But Freud did not see himself as old, not yet. He pulled back his shoulders and glared, then felt idiotic.

Back in the hotel, his stomach was churning from American food. His mouth tasted like rancid milk. His neck felt numb. I’m truly a mass of symptoms, he told himself. I’m a neurasthenic woman. I’ll wake up paralyzed on my left side. I need a day by the sea. He rummaged through his trunk for a lighter suit. In the morning, before the sewer vapors hit the sidewalks once again, he took a ferry to Coney Island. Of course increasingly, as we know now, he kept these anxieties-- his own case study-- in separate leather notebooks, a psychiatric form of double book-keeping.

As the boat chugged along, smoke from Manhattan evaporated into blue mist. Finally, the ferry anchored at Dreamland Pier (what someone called Old Iron Pier). A friendly gust of sea air greeted him, but the view made him wince, like architectural gastritis. A lunatic tower dominated, built like a hodgepodge-- vaguely Moorish on top, wedding-cake Venetian in the middle, a wigwam at the bottom. Clustered around it were buildings so tentative, so flimsy, they could have been built with egg shells; they were sketches in pasteboard. Then, toward the horizon, he saw streets that looked like the day after mardi gras, like a gigantic drunken operetta.

Luckily it was still early in the morning. Even the mist had not burned off yet. The main streets, Surf Avenue and the Bowery, looked sleepy. But then the turmoil began. Within an hour, they were already jammed with confusion. Armies seemed to be scattering in retreat. Freud tried to hide on the beach, but after a few hours, decided to enter the “irresponsible gaiety.” He started taking notes in one of those leather journals that would remain hidden, even from many friends and admirers, for ninety years.

At the entrance to Luna Park, he noticed two monkeys on a chain, mother and child. The mother was baring her teeth and hissing, while a crowd poked at her little boy, some with umbrellas, canes, some with their index fingers. The monkey child’s movements utterly reminded him of children he had treated, a monkey Little Hans. If this were an infant, a shock this fierce would undoubtedly lead to phobic behavior. What if monkeys stored this shock in an early mental place, a primal sod? And what if this atavistic place survived, while the species evolved-- like gills or tail bones inside the fetus? It would lie hidden below more intricate formations. And yet, it would still operate as a mechanism, perhaps fainter in humans than monkeys; or even more convoluted, like folds on the brain. Surely there would be no therapeutic way to find a psychic spot so ancient.

The monkey child under attack stared agonistically, almost christlike. Freud tried to interpret its sublunar gaze, but its eyes were a deep onyx. He managed to capture this thought in only a single sentence, beneath complaints about the boiled sausage he had just eaten.

There is reason to believe that Freud walked into Dreamland, the last and most bourgeois of the three amusement parks in Coney Island. To enter, one had to pass through “Creation,” a music-hall version of Genesis. Creation began at the mouth of a huge tunnel, featuring the massive thighs and vagina of a plaster nude thirty feet high. Her breasts were larger than haystacks. She sparked at least two sentences. A phrase from one survives, in the recently uncovered Freud Ephemera: “… or do Americans prefer genitalia large enough to crush a man, or at least ruin his hat?” As many scholars have noted since the Freud Ephemera turned up in London (1999), biblical fantasy was highly eroticized in Coney Island, or turned into a circus freak show, with little boys as mephistopheles selling bags of peanuts, and dwarves with their own freak town

We are also reasonably certain that Freud went to Hell, not only the Hell Gate in Dreamland; but also Darkness and Dawn (with Hell as Darkness) in Luna Park. He enjoyed watching the Chicago Fire (with women jumping from flaming windows). Nearby, he claimed his hair was nearly singed when the riverboat Prairie Belle burst into flames along the Mississippi. He even yawned his way down “Stygian chambers,” to the River Styx; and saw the Flood at the Crack of Dawn.

Hell Gate at Dreamland caught his attention most of all, particularly its shoddy construction, and miserable ventilation. The fires of the damned were made of crepe paper. The walls of Hell were papier maché. A reasonable Flood from God could have dissolved it all in five minutes. But the mood in Hell had a “strangeness and irresponsible gaiety” that Freud assumed was an American problem. Americans like cheerful torture, he decided. Fairy-tale rape Jung would probably call it (Jung would have a field day with all this). “Americans will take a long trolley ride just to pretend to be buried alive. They think being molested by circus freaks is the most uncanny (unheimlich) thing of all.”

A pretty red-haired girl caught Freud’s eye, as she wandered into Hell Gate. A girl of twenty, she adjusted her new bonnet, posed cheerfully in the mirror. Suddenly, demons in cheap tights grabbed her. With a look of supreme boredom, they lifted her by her armpits. The more she kicked and cursed, the harder they laughed. Then they dumped her like a dead cat down a long trough. Her taffeta undergarment rustled while she skidded out of sight. Afterward, the demons turned and cackled mindlessly for the crowd. An exhausted, obviously gin-soaked Satan snickered his approval. This stale laughter was supposed to be infectious.

Meanwhile, the young lady’s screams faded away. In like manner, her sliding body seemed to hit bottom. Freud heard a faint thud. But then two minutes later, she came storming back. Angrily, she planted her new hat (a tuque or toque) back on her head. Then she gestured rudely, “in a masculine way,” at the demons and Satan. Puffing up, she looked ready to slap someone, but then, inexplicably did not. Instead she broke into a smile. After all, Freud wrote, she had just paid at least ten cents to be there. Within twenty minutes, eleven more well-dressed women were thrown down one hole or another; with barely a peep from any of them, like dover soles being dressed and boned. But that was not the only indignity women had to suffer “with a smile.” At the Luna Park next door, many well appointed ladies, even ladies of a certain age, were shoved on top of a small hole where a large gust of air blew their dress above their thigh. Then everyone was supposed to whoop it up. Thank goodness my wife and daughter are back in Vienna, Freud noted. Imagine them disappearing like shit down a hole, with their thighs exposed. A newspaper he found called this “a nightmare world that claims to be bizarre and fantastic.”

In German, Freud detailed a sermon given at Hell Gate, to justify everything he had seen. A wholesome preacher approached like a sturdy tenor (“the face of a farmer, the look of a swindler”). Men should not squeeze unmarried women, the preacher declared. Nor should women “outcasts” steal from drunken men. In fact, all whiskey and beer “arouses the passions.” But most of all, one must keep Satan from your door: be sure to pay your preachers as much as you can afford. Then, Freud heard the ceiling begin to ache. He looked up. It was barely supporting a fat archangel sliding on a wire. Satan gasped loudly, then went into bad pantomime. He howled like a man screaming on cue, then dived down a pit.

