MY MOST SUCCESSFUL CASE

[The Everyman Theatre in Hampstead. An empty stage. Sigmund Freud is helped on and seated in a basket-work chair. He begins to speak.]

Beginning is the hardest thing. The End - and I am under no illusions about the fact that I am close to my own personal end - the end is always much easier, insofar as it has been determined by what has gone before. Faced with the inevitable regrets, one takes consolation in seeing the reasons for one's failings. What exasperated by its velleity, one undeserved catastrophe after another, can now be perceived as a chain of cause and effect. Understanding is the most powerful consolation - at least for a certain type of mind - he type which rates insight above personal survival and assigns it an eternal existence quite independent of its lodging in other minds. It is perhaps worth remembering that one of the first actions of the Jews after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, as the consequence of an ill-judged rebellion against Roman authority, was to request permission from the Emperor to set up a college to study the Talmud.

The question of course arises - and, as you will see, I have successfully avoided the first of many temptations to speak about contemporary matters, though of course I am actually talking about them all the time, even and especially when I refuse to admit that I am doing so - the question, of course, arises: what did these Jews hope to achieve by the rigorous application of their intellects to these problems of textual interpretation? Why did Lenin and Marx wish to spend so much time in the British Museum Reading Room? To economise on heating-bills in the winter? To get away from their wives? Or in Marx's case from an embarrassingly pregnant housemaid or his remorselessly intellectual daughters? These are of course frivolous remarks, but not entirely so, for it cannot be denied that intellectual activity - and other occupations which are commonly subsumed under that term, such as reading, or theatre-going - may have attractions and functions which are not immediate or obvious. Certainly in the instance I have cited, where the Jews chose to obliterate the bloody memory of wholesale slaughter and an irredeemable desecration of their holiest place by turning their attention to a discussion of the permissible dimensions of a tabernacle constructed for the feast of tabernacles, with a precision of measurement more suited to a borough surveyor applying building regulations than to a theologian striving to interpret and understand the will of God - certainly here one can see the flight into obsessive and compulsive behaviour, the endless attempts at the solution of self-imposed and insoluble riddles, which marks the deliberate repression of unpleasant thoughts and memories.

And that about describes my present introduction. In a world where nothing is certain except uncertainty, where, in some countries - and I have only recently left one of them - a simple knock at the door can be, without superstition or mythology - a direct harbinger of pain and death - in such a world it seems more necessary than ever to attempt to impose some kind of pattern. - No. That is not the way to say it. I - one - does not wish to impose a pattern. That is what they do. Imposing is their technique. Labelling. Putting up signs. Sticking yellow stars on people. No. No. It has always been my intention to allow truth - to allow patterns - to emerge. To float to the surface of the mind. To swim into view. One summons them with incantations. One opens one's mind - just as one opens one's eyes - and these things appear. The illusion of understanding. At least it is a self-consistent illusion. The argumentative traditions of three thousand years of Talmudic scholarship would never permit me self-contradiction, nor would I permit myself any more than a legitimate paradox - the most simply observable fact, that the same cause can produce two diametrically opposed reactions, and that the same reaction can likewise be produced by two causes which are diametrically opposed. Consider, for instance, my reticence as to the true subject of my present talk: is it the fear of confrontation, or the pleasure of anticipation which forces me to be so reserved and so circumspect, to beat about the bush, as you English have it? Am I terrified, or am I fascinated?

There is a great deal of comfort to be derived from contemplating the operation of logical systems - even when one has begun to harbour doubts about their efficacy at producing incontrovertible truths - indeed, especially so when the nightmare haunts one that there may be no such thing as truth. In such a state, one is perhaps more inclined than is justifiable to assert the absolute authority of those theses which are, if soberly regarded, no more than the working rules of one's own view of the world. I know that I am guilty of such over-statements, and that I have always been so. It is not a vice of which I have been able to cure myself - as a matter of fact, I do not think I have ever cured myself of any of my vices, though their long-term bad effects have made me more conscious of the fact that they are vices - such as the cigars whose stimulation I have never been able to do without, for which I have paid the price in incessant catarrh [he hawks and spits] and the cancer which is at the moment eating its way through my jaw and will shortly terminate my life.

It is, in so many ways, satisfactory to know why. Even when you can do nothing about it. Perhaps especially when you can do nothing about it. Of course, if you only think you know why, it is all the better that you have no opportunity of disproving the theory. The Talmudic scholars, too, were always sensible enough to avoid risking the therapeutic properties of their reasonings by exposing them to some kind of scientific test, whose result would be, frankly, irrelevant, since it is the effect and not the truth with which one must be concerned - the subjective effect on the individual, which can be observed and ascertained, as opposed to the objective truth, which, in the last analysis, can never be determined, and would only interest God, who knows all about it already and doesn't need to be told.

Goethe said: only what is fruitful is true. And that has been my guiding principle. As it is now. With the proviso that certain things will be true for me, which may not be so for you. But, as I said, we can only be concerned with personal truth. All the more so, when the object of our investigation lies in someone's past. Let me admit - perhaps a little prematurely for the smooth flow of my argument, but never mind - that the someone is myself. I have never hesitated to use myself as an example in my investigative writings, though it inevitably attracted to me a certain amount of opprobrium and undifferentiated abuse, inasmuch as those less honest with themselves than I am attempted to deny and discredit my general insights by accusing me of insanity - not simply in the normal everyday mode of academic debate, where everyone who disagrees is a charlatan, a numbskull or a lunatic, but in the more extreme clinical sense: if I believed certain things to be so, and held that the workings of my own brain confirmed my hypotheses, then that made me ripe for incarceration in a suitable institution. But I have still never hesitated to use myself as an example, inasmuch as I am able to observe at first hand those subtle and cunning defences and resistances which the deepest part of the mind employs in order to keep its secrets. Indeed, there are occasions on which the higher parts of the mind collude with it, and conspire, out of shame, to suppress or at least modify certain aspects of its nature. I suggest you observe me carefully and listen with attention. I have many more years' experience in outwitting myself than any of you have - an interestingly ambiguous sentence, because it does not rule out the possibility that it is the lower part of the mind which has acquired experience in fooling the upper part. Did I insert that ambiguity myself - consciously? Or did it arise because language is like that? You may not know that it is precisely the problem of what one means by "I" which gives great trouble to those who concern themselves with linguistic philosophy. I have the same problem - whichever "I" "I" mean. The problem seems to be incapable of resolution - within limits. Yet one can mostly see which part of the personality is involved at any one time. So watch me. Learn from me. But do not necessarily believe what I say. Only listen to it.

Indeed, you will have great trouble in verifying or disproving the incident which I am about to relate to you. But well before I come anywhere near relating it, I have to ask you whether that matters?

Those of you who have already been through one World War and are now looking forward with trepidation to a Second will have discovered for themselves what a rare and slippery commodity truth is - and how one does not always have as much as one needs, but also that one can have more than one requires. Truth has particular functions, which can sometimes be better served by lies. Though perhaps you would not admit that.

As a Viennese by right of residence, if not by birth, I have a powerful advantage over you poor straightforward honest English people when it comes to the matter of deception and the ability to see through that deception - in the mad, the normal, and even in oneself. But you reserve your acting for the stage and your eccentrics have the good grace to parade their eccentricities as visible proof of the age of their family tree and its consequent diseases. Noblesse oblige.

Even so, you English are also beginning to find yourselves in a world with fewer and fewer certainties. A gradual process for you. For me it was relatively sudden. I am not simply referring now to the arrival of foreign troops in my homeland and my consequent enforced departure. Of course I could and should have foreseen it all, anticipated it, sent my books abroad and so forth - a gradual process, much less nerve-racking than the present one undertaken in haste and sickness - but - and let me mention here that my major concern was for my collection of antiquities, which has in fact survived, and also for my...couch...likewise - you see, I cling to order, to external order: I had hoped to live and die in the same house, Berggasse 19, - the neighbours changed, but we did not. The exploration was always inside, and that meant having security outside. Always the same tree in the courtyard. In spring and autumn I had a game of guessing the date by the state of the leaves. I was politically naive because I wished to be so, and refused to admit that these external changes were in any way as deeply disruptive as those vast internal psychological changes which I had - in myself - learnt to surmount.

No. They do not belong here. They are not the things I shall tell you about. I have excerpted them. I have disguised them. I have used them as examples and discarded them. There would be no purpose in going back and looking at the mess from which I have extracted all that was of value.

And yet I am going back.

Hegel gave the world a model of the progression of ideas. By argument. The dialectic. Fine. Simple. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. Which forms a new thesis, to which there is a reaction, which is then subsumed in an altered form of the thesis. And so on. But I - walk round a problem and look at it from various sides, until I see it clearly. But you may not know from which side I am looking at it. And you may think I am not looking at it at all, but at something completely different. But you are wrong. It is always the same problem.