Afterward, Freud lingered in Hell for at least twenty minutes more. Then two demons came by. They warned him to stop writing, then began to cackle, and head in his direction. So he left in a hurry. But there lies the scholarly problem: how did Freud understand the sermon in English? Clearly by then he had been joined by a friend of Sàndor Ferenczi, probably two friends. It appears that Ferenczi was too busy setting up the lecture series, so he sent these two unlikely people in his stead. They were his former patients, “success stories that proved the genius of psychoanalysis.” What’s more, they knew Coney Island all too well, and spoke German and Yiddish. First there was a pretty woman in her early thirties, with a full face and large brooding eyes. Like a parody of a therapist, she tended to her high-strung cousin, a man with the same deeply sunken eyes, and a peculiar scar from his earlobe down to his jaw.

Guiding Freud back to Surf Avenue, they paid ten cents to have his picture taken (not the faked photograph so often assumed to be Freud, but the photo in Folio 7 of the Ephemera). Here we see Freud in a cloud of confusion, fighting for his dignity. We literally see him looking up with suspicion. He was getting hints of what he was up against. Then the facts were made plain: The man, named Al, was haunted by the unspent yearnings of a dead relative. He felt “her” crawling inside his chest, whispering to him. Over the years, she had “forced” him into horrible business investments that wasted the family fortune. “She” (or it) had also coaxed Al into chilly love affairs with dull women that “she” found acceptable. But to Al, they were invariably too scrawny, too squinty, too withdrawn.

However lately, Al had stopped feeling haunted. Thanks to Frida, he was now applying Ferenczi’s collective hypnosis to silence the dead relative. By contrast, only three months ago, this dead voice-- whose name could not be spoken out loud, not even written down-- had forced Al to hear the pumping of blood throughout his body. “Dead Relative” (as he called her) had sensed a constriction somewhere. She warned Al that he was due for a massive heart attack. Al fell into a panic. He listened sleeplessly to the burbling of his arteries, until at last, he went into false angina, and found himself in the hospital.

But nothing like that invaded this cheerful late afternoon (not yet). Al was doing “fine, feeling chipper.” With Al doing so well, Freud shifted his attention elsewhere. He noticed that Frida had immensely long eyelashes. Surely behind those yes, she had serious reaction formations as well, he thought. Why else would she devote herself like a sister of mercy to Al? He clearly was not available, not for romance, not even for much conversation-- “not this year,” she said, rather pointedly.

The two cousins (or was that three, with Dead Relative in hiding?) ushered Freud to a bath house near Steeplechase Park. They translated for Freud in English. His throat was parched. They got him a frozen ice. Then with a loud sigh, Freud plumped on to a rented steam chair, and nodded off instantly. However, as Folio 7.6 indicates, he then slipped into rather frantic dreams. At the height of his busy sleep, he saw Frida staring at him. Her immense eyes were floating or ticking like a clock. Her stare awoke him with a start. He sat bolt upright, in a sweat. There indeed was Frida looming over him. She had been studying him and gathering her thoughts.

Through Ferenczi, (his reverent disciple, at least in1909), she had been absorbing Freud’s newest book about Little Hans, the five-year old phobic boy; and also the recent case study of the Rat Man, about zwangsneurose, obsessive-compulsive neurosis. (She was only beginning to internalize his Wolf Man essay.) And now, as if by miracle, less than a week after she had returned home, the author himself was having troubled dreams before her, twisting and turning right there in the flesh. It was only weeks since her self-hypnosis with Ferenczi (and Al) had undergone that famous breakthrough (cited in Gottlieb, et al.). There Freud was, supine, still dapper at 53, hair only faintly gray, though a little matted from all he had been through. Just seeing him sparked insights. But she had learned through bitter experience that when you speak to bright men, frame your words very slowly, and your tilt your head toward the light. We only have the gist of what she said, though it went on for some time. First she posed a question (while posing, so to speak):

“ Suppose reaction formations are driven by erotic denial?”

Freud answered: “Yes, they are.”

“Well then,” she went on, “can reaction formations act on groups? That is, the same as it affects people alone?”

“Perhaps,” Freud answered, then thought again. “Yes, of course… It must.”

“Well (stretching her neck for a moment, pausing to catch the light)… that means a group plays by the same emotional rules as a person alone. Basically?”

The late afternoon cast a spell over her face. She smiled and reworded her question: “Put it another way. Let’s take the crowd at Hell Gate. Does their phobic play work the same as Little Hans by himself?”

Freud stared at her with renewed interest. Sensing his approval, she ranted on about Coney Island attractions for ten minutes or more. Freud particularly remembered her description of men who loved being zapped by electrical prods in Luna Park. Then he noticed that her palm was moist when she squeezed his hand. Her eyes transformed from hazel to coral in the late afternoon light. But even worse, her mouth reminded him of Sabina Spielrein, the patient with the sway in her walk. Freud knew that she was already Jung’s mistress. Jung, that kuppler (pimp), had even coaxed her to write to Freud, asking him to mop up the affair. Jung sent her to Freud like a taste of meat left on the bone, to show off the line of her face, the slim neck.

The sun burned into the ocean, leaving Frida in silhouette. Freud shifted his head, and like an optical illusion, Sabina’s face substituted for Frida.

As Freudian scholars know, this was not the first time that he underwent this phenomenon, simply the most haunting, the most cited in the Ephemera. Facial transpositions often bothered Freud. Usually, they came during the third or fourth year of extensive therapy. Frida had simply jumped a few steps ahead. Freud often compared these transpositions to phosphenes caused by the sun. “A husband transposes his mother’s face on to his wife’s naked body,” he wrote in 1916, then crossed it out.

As R.R. Greenblatt pointed out, at the groundbreaking conference on the Ephemera (2002), “Freud tried to live above or below the erotic fixations that he discussed.” Frida’s answer was even simpler. To her, Coney Island was a psychiatric teeter-totter. Reality keeps uneasy company with pleasure, she said. The outside pretends to have collective sex with the inside.