You may, of course, wonder at my volubility. We are the people who cure by listening and letting the patient talk, until, under our guidance, they cure themselves by the insights they have arrived at on their own. It is surely clear that there would be no sense in forcing on them any of our insights into their condition. How different we are from normal doctors who assert their knowledge and tell the patient that he or she must get better, because this or that is the cure of their disease. And if it should not be - or if they should be mistaken in their diagnosis...No. We let the patient tell us when they are cured, though we may have known it ourselves for some time: it can only be true for the patient when the patient says it is true.

We listen. And when do we talk? And who do we talk to? <Apart from now, that is...but this is very much in the nature of an exception.> Who confesses the confessors? Who analyses the analysts? What a weight of guilt! Not simply one's own, but that of everyone who has unburdened themselves - do we really carry all that? Or do we put it in a left-luggage-locker in our consulting-rooms? Kick it behind the couch and forget about it? The cleaning-lady will never find it, would not recognise it if she did - To our wives we do not confess it. If we did, we could no longer live with them. Some, of course, is off-loaded that way, but very little. No human relationship could be a bridge for the transport of that much misery and distortion. If there were a God, we could confide in him, especially inasmuch as he claims at least a nominal responsibility for the circumstances with which we have to deal. But when I called on him, he wasn't in. So we let the mess trickle down through our minds and drain away into the bilges where it slops around relatively safely. So everything is forgotten.

And yet nothing is forgotten. Nothing. Was that not the most frightening thing about the God of my childhood: that he promised vengeance unto the third and fourth generation? Who knew what infamy had been performed by a hapless and impoverished great-grandfather in Arad, or Brody, and what catastrophes it might not entail upon unsuspecting me? A disturbing habit: the explanation of misfortune as punishment. A habit against which I have always fought, in myself, as in others. The foundation of many religions, as is clear, but pathogenic for all that: a great cause of disease in the mind.

Nothing, I say, is truly forgotten. At the bottom of our minds, in that great sump of our dead days, in a shape that is no longer recognisable, it is retained, and its influence continues, all the more powerfully for being unacknowledged. We give this oldest part of us shapes that we can tolerate - and Jung, my sometime disciple, is perhaps more concerned with the shapes than with what they represent. It is an easy fascination to understand, and indeed to fall victim to - witness the figurines of the Middle Kingdom that clutter my English home still in their packing-cases. It is a foolish but tempting fancy to see the life of mankind as being like the life of a man, and to believe that there was once a formative childhood when these nightmares were less disguised and more visible, when the problems that haunt us could have been banished for ever with the correct ritual and a believer's prayer. Of course, it is not true. We all have to face our own nightmares and drive them away or perhaps only keep them in check. I cannot take your place, though I may guard your back and tell you encouraging tales or shout 'Look out behind you.'

Of course, the presence of someone behind you also means that you cannot run away, as you might well like to do. You must stand and face up to what it is that frightens or disturbs, excites or attracts you. Is there anybody behind me now? No. You are all out in front. Waiting. Waiting for me to redeem the promise I made by beginning to talk to you at all. Perhaps it was a mistake. If so, whose?

Let me tell you about my mistake. Oh no, not the thing I really want to tell you about, but something much earlier, something to which I am already reconciled, something which I have already overcome. Which, indeed, I overcame almost as soon as the challenge was presented. Though of course I was younger then and able to find the answer because I imagined that there were answers to be found. Let us be honest: you only ever find what you know to be there.

My early investigations into female hysteria led me to the conclusion that my patients had all been sexually assaulted by their fathers. A state of affairs which first of all struck me as grossly disturbing. And then as grossly improbable. In the majority of cases, the fathers concerned would scarcely have had the time, let alone the opportunity to perform the acts attributed to them. Indeed, this kind of accusation was almost always linked with the charge of neglect. What does one do when faced with the incomprehensible? One alters one's way of thinking, so as to comprehend it. A lesson which few people have the wit to apply more than once in their lives - a judgement from which I do not exempt myself.

With a rapidity I would envy nowadays it became clear to me that these sexual assaults, the memories of which emerged so clearly in the course of treatment, had not necessarily taken place in reality. They had found their place in my patients' past because one constructs one's own past - often, but not exclusively, in order to explain one's present - not merely out of what has happened, but out of what one wishes, or fears, might happen. Indeed, it is often hard to know if one fears a thing may happen because one wishes it would, or vice versa. They wanted their fathers to rape them, and resented it because they never did.

Of course, I could never have put it to them with such frankness, and I only put it that way to you because you are of a younger generation, whom it does not concern. You will be able to shrug off these insights as passé and continue to labour under other more convoluted neuroses, mostly but not exclusively of your own making. Even I do not blame the patient for all the mental anguish he or she suffers. The external world must bear some of the responsibility. As must I.

The treatment of patients is a most exhausting process for both sides. In my younger years, at a time when I had much more mental strength and much less money, I was on occasion compelled to forego any form of summer vacation, though I usually contrived to send my family away from the oppressive heat of Vienna for a month or two - even to Aussee, then just at the beginning of its popularity and hence affordable. I remained in Vienna with a reduced household staff and was able to devote my spare time exclusively to writing. As the revenue from my patients increased, I discovered, as most psychoanalysts do, that my patients and I could manage without each other for a couple of months in the summer, and I consequently joined my family in their summer residence earlier than before. However, I still found it useful to be a grass-widower for a limited period in order to devote myself more completely to writing up my researches than would otherwise have been possible.

Thus it was that in the summer of 1909 after a peculiarly oppressive and sleepless night I found myself walking along the banks of the Danube canal in the early hours of the morning. The area was not salubrious, providing as it did a ready pitch for prostitutes to solicit soldiers on their way to and from the Rossau barracks, whilst benches and bridges stopped up the gaps in the municipality's housing-schemes for those who had no money. Nonetheless, the water cooled the air, and the sunken nature of its channel made a clear pathway for the morning breeze that blew down with the freshness of the country from the Kahlenberg and could never have found its way through the maze of snoring and dream-infested streets.

Among the derelicts and dead-beats strewn around in various attitudes, my attention was drawn to one whose eyes seemed to have an extraordinary fire. Where the others sprawled or lolled in dejection or intoxication, he sat with intensity in every line of his body. The coiled spring and the beast of prey about to pounce are hackneyed metaphors, but they are all that come to mind to describe him adequately. At that time, of course, I had no inkling of the source of his inner tension, nor of the fearful effect which its unleashing would have.

Of course, I did not speak to him. It was far from unknown to me that single gentlemen of a certain persuasion were accustomed to pick up pretty young men on this stretch of the canal, and I did not wish to have my intentions mistaken. Nor did he speak to me. There was a policeman clearly in view, who had just finished exchanging words with a prostitute, and any attempt at striking up a conversation would at once have been interpreted as begging and attracted the intervention of the law. It was after all evident that the well-dressed man in his early fifties, smoking, even this early in the day, an expensive and pungent cigar, could have nothing in common with this bright-eyed twenty-year-old down-and-out. In the long run, of course, it turned out that we both had a disturbingly similar grasp of human psychology, which extended even to telling people precisely what we were doing, even though one might have presumed this knowledge would have been turned against us and so frustrated our ends.

I felt I wanted to rest. The other benches were filled with huddled shapes, but this particular young man's upright posture - he seemed to be defying sleep - meant that there was plenty of room beside him. So I sat down and finished my cigar. The policeman had moved on. The prostitute likewise. Little curls of mist like smoke-rings were rising from the canal. I took out another cigar, but, before lighting it, offered it to my - - - companion, as he had become. He made an imperious gesture of refusal.

'Filthy habit,' he said, 'filthy habit.'

I smiled, and put my cigar away, reflecting on the man's self-possession despite his poor social position. Someone with less inner fire would have accepted my offer, kept the cigar, and sold it later for the price of a cheap meal.

We sat together in silence. Although I have always been concerned with talking, it has not escaped my notice that silence can bind people together much more. It involves mutual respect to a far greater degree than the urge to deluge one another with our personal details, or the desire to counterfeit that urge by gabbling away on some disinfectedly neutral subject. Silence is a very good way of avoiding misunderstandings. It is also of course a good way of avoiding understanding. I notice for instance that the people in this room have so far - wisely - remained silent.

After some ten minutes, I rose, stretched my legs, cleared my nose and throat, spitting as I did so, but taking care that it should not appear an aggressive gesture, and announced that I proposed to take an early breakfast at a nearby café, which I knew would be open to serve the market-traders of the vicinity. If the gentleman would care to join me, I should be happy to provide him with breakfast too for the sake of his company. He was obviously a person with firm opinions and I felt in the mood for a discussion.