Freud answered with a sociological theory. “The lower classes in Coney Island are not as sexually repressed as the cultured classes,” he declared, his voice rising. Case closed. He slammed his notebook shut, to emphasize, punctuate, when something from outside floated toward him. He sensed a ripple of hysteria fifty yards away. Al was spinning like a dervish, his arms splayed outward as he turned. A crowd of beer drinkers formed a circle to watch. Al became an attraction. He had just seen a dwarf on Surf Avenue who completely, I mean utterly resembled the Dead Relative. Suddenly, the weather turned gloomy around him. Voices came at him. Four of these voices felt like winds landing on his head, making the shape of a cross. Next, Al heard music that sounded like insects climbing into his ears, making him dizzy with vertigo. Frida was heart-struck. Freud had to serve as the doctor in the house. Two hours passed (no notes). But clearly the day went from bad to much worse.

Some time after eight, Jung may have arrived, and Ferenczi they say. That is, of course, what biographies have told us, that they cruised and schmoozed together, a genteel evening by the sea. But now we know that Freud asked his friends, particularly Jung and Ferenczi, to hide events of his day in Coney Island. I am not convinced why. It was not simply those two patients. Al’s episode, his catalytic ferment, as Ferenczi called it, should not have overwhelmed Freud. No doubt, something larger convinced everyone to maintain silence for the rest of their lives. Even Ernest Jones was kept out of the loop.

Now however, the Ephemera restores part of that day, though not enough. We are still left to fill in the blanks. At least two hours are missing, perhaps even twelve, from morning through night. Frida brought Freud back to his hotel. Something may have happened that night or the next day. Five years later, Frida married a career officer in the German army, but by 1920, she had disappeared. Al meanwhile slogged along for decades, lived an astonishing long life on vapors, like bacteria living on a rock. He died as haunted as ever, but with a heart going as strong as a furnace, at the ripe age of seventy-four. His brain simply gave way, but he never had a cold in his life. Paranoia kept him fresh.

Now we return to that week in New York. Standard documents leave us only a few dyspeptic facts: Soon after visiting Coney Island, both Freud and Jung suffered diarrhea, each on different days. New York food troubled them. That is well established. Also, on the Wednesday after Coney Island, Freud went to Columbia University, where he involuntarily urinated down his pants, left a mortally embarrassing stain. He and Jung discussed whether he should enter therapy for the problem. And some time that year, once if not twice, he and Jung plunged into one of their fiercest oedipal arguments, partially only about Sabina, mostly about the paranormal. As their rage steamed the wallpaper off the walls, Freud simply fainted; he hyper ventilated, or fell very briefly into grief at the loss of his “adoptive” son. No wonder he called America a land of savages.

By 1914, Sabina was replaced by Toni Wolff as Jung’s mistress, as a permanent “aunt” for his children. Jung, in turn, hinted that Freud had sex with Sabina. Freud exploded. That was the end of their dysfunctional family. Now the Ephemera answers some of the nagging questions, about Ferenczi’s private adventures as well.

Right before transmogrifying in front of Freud that day, Frida had gone back to Hungary for six months to be treated by Ferenczi. There she met a married man of limited potential named Moscowitz, who changed his name to Klein in order to dance as a gentile in the Austrian Empire-- mostly to get away from his wife, the farm, the goats, the grist mill, the cheese. “M+K,” as Ferenczi calls him in his notes, had a step sister in Budapest who was something of a panderer. She ran a rooming house in Budapest that often rented to women of an “uncertain reputation.” Ferenczi warned Frida against staying there, but Al seemed to be less haunted around prostitutes. That made the day, at least, much easier for Frida. So she left Al there, while she stayed with M+K. But every night, she returned to the rooming house, to drag Al back to earth, and take him to the music hall. There M+K performed what one reviewer called the worst dance act in Budapest. But M+K was indefatigably cheerful, a relief from Al. That allowed Frida to be loyal to all the men in her life. After the show, she could walk Al back to the rooming house. There Al met his favorite, a young Polish girl whose pubic hair was very red, like a fox in a burrow he used to say. Afterward, Frida pretended to sway in rhythm to M+K flying high beside her, reenacting his czárdas as they wandered home.

Finally, after a few months, M+K took a train back to his village, near what is now the Slovakian border. His son’s wife was about to give birth to his grandson, who would be known as Young Yussell, a Yiddish nickname for the Hebrew name for Jesus. But Young Yussell was hardly a Jesus, certainly not a mystic, even when ghosts crossed is path. For example, when he was ten, in the chaos after the Great War, Young Yussell finished tending the goats as the sun went down, and walked to a clearing in the woods near the farm. There he saw an old table thirty feet long. The surface had been carved with an adze hundreds of years ago. The table was piled with roasted meats. Dozens of revelers were eating loudly. They were dressed in what Yussell called “very old clothing.” When asked what he meant, he answered, “older than anyone wears anymore.” They wore tights and codpieces. Some had feathered hats. The leather of their shoes and shirts was tanned in the old way. They were from another century.

He walked up to the table, and it disappeared. With the table gone, he could see the clearing through the moonlight back to the farm. Yussell never wondered what had taken place. Why question, he asked? Did the ghosts leave any food for me? Yussell believed the earth was no rounder than you could walk in a day. It was flat because your shoes were flat. It was no more haunted than bugs on your food, or a smell where you sat.

But through Frida, Yussell’s ghost story finally came to Ferenczi’s attention. He used it as ammunition against Freud’s argument about the insoluble nature of the unconscious. Freud answered in this way:

A man who feels a great thirst at night after enjoying highly seasoned food for supper, often dreams that he is drinking. Of course, the dream never satisfies a strong desire for food or drink. Young Yussell had probably missed supper. But even as a boy, he knew that you cannot quench your thirst by dreaming. From such a dream, one awakes thirsty, and the hallucination dries up in the moonlight. That is your folklore for you, your haunted forest.

For example, in 1913, Freud complained of patients who dreamt in fairy tales, conjuring up Rumpilstilskin, and so on. He decided that they were satisfying a wish fulfillment, but not out of collective folk memory. Instead, they were dreaming of moments from their childhood nursery (screen memory). A patient dreams of a copy of Doré’s illustrations to Perrault’s Tales (1867). One image haunts him, was engrammed in his memory, of Little Red Riding Hood lying in bed beside the wolf. She stares ahead in dreamy anticipation. The Wolf’s great snout is almost handsome, very carefully modeled. In the end, it remained clear to Freud that neither folk tales nor popular illustrations nor Coney Island-- nor a visit to the Acropolis or the Loch Ness monster-- could generate dream work, not in the way that the Id (the primal I) did.

Something like narcissism, depersonalization or infantile regression might generate Yussell’s brief identity crisis. These were hallucinatory flashes, again like Freud at the Acropolis, but nothing on the order of what we find in Freud’s notebooks about Coney Island (discussed variously in Folios 7-9). When the codex of the Ephemera finally appears (2005), the public will finally see what a few scholars have confronted since its discovery in 1999. Readers will have to take the same journey. It turns out that his day in Coney Island extends for another eighty years at least. It echoes throughout the twentieth century, easily from 1909 to 1989, even to 2004.

We return to that day for more clues. In 1918, he writes:

From the boardwalk, I saw women in bustles and women in stone, but not stone. It was a warm day, as warm as the Prater on a Sunday in summer. I remember New York from the boardwalk, and have hidden what it suggested about some of my work. I do not suppose anyone will need to know about my casual impressions of Coney Island in 1908.

We know, of course, that the boardwalk was not formally installed in Coney Island until 1920, not all seven miles from the parks to Sea Gate. Only the Bowery remained as part of an earlier boardwalk. Freud even mistakenly dates his visit to “the American Prater” as 1908, as if the crises with Jung in 1909 had not happened yet. But most of all, clearly the elegance of the Prater was hardly the same as the roaring half-mile of the Bowery boardwalk. Consider this description in 1908:

Busy blocks-- eating booths, hot frankfurters on the grill, beef dripping on

the spit, wash-boilers of green corn steaming in the center of hungry

groups who gnawed on (them) as if playing harmonicas; photograph

galleries, the sitters ghastly in the charnel-house glare…open-faced moving picture shows (that) invite effrontery from the jocose crowd; chop

suey joints, fez-topped palmists, strength tests; dance halls and continuous song-and-dance entertainments; girls … in tights and spangles (except on the Sabbath). Bands, orchestras, pianos at war with gramophones, hand-organs, calliopes; overhead, a roar of wheels in a death lock with shrieks and screams; whistles, gongs, rifles all busy; the smell of candy, popcorn, meats, beer, tobacco, blended with the odor of the crowd redolent now and then of patchouli; a steaming river of people, arches over by electric signs—this the Bowery at Coney Island.

We also know that Freud saw his first moving pictures that week, possibly at Coney Island; and was again singularly unimpressed, like the classic statement by Kafka a few years later, that movies were only “iron shutters” that disturb one’s vision, forcing the eye to jump from one vision to another, ‘putting the eye into uniform.” (We know, of course, that Freud always compared his day in Coney Island to the hounds of world war). It was indeed so difficult for turn-of-the-century modernists (Freud, Kafka, Bergson) who were shaped before mass entertainment took charge, to perceive its imagery as more than the sweat of the crowd.

Anyway, by 1928, Freud had completed his meta-theory answering Coney Island as a “sidelong glance,” in notes about group dynamics, transference neurosis, the psychopathology of everyday life, lay analysis, taboo systems. But the crisis was not laid to rest, not even as displacement, particularly after the war. Freud even mentally retrained to Coney Island (Folio 9) as he labored over his answer to Rousseau, Civilization and Its Discontents. But even there, the phobic play of the crowds in Coney Island had to remain scrupulously outside of his system. “I have invented a map like a wall brick by brick,” he writes. “But he exception makes the map,” he added. Thus, in the Ephemera, the Coney Island material defines what he calls abseitlingend, “outlying. It was basic to the place that could not be mapped into his topology, even at the end of his life, particularly at the end (as in references to the hounds of war as a thrill ride). We see Freud dying of cancer of the jaw on the eve of the Second World War. One of his final notes refers to a dark Coney-Island like hallucination. As the pain and the opium ripen together, he describes “the spiral dream,” where “phobic play” converts into spiraling machines crushing his Europe.

Of course, 1928 became another milestone, we now know. However, why a milestone still remains unclear. We are forced one more time into guess work. What was so riveting to Freud about this particular “surprise” in 1928? That is, after so many other surprises appear as cryptographic references in the Ephemera, what Greenblatt calls “his secret language to himself as a twin.” All we know is that, for perhaps the twentieth time from 1905 to 1928, Freud withheld what he called a “surprise.” He isolated it from his public record. Even in Folio 9, he reveals only enough for him to remember. As he wrote in the Addendum: “To know that you will be plundered (plundern) like a ruin for a thousand years is to be haunted by the future.” At any rate, this “surprise” of 1928 (he called it “uberaschung,” an oddly antique word) apparently required special handling. It was a last straw of some kind, an event he kept from his family as well. Freud had to change the diaries as a result, make a structural revision. In the summer of 1928, he gathered the leather Folios 7-9, then added 1-8; and converted them into a secret incunabula, of sorts. Each volume was fitted in its box (so often compared to a cigar box). And within each box, he also inserted the famous “lost” photos, sketches and other ephemera (thus the name). All nine boxes were then joined like a piece of crude marquetry inside a larger case, something built for him that could be locked up.

This case traveled with Freud when he left his apartment for London in 1937. He described it once as “the relic of a family pet.” For the crossing to London, it was wrapped in a blanket, and stored inside a steamer trunk. A year later, as his illness worsened, he planned for the future of his incunabula. He set up the unknown last requests. And they were observed to the letter, as far as we know. Finally, even the requests themselves were permanently lost, when the family servant entrusted with them died in 1954. Not until 1999 did the waterlogged wooden crate finally turn up. At first, it was catalogued, and auctioned off, as “a handmade typewriter case filled with travel diaries by an Austrian physician, circa 1920.”

But let us return to another key event from 1928: Freud’s meetings with Soviet artist/designer El Lissitzky. They already knew each other, perhaps as early as 1922, but only casually. In the Fall of 1928, however, they met for days. We imagine the two international Jews struggling over a coffee at first, trying to find a common interest, a common humanity. They politely disagree about America, about its potential. Freud drops hints about strange notes on America (fremdheit), private scribblings, not a part of his public lectures.

“I have often wondered,” Freud said,” if the shape of Coney Island parks resembles my model of the mind. By that I mean, does real space reproduce unconscious space?”

Lissitzky, the former architect, the constructivist spatial designer (PROUNs) was thrilled by the concept. Was there a way, beyond the ghoulish cuteness of amusement parks, to build a space where the symptoms and formations of Freud’s theories could be acted out—to walk around Freud’s model as if at a theater or in a cathedral, or on a city boulevard?