He turned and looked up at me. I find it very hard to describe the look in those eyes, or the effect they had on me then or have had since. Compelling is perhaps the best word I can find.

I pointed out that if I had merely intended to offer charity, I could have given him a coin and had done, at which he looked away, and continued staring out over the canal. I judged the conversation ended, and made for the café, only to find my companion catching me up rapidly. It seemed simpler to say nothing, so we were again linked in the brotherhood of silence.

The waiter in the café recognised me, naturally, since it was often my habit to call in for an early breakfast when I did not wish to disturb the household after a sleepless night, and greeted me as 'Herr Doktor' which, as I could see, my companion noticed, without it eliciting any comment from him.

We drank coffee and ate in silence again, but as my companion drank his coffee greedily and showed little restraint in clearing the basket of fresh rolls I felt his reticence dropping. So that you can judge my interest in the case, I may mention that it was with great restraint that I refrained from lighting a cigar after my coffee.

'So you're a doctor,' he said. 'A medical one, I presume?' I nodded. The proximity of the General Hospital made it a fair guess. But I was not prepared to volunteer any further information.

'Successful, no doubt. All doctors are. Expensive cigars. Filthy habit.'

'And yourself?' I enquired, as politely and non-committally as possible.

'An artist,' he replied. 'My father objected, of course.'

'Of course,' I echoed. But he heard none of the irony in my voice.

'But he's dead now. My mother too. I wish I'd been able to be successful before - - - in time to show them...but...there are struggles at the beginning, as always. A period of testing...of obscurity. From which the true artist emerges. Cleansed. Purified. Transfigured.'

'Naturally,' I put in - with a great deal more sympathy than sarcasm. It may sound selfish, but I had hoped for more from him than this worn-out Romanticism. Perhaps some vague memory of Diderot - Rameau's Nephew had been in my mind. Perhaps I had believed that here was the cynic whose intensity would destroy the sham of civilisation - the trickster who could trick everyone because they were all so ready to fool themselves. I find it interesting that Goethe, a man whose own impulses and insights so often led him to question the views of society, and who nevertheless felt the need for social structures, albeit more humane and flexible ones than those currently in operation, should have chosen to translate that work which essentially questioned so many things he valued. Not that I would compare myself with Goethe. Though of course I just have.

It was whilst I was reflecting in this way that I suddenly realised my companion had begun to cry.

You do not need to be a psychoanalyst to know that tears are an excellent cathartic procedure - in private; but that in public they may only worsen the problem. A raised eyebrow in the direction of the waiter was enough to assure him that the bill would be paid in full on my next visit. Thus I was able to escort my weeping companion into the street whilst arousing as little attention as possible. Fortunately, the by-way I chose, and the long flight of steps we had to negotiate to get to the Berggasse were deserted, since they were not the main routes by which the early-morning shoppers - cooks, domestic staff, members of the working-classes - reached the market.

I had put an arm round the young man, whose slight frame was still being shaken by great wracking sobs. It seemed the only thing to do in common human decency and he obviously did not take it the wrong way. His bowed head meant, of course, that he did not see the brass plate on my door, which in many respects was just as well. If only one could begin more consultations without these elements of prejudice - on both sides, let me add. Anxious not to disturb the household, I guided him into my consulting-room, certain that in there we should be free from all interruption, since that was an inviolable rule of the house.

Without any urging, he sat on my couch, adopting the same pose he had on the bench. staring ahead with those forceful eyes which even the tears had not dimmed. In a measured voice, which gradually became more powerful as he gained control over it, he told me about his life. I asked no questions. I did not need to. One seldom does.

Born in an Austrian town on the German border, he had spent his early years in various places in Upper Austria, finally in Linz, and had come to Vienna two years before in order to study art. Since then, his mother had died - he felt guilty at not having been at her death-bed - and he had been rejected by the School of Art and the School of Architecture. Now, a homeless and penniless derelict, who had failed both his parents, and, since they were dead, could not make up for that failure, he was eking out a living by prostituting his art. He pulled out from his pocket a small drawing to show me. There was a certain painstaking accuracy about it which I found moving - it was clear to me that the man had a very superficial talent, but no real ability: it depicted the well-known spire of St Stephen's Cathedral with every nodule faithfully reproduced, rising above a pile of cakes of soap, with every cake likewise carefully drawn. Obviously, the advertising slogan had yet to be added, but even in such a mundane piece of hack-work the artist had refused to remain anonymous. Plain and clear in the bottom right-hand corner stood the name: A. Hitler.