Freud and Lissitzky began to imagine what shape this phantasmagoria should assume (Trugbilde, Wahngebilde). Freud remained the inveterate Viennese, circling for lunch. He kept returning to the layer-cake design of Viennese housing, with its half floor above the store level—that would be a preconscious— followed by cathectic, aseptic layers above. The boiler in the basement he saw as a kind of Ich or Id. It radiated heat like “vengeance rising through the floorboards.” A roof leaking cathected from overhead, also like the Id: “to be invaded by pent-up weather is a dream of drowning in your parent’s embrace.”

Lissitzky wanted something more functional, yet whimsical, like his Lenin’s lecture tower, a much more open floor plan for the unconscious. But clearly, Freud’s theories of childhood shock and adult neurosis could only be two tiers. Lissitzky needed something more imbricated. One day, he brought Sabbattini’s old manual from 1638, about how to build illusions in the theater, for example, how to turn a man into a stone and back again.

Inside Sabbatini, we find evidence explaining that quote about the Prater. Freud was imagining a soothing unconscious, where humans and stone cohabitate in Baroque elegance, like Descartes’ fascination with automatons designed as a singing lake. This quote came from his notes on Lissitzky’s maquette for a scripted space of Freud’s unconscious. The occluded, shelf-like ideogrammatic design even influenced Eisenstein for a few months (generating a brief film by Eisenstein, now lost, perhaps two minutes long). But Lissitzky’s package never returned to the Soviet Union. With the coming of the first five-year plan, and with the momentous suicide of Mayakovsky, Lissitzky decided to leave his Freud/PROUN in Germany. It was to be an unstable, motorized journey zigzagging on an hydraulic stage, filled with electromagnetic puppets, and sliding involutions, like cilia or a Coney-Island mystery ride, to reenact cathexis in a Freudian space; along with vectors of water forming psycho-ideograms on sheets of glass against one wall, that was also incised with names that Freud wrote especially for the project, including Dreamland and Hell Gate.

Lissitzky’s design, with Freud’s commentary, were stored in a basement in Bremen. There they hibernated until1966, when the architect Sándor Hartobagi found them. Behind a sketch on wood, Hartobagi peeled away three pages, sticky from moisture. Most of the text had been eaten away by fungus, like a dead sea scroll. A signature indicated someone called “Ds. Df .” Even Hartobagi guessed that it was an inversion of s..igmund f…reud. However, not until 1999 was the handwriting verified as Freud; along with more on Freud/PROUN found in Folio 9 of the Ephemera.

Why so long for this discovery to emerge? Hartobagi’s brief essay, with architectural charts, came out only in Hungarian, so Freud/PROUN disappeared once again (in a language not widely read). However, it survived as urban legend for young architects in pre-war Vienna, particularly for Victor Gruen. Then in 1956, the émigré Gruen made his mark in the US. He completed the first of his many multi-level enclosed malls, the Southdale Shopping Center in the Edina suburb of Minneapolis. At the historic opening, after three vodka martinis and no sleep for two days, Gruen made a slip of the tongue, a parapraxis. Freud ephemerist, Ute Margaret Flynn explains: “Flushed with excitement, perhaps a little drunk, Gruen promised a future dominated by Viennese shopping agoras, PROUNs he called them. He felt himself retracing the steps of Dr. Freud inside the Ringstrasse, ’into an American Prater, a shopper’s Coney Island.’”

In 1986, the Hungarian computer designer, Zsolt Bohus spotted the article. He became obsessed with developing it into a computer game, for American providers outsourcing to Hungary. The Bohus game design, with steam and prairie fires and nightmare rides, with the super ego spitting venom and the preconscious boiling and spewing, went out for review—to test its commercial potential. It finally passed to Fred Blazs, an executive at an American game company (name withheld); also married to a psychiatrist (he seemed the logical choice). However, Blazs explained that first of all, he was just been divorced; and secondly, in court, his wife complained publicly that he had no unconscious at all. And on top of all that: what is the reward system for psychotherapy? “Remember these are kids passing puberty, in their underwear, playing computer games at two in the morning.”Blazs was famous in the industry for saying: “In the next hundred years, we all will pass puberty over and over again, in game after game.” That certainly would not qualify him as Freudian.

This Freud game (simply called Id) does not get past the radar at Disney’s Epcot Center either. Besides, why would Disney want visitors to discover their own unconscious? Indeed, Frida’s warnings had come to roost. Mass culture was now shaping unconscious drives en masse, warp drives. It was building user-friendly wish fulfillment—ergonomically scripted spaces, what Klein calls consumer Calvinism: the myth of free will in a world of absolute predestination. We no longer can easily separate the latent from the manifest. As an editorial in a recent advertising journal explains; “Consumers don’t need an unconscious, only better medication. An unexamined life shops.”

As for Young Yussell, our only link to Frida and M+K, he winds up in America, first in Pittsburgh, brought there by his father, a pesky old man with a taste for bad advice and schnapps. When Yussell was twelve, and still herding goats in Hungary, his father wrote: “Yussell, some day I will bring the entire family here to Pittsburgh. But you as the oldest son must get ready. Only one skill can save you in America. Learn this one thing, and you will be a success. Learn to play the violin.”

So Yussel spent the next eight years sawing away at a cheap violin, then through his aunt, the rooming-house owner in Budapest, he got a slightly better tuned, perhaps stolen violin, as a birthday present.

But imagine how useless playing the violin was when Yussell arrived in 1928. By the time he learned English, Pittsburgh was sinking into the Great Depression. Yussell eventually used his fine motor skills to become a kosher butcher.

His father, the boozy son of M+K, had other plans altogether. He decided to retire the moment that his sons arrived in Pittsburgh, and refine his love of schnapps and other sweet whiskies (Southern Comfort, single malt scotch whiskies, Glenfarclas when he could afford a pint). Finally, the family moved to Brooklyn, where he became a rag man, wheeling his little wagon behind movie theaters to watch an afternoon double bill. Then after ma’arev (evening prayer, with honey cake and schnapps), he would return home exhausted from the long day, itching for another pick me up.

Yussell married, though not happily. He fathered two children, who spent most of their formative years wishing they were somewhere else. Finally, Yussell brought them to Coney Island, as if following a voice from a dead relative-- an insistent woman’s voice that came to him in a haze, and usually filled him with bad advice. But at least she can whisper, he reasoned. With help from this voice, Yussell developed an unerring instinct for moving to neighborhoods just as they start to decline. Coney Island began to sink like a stone almost the day after he arrived, or at least within the year.

His son, Norman (often confused with the author of this piece) was an anxious, fretful child, afraid of his own shadow, also afflicted, in Yussell’s words, with “no common sense.” What’s more, Norman began to have strange nightmares after they moved to Coney Island, particularly about a woman with large glowing eyes, like a mole. Luckily, Norman never remembers his dreams.

But something obviously lingered, like sour breath after a heavy meal. In 1995, while teaching media classes to computer animators, Norman became obsessed with Freud in Coney Island. As if by intuition, he began imagining a game he called Sim-Freud.

By 1998, this game settled in his mind like a pigeon on a ledge. One night, while he slept, a particle from a down pillow went into his ear. It imbalanced his canals. He woke up with benign positional vertigo. Suddenly, he couldn’t distinguish front from back. The wind blowing on his face felt like a blast of air behind him. When he walked, the floor rose like liquid, rinsing and churning. But gradually, his brain made adjustments. It did not repair the imbalance, simply adjusted to it. His brain told his eyes to stop feeling nauseous or dizzy. That made upside-down appear right-side up. It adjusted his horizontal picture. Finally, he could walk easily.

But during the worst of the vertigo, when his head swam the most, Norman researched the history of dizzy spells. He learned about Prosper Ménière’s Syndrome (1799-1862); and the French filmmaker who called himself La Ménière, because he suffered from severe vertigo for thirty years—from repetitive paroxysmal vertigo. But even stranger still, La Ménière spent his entire career in a serious pickle. As a young man, he managed to find a loyal backer named Labrouste, a gentle laconic commodities investor. Labrouste’s blind trust led to a very unusual contract. He would pay La Ménière everything up front, entirely before shooting began. Then when the film was done, La Ménière could itemize his budget, and return any unspent money.

For a few early shorts, that worked fine, but then Labrouste died unexpectedly, leaving no time to arrange his estate. So their unusual contract remained as part of the will. Legally La Ménière inherited a special fund, but could lose all of it, every franc, the moment that he actually finished a film. He could drag out his pre-production, rewrite for years, shoot and edit for a decade, even nearly complete as many films as he liked—and for each, draw another fifty thousand francs. But the moment any proof came to the heirs that he had actually finished a movie, they would set dogs of hell upon him.

So the legend grew about a secret cache of film cans, with movies about vertigo. Had La Ménière actually completed a dozen films? Was this five minutes by La Ménière the end of that two hours? Cults searched for secret premieres of his work, like alien sightings. Then clues to one of them caused a stir. Perhaps the reader has seen the article recently by Goldblatt on La Ménière’s “unfinished” masterpiece: Freud in New York. As the movie opens, we see Freud struggling with vertigo, lying on the Persian rug on his famous couch. We enter his POV. Vertigo literally “uncoils” through traveling mattes. Strands of brain tissue rise in slender filaments, like floating gold leaf. Then Freud goes to the conference at Bremen, and by boat to Manhattan. There, for over an hour of the film, he is trapped in a sexual farce about phobias among New York socialites. One orgy leads to another, sexual penetrations pile up like vertigo inside an eloquent recreation of a Manhattan hotel circa 1909. Finally the director, La Ménière himself drops from the ceiling. We see him in his familiar rumpled tuxedo. He screams obscenities at the camera. The camera follows him picking up the last two minutes of the movie, a tail of celluloid a hundred feet long. Cackling like a rooster, he sets the last two minutes on fire. Soon the movie frame itself starts to burn. Flames literally engulf La Ménière. He escapes by slithering up the wall, almost like a lizard, and disappears.

Recently, the heirs have gone to court, to argue that this is an ending. But for Freudian ephemerists, it may be a beginning. Folio 7 proves La Ménière correct. In the passage leading to the Coney Island episode, Freud writes that he and Fliess did indeed suffer occasionally from vertigo, from “dizzy nerves” caused by stress. Of course, can we trust what anyone, even great figures, write about their afflictions? Freud also added: “When vertigo took me over, grains of truth just slipped through my fingers.”

In 2004, Norman introduced the Sim-Freud problem to the German filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt. That inspired Schmidt to began a screenplay. He is still trying to get Al Pacino to play Freud. The story opens with a perverse angle of the Statue of Liberty. From there, an ocean liner zooms in on Freud, Jung and Ferenczi at the bow, trading insults and insights, like Cole Porter songs about therapy. After the opening credits, we enter a swank 1909 libertine world, from Fifth Avenue to Harlem. Bits of business overlap. The master scene unfolds. Bawdy hostesses try to coax Dr. Freud into playing the rabbi at orgies, to deliver the hard truths about their afflicted lives. Reluctant to be a seer for these idiots, Freud struggles to find a moment by himself. He escapes with Jung to Coney Island. After gloomy but comic encounters, we follow him running like a tottering older man down the beach. He drops his cigar on an oil rag, and through a chain of sparks, accidentally sets fire to Dreamland.

It is like Orpheus in slapstick. Freud descends into a farcical underworld. Amazingly enough, production has indeed begun. An imaginary Coney Island has been built in Munich, mostly indoors. At Babelsberg, near Berlin, a faux Manhattan will double as Vienna-- only a hundred meters from the famous Caligari Halle, where the German Expressionist film industry began in 1919 (now a skating rink). Throughout the orgy scenes, even one set on the ice, with music and Viennese rag-time dancing— as New York turns into a cross-dressing erogenous zone-- Freud is plagued by an attack of vertigo; much the way Schmidt was struck by vertigo in 2002. What’s more, various crew members claim that they hear voices from dead relatives. But a nervous grip (who refused to give his name) said that “movie sets are always infected with psychic rumors. It’s as common as overdoses. Half the cast is usually possessed by something expensive and exhausting.”

Indeed, the ninety years of coincidence that link Sim-Freud to seemingly everything must be seen as historical, not psychic. We cannot let Jungian or Rankian mysticism confuse us here. Years before Schmidt’s movie was even imagined, back in 1999, Norman Klein introduced Sim-Freud to media artist and theorist Lev Manovich. While meeting for overpriced coffee at the Beverly Hills Hotel, they both decided to translate the story into an ironic data pilgrimage. They would let Sim-Freud span the entire twentieth century. Odder till, they met precisely one month before the discovery of the Ephemera was announced at a conference in Rotterdam (where Edgar A. Poe pretended that Hans Pfall was first sighted, after a flight to the moon, in 1835). Over the course of a weekend, Klein and Manovich concocted a data narrative, called it The Freud-Lissitzky Navigator. Lev went to work designing it. Much of the text stayed in Lev’s Russian inflected English, like a ghostly filter.