Had I known, what would I have done? The question is of course absurd, because I could never have known with enough certainty to justify my actions. Exhausted by his sobbing, he had lain back on the couch, drawing his legs up, and gone to sleep. A soft cushion would have done the job. He would never have woken up again, let alone struggled. There would have been a body to dispose of, but with my essential respectability and the proximity of a hospital always greedy for dissection subjects such a problem would not have been insuperable. Only, of course, it never occurred to me. How should it have done, when I saw him sleeping calmly there, the tension in his body for once released? But even as I watched, he woke, and it snapped back. He sat up at once, unwilling to expose himself, gathered up the drawing wordlessly and then began to talk again, only this time in a much more assertive way.

He had felt very low, he said. He had contemplated suicide. He might even, that very morning, have - - - but fortunately I had come along and shown my faith in him. It was, frankly, a faith which he deserved. To be sure, the Jewish conspiracy which ran the educational establishment had refused to recognise his talents, and capitalism had forced him into a position where he had to let himself be exploited, but it would not last, it could not last, and soon he - and all those others like him - would be free to take revenge.

As he spoke, I slowly began to understand his menacing appeal. I did not interrupt him, of course, but I urged him quietly not to hold back his resentments. As if he needed such encouragement. His plans at this stage were of course by no means specific - but it was evident that he blamed everyone except himself for his failings, and that he assigned this responsibility in the most abstruse and pervertedly devious ways. I was witnessing the grotesque irrationality of the pure Id, untainted by anything in the way of the higher functions. The frustrated desire to create was turned into the lust of destruction, and all the high-sounding ideals were borrowed and distorted to provide a spurious justification for acts of ultimate obscenity. It was like ripping up a Bible to line a cat-litter-tray. Here was the philosophy of the murderer who blamed the victim for provoking him by refusing to defend himself.

And here is the philosophy of the victim who is obliged to feel the guilt which the murderer refuses to feel. Because somebody has to feel it.

I cannot recall with any precision what I actually said, but I believe the gist was that his feelings were perfectly natural, that he must of course acknowledge that he had them, that repression and denial would only give this bitterness in him such strength that it would overwhelm him. I made the standard comparison with the boil that has to be lanced and drained. I can only assume that he in his turn made the standard error, and thought that I approved of all the things which I demanded he acknowledge. He did not wish to understand that they have to be acknowledged so that they can be controlled. He confused creation and destruction. He worshipped the elemental forces and did not realise that they had to be channelled. And when in later years he spoke to millions, he spoke with the force that comes of having no restraint. He lied with the openness that comes of having no law but one's own advantage. And because what he said came from so deep within him, it went to the deepest parts of his audience and made them, too, the mindless creatures of the blood, whose intelligence was at the blind service of their instincts instead of acting to understand, guide and restrain them.

What should I have done? Should I have cried, 'Wicked! Wicked!' How could I? I had made these things thinkable, because it was the way to purge ourselves of them. He made them performable. I - was on the side of civilisation, helping it, by forcing it to admit what it was up against. But he suppressed the second part of my message and in his gratitude called psycho-analysis 'a Jewish science'.

Oscar Wilde observed with accuracy that all men kill the thing they love. It is no doubt a similar perception of the irony that results from the confusion of strong emotions which has led many people to suggest that Hitler himself has Jewish elements in his ancestry. On the other hand, it may be a less complex motivation - a desire to blaspheme against the new German creed, similar to the oft-repeated claim in barrack-rooms that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier. The notion of a private national God who promises to His race the territory of other tribes is far from being a Jewish invention, though the fact that our Holy Scriptures have furnished the literary model for such claims has led people to think it so.

No. Herr Hitler's achievement lies in replacing the forbidding father with the all-permissive father. My own estimate of my brief encounter with him would not lead me to see myself in this role, but, as I have often indicated, there is really no telling what the mind can make out of reality.

Perhaps my influence is better described in another little legend which I understand is common among those Jews who have already been interned in concentration camps, as well as among those who are awaiting their turn. According to this, Hitler is not a real human being, but a golem, a clay idol animated by a magic word or phrase placed under his tongue by his creator, a clever but evidently misguided student of the cabala. Hitler's methodical persecution of the Jews is an effort on his part to trap his own creator and prevent him from ever having the chance to remove the magic words and and turn him back into lifeless clay.