Meanwhile, Norman heard the ghost of his great-grandfather M+K rising to complain. A rasping sound, vaguely like a human voice, ached in the back of his head, as if a synapse were pressing against a nerve. This was not the first time. Back in 1967, a hippie mystic in Montreal had warned Norman that his great-grandfather bore a grudge. The mystic spotted Norman doodling, then walked up to him.

“You have lived in two worlds and are lost in a third,” he explained. Norman vaguely agreed.

Then he added: “Your great-grandfather danced in Europe. He is angry with you, perhaps unfairly, but you must do something.” Norman was supposed to leave the doodle under a tree, and pour a glass of water over it—that weekend or never at all-- to soothe the old man’s nagging spirit.

Of course, Norman forgot to bother with all that, simply overslept, even lost the doodle altogether. Afterward, his emotional life was lost at sea for twenty-five years. Electronic equipment often crashed, even went on fire spontaneously, when he sat near it. His strange luck became a running joke. Finally, belatedly, late at night in 2004, he offered this novella to M+K. It was nearly three in the morning when he decided. He set his mind to conjuring a picture. He imagined an old man trying to never go back to the farm. Legend has it that when M+K was ninety-seven years old, he would sit near the kitchen, waiting for women to pass by, then reach for a last squeeze of their hips, to restore his intimate memories before it was too late..

Feeling a trifle silly, Norman listened for M+K’s voice. A groan under the floor awakened. Something like a voice spoke in a very foreign language that Norman, never good at languages, still understood. It was a rare pleasure. The voice told him a secret about his father, of Young Yussell’s first encounter with a prostitute provided by M+K in Hungary. Yussell’s penis was so cold from waiting outside, he was embarrassed, needed help; and for a moment, thought women could make him happy, be patient with him. M+K made Norman promise to never put this story in print. But Norman has clearly decided to break that promise.

Of course, that’s Norman speaking, not me. I will maintain scholarly objectivity to the end, even the middle. And as long as my medication holds out, I am a man of Apollonian good spirits, not a neurotic who keeps confessing (but lying) to strangers, as Norman does. You undoubtedly have read about that incident in Canada, near the ancient forest. His passport has finally been restored, but it took some legal finagling.

I repeat, as I have said so often, it is nearly impossible in this culture to not erase your own identity. Think of what Freud’s Ephemera has taught us, how little we knew before. Freud constantly erased exceptions to his theory in order to keep going. I am particularly fond of the five pages he called The Psychopathology of the Stomach: Daydreams On How To Gut A Fish (Folio 8, orange insert), with that Talmudic commentary on mushrooms (in a tiny handwriting); and references to young women who eerily resembled his wife when she was young, but with one feature improved-- a better neck, or tighter hips, the nose sharpened, the thighs leaner. Or Freud’s line about the stomach as dreamwork, where he discusses trans-pathologies inside the body (again, mentioning his “near hallucinations” when women’s faces transposed while they spoke to him). Freud even wondered if the autonomic nervous system cathects like the mind, if the stomach could be part of the Id (Ich). Of course, he scraps all this as nitwit chatter, along with his recurring dreams that “smell” of Coney Island. Mass culture must be kept at a safe distance, a blind parallel to consciousness, like the stomach. So too with media. In Folio 5, he writes: “I just had a grueling phone conversation with Dora. The telephone removes the flesh, but keeps the skin.”

We return to 1909 in America, to eventually link up with that clue: At last, Freud got to see a wild porcupine. Abe Brill and Stanley Hall both made sure to find one. He was mildly impressed by Niagara Falls (where the annoying comment, “Let the old gentleman go first” may have taken place).

Then Frida somehow learns about Sabina Spielrein (can Ferenczi ever keep his mouth shut? Or has Jung put his arms around her “poetically?”). She reads something very intimate to Freud on the telephone, something about therapy being a masturbatory pleasure similar to entertainments in Coney Island. Here Freud’s penmanship changes. In the margin, he doodles concentric “flesh-like” objects, perhaps sexualized telephone receivers (see Goldblatt again). We sense his infatuation with things that deliver “passionate withdrawal,” eccentric distance. In 1910 (Folio 9), he calls the telephone “erogenous vapors.”

While she chatters on, Freud agrees with Frida once again; and it was not like him to agree that often with women in long-term therapy. He agrees that a Coney-Island attraction—where a thousand people watch themselves stripped naked, metaphorically speaking-- is like a machine inventing desire. Whoever controls that desire might be able to “colonize primal process.” But this is not simply pornography, he insists. After a pause on the line, Frida also agrees, saying: “Pornography is not as passionate as the machines in Coney Island.”

Freud holds the phone for a minute after she hangs up, as if the electricity inside the receiver were completing her message. Then he crosses something out, so thoroughly that even laser searching cannot quite lift it.

That brings me to another problem: Perhaps you are following the legal campaign against laser searches in the US and the European Union. What rights to privacy do the dead possess? I say none. (Norman worries too much.) It’s like Young Yussell opening a side of beef at the store. Ghosts used to rattle between the floorboards, like rats mating. He made customers pay a little extra to listen to the intimacies that the ghosts were sharing (ghosts cannot keep secrets). “Privacy for the dead is just a business for the living,” he would explain, “the same as cutting meat from dead animals.”

How mechanized should this invasion through entertainment become? In 1925, Freud writes about psycho-analysis being “watered down,” like an entertainment. “Many abuses, mostly unrelated, find cover under its name. In America, too, psychoanalysis comes in conflict with Behaviorism, a theory which is naïve enough to boast that it has put the whole problem of psychology out of court.”

I guess we could say that Freud is the pot calling the kettle black. In those notebooks, he keeps so much of himself out of court. But now finally, we see what was hiding-- a Coney-Island PROUN, a thrill ride, an orifice at Hell Gate, a haunting. He was irretrievably haunted by an erogenous zone built in Coney Island for late Victorian Americans. He projected it into his theories about the fictional impulse in the patient, the therapist and the public— about moths flying all at once, a Coney Island of the mind, as the poet Ferlinghetti called it. So we learn by what he said, not what he did; by taking him at his word in the Ephemera. Like this other Freud, we irrepressibly fail to repress, no matter how we objectify. We condense our facts badly, project them, displace them, paint a black line to cover up an absence between things, make history out of a barely remembered moment.

With the Ephemera, we see the fictive impulse turned utterly dialectical, a geometry of unspoken speech, and crossed out exceptions. Very soon, perhaps in five years, we may know too much to tell it at all, to make it whole. Norman likes all this confusion, a bleeding through. He likes what the Ephemera has done. We are finding hundreds of Freudian unfinished pieces of business, Freudian bridges we never knew existed, until they were burned. The rush to find these exceptions is fast becoming an industry in itself: ephemerana. Forty books on the subject, and over two hundred web sites, will be out by the end of the year.

But now comes the question on everyone’s mind: Who will be “ephemerized” next? I hear rumors about Jefferson’s writing closet, even “uncoveries” in the correspondence of Marx and Engels. We’re the ghosts doing the haunting now. But do we really need to hear every belch and feel every sexual urge that humanized these icons? The answer, of course, is absolutely yes. It is the only way to update, much less recover, our sense of a subconscious life. A globalized Coney Island has long since displaced us.

The Final Clue: Norman thinks that the next generation of “ephemera search” will protect us against all that. It will become molecular, something called nanoscopic search, an almost theological science. Apparently, sound and speech can be recovered nanoscopically. A sound never actually goes away; it simply lowers its reverberations, even for decades. It is possible to hear (or scent) what was said, like a dog sniffing the presence of someone who walked by days ago. This is what he means by ghosts, what his family has meant for generations. They are the traces of sounds. A few unlucky souls hear them, even think they can talk to them.

The scientific theology behind all this seems too close to fiction to be fact. The space between atoms is not silent. Thousands of eccentric vibrations, called phonons, are trapped by each molecule. Researchers claim that phonons are particularly “noisy” inside the brain, but are found in all matter. Think of them as vibrating memory, as echoes, even of unspoken thoughts.

Vertigo heightens our sensitivity to these echoes. Once vertigo throws our canals off balance, it makes us dizzy with the buzz of lost sounds. Patients with vertigo often complain of a cochlear irritability, a heightening. La Ménière claimed that he could hear noise in molecules, in his blood, in his pituitary gland. It might be true.

Thus, vibrations in a molecule do make a noise, called a startle. Nanoscopists have begun to record it. This sound registers as a signal in the membrane of the ear. Sounds can even be stored in the DNA of a piece of wood, like a chair or a ceiling. On the nanoscope, they look like a bubble in polymer; the bubble becomes “a visible sign” to molecules nearby. This vibrating “startle” buzzes a signal; it literally delivers a message to other molecules, fainter each time; but that can’t be helped. There is has no way to stop molecular sounds; they are an infinite confession.

Strands of phonons-- molecular sounds-- tend to cluster, like dust. They will gather on anything, from organic to inorganic. Thus the centuries-old debate over whether a stone can think has now been solved. From water to rocks, memory can gather as a kind of vibrating lichen, a thought without life.

These clusters may fill a room (“haunt it,” the nanscopists say), but they also can strike the inside of the ear. When that happens, our brain decodes the clusters as words, as echoes from a ghost. They may not be words that you have ever heard (talking in tongues, etc.), but you will understand them nonetheless.

Phonons are microscopic drum beats that pass for words. They can be struck on any surface. When they vibrate into the brain, they translate into a rhythm, a musical language. These words sound like a ghost, even though they are little more than excess kinetic energy. They are motile; vibrating bubbles in the flux. A subway vibrates far below ground. The sound echoes in our shoes. We turn the echo into language: We sense that we have missed the train.

Evolution tends to favor animals that can sniff out these sounds, “scent” phonons. Humans are the exception. They tend to single-mindedly shut out this noise. As Freud discovered, we censor or filter these urgent traces of memory, particularly in our sleep. At the same time, humans are drawn to these sounds, as if they were an erogenous zone, what some call “the siren effect.” Clusters of molecular sounds excite our senses, even terrify us, but also seduce us. They are the puzzle left by a ghost. They speak, but generally in fragments, as in a dream. They rarely complete the sentence, the point of the words. Humans feel driven to complete the meaning instead; we are bred to do it, like a dog is bred to hunt, or fill a hole. When a molecular “voice” forwards something that only molecules can decode, the human brain doesn’t care. It will go to great lengths to complete it anyway— by instinct. Human beings have evolved a unique skill; they can imagine completeness, even when it is not there. That skill to misremember and misspeak has grown the size of our brains. It makes us intelligent enough to outwit animals with powerful jaws. In all the world, we may be the only species that can make fictions out of absences, that can pray to a molecule.

As with all new media, the theology surrounding nanoscopy will pass soon enough. Utopia lasts until the wrapping is being removed. Then it will transforms into another violent tool, another WMD. But nano-sounding—as it is called in the defense industry-- may also overload us psychically in valuable new ways. (I don’t share Norman’s hope that phonon overload will bring a charming rediscovery of the subconscious, the end of the history of forgetting). Since Freud’s day-- symbolized by the nervous buzz that got to him in Coney Island-- we have lived in variations of overload. They make us blasé (Simmel), make us desperate for therapy in Freud’s era, or turn us violent, then and now. They are clusters of dynamic sound that we scent as much as we hear, like a Boccioni painting of the city rising in its vibratory energy (1910). This overload can haunt us as ghosts.

But now we enter the age when some of the phonons left by the dead can be harvested, going back up to two hundred years, through nanoscopy. That is surely overload. It is the next fretful step in the era that began when the Ephemera were discovered (1999). Very soon, we will ephemerize traces from a thousand people in the way that Freud did for himself. The bleeding through has begun. At the same time, the era preceding nanoscopy has ended. Its beginnings and its conclusion were earmarked by Freud and his Ephemera, by the screen that he used to keep his memories private. Now, in place of isolated Coney Island noise, a new feudalism is growing in the United States, as I said earlier, dominated by a globalized Coney Island, by machines that harvest and industrialize collective desire. It is an industrial form of “the invaded unconscious,” something Freud absolutely refused to imagine, except perhaps on his death bed, at the start of World War II. But now I repeat myself, like the sounds in a molecule, ever fainter each time. I am dreaming on my feet, caught in a crowd.