Are there words I could pluck back from his mouth? I would not know what they were. I told him only what I knew and had published. I consoled him only as much as I would have any human being. Am I seeking an error where there is none? The Jewish God is a jealous and a cruel God, whose judgement is meted out to his people in no uncertain terms. In a world of uncertainties - uncertainties of mind and body - that particular malevolence is sure, and mitigated only by human incompetence or the cat-like teasing which lets one victim go to torture the others all the better with the barbs of simultaneous hope and despair that deny a comfortable acceptance of pain and disaster. It was my merit to have recognised the reasons behind the human need for such blind authority, to have relativised, not abolished it. This later task must be for others who can emancipate themselves from the need for order with which my life has been burdened, although I am not sure that any of us would recognise such people as human.

I escorted Herr Hitler to the street-door and let him out shortly before eight o'clock. He went away in considerably better spirits than he had come. I have not seen him in person since.

It is told of the servant of Midas, the Phrygian king whom Apollo afflicted with a pair of ass's ears because he gave the wrong judgement in a singing contest, that he became so unable to contain the secret that he whispered it into a little hole in the ground. Only to find that the autumn cornstalks whispered, as they brushed against each other: Midas has ass's ears, Midas has ass's ears.

You will no doubt be analysing my motives - I could expect no less of you - both in doing what I did and in telling you about it. In my own defence I can only point out that it was the only consultation that I ever had with the gentleman in question, that the analysis had indeed barely begun - those of you familiar with these matters may recognise in his later behaviour the typical early resentment of the analysand, though even I would not go so far as to see in his invasion of Austria an attempt to elicit a reaction from me.

Some of you will, inevitably, see a large measure of self-accusation in my behaviour, and, following the pattern of psycho-analysis established by my pupil, Herr Hitler, dismiss this as a typically Jewish trait. Let me assure you, we Jews do not need to hate ourselves, there is always somebody else who will do the job for us, without payment, and if all else fails, there is naturally our own God.

The fact that I describe Herr Hitler as my pupil may also seem self-accusatory, but I think it is no more than the truth - well, no more than a truth. There are limits to the responsibility that teachers can and should take for their pupils, and I cannot pretend that I am happy with the development of all those who have a much more legitimate right to that designation. Indeed, as much as thirty years ago a criticism was made of me which I took as accurate and not unkind because the way in which it was made was both elegant and flattering. I do not know how much knowledge of German literature I can assume among you - obviously you will not have the same familiarity with it or reverence for it that I have - but there is a poem by Goethe, which has inspired a piece of French music, entitled The Sorcerer's Apprentice. In the sorcerer's absence, the apprentice tries the tricks he has half-learnt, with disastrous consequences because he does not know the word to make the spirits stop. In the poem, the magician returns in time. This magician does not have very much time left in which to return. And there are, alas, so many other ways of distorting my teaching - of being inhuman, inquisitorial, surgical and mechanistic, because I have shown just where one ought to probe - that I cannot blame myself in any rational way.

If, nonetheless, you persist in seeing my revelation as a manifestation of guilt, then I may go so far in agreeing with you as to concede that victims - and I am only remotely one such - are indeed prone to suffer a sense of guilt. It is the best way of explaining what has happened - to assume that it has a cause in one's own past behaviour. Thus suffering can be given a purpose - an educative purpose. As you must realise, I dismiss this completely. The links are tenuous, the logic false. More convincing in my case would be the supposition that the victim is brought by his suffering to think the unthinkable, to recognise in himself the capacity to inflict on others what he is enduring. This comes as a shock, and may easily lead someone under stress to confuse the recipient of the action with the person who commits it. Thus the victim feels the guilt which the perpetrator ought to feel, but does not - not simply because there is a deep need for chastisement in this situation and it is applied regardless, but more because of the close bond between torturer and tortured - the revelation of all those enormities of which, alas, humanity as a whole is capable. In this sense I feel it incumbent upon me to refer to Herr Hitler as my teacher, and not merely my pupil.

Of course, all this lies in the past - a pleasant area, often far pleasanter than the present. In the past, for example, I am free to roam in the Austrian mountains, to run up and down them and give myself up wholly to the pleasures of nature. In the present, Hampstead Heath and often even my own garden is beyond me.

One great source of consolation is that the past cannot be changed. Regrets are useless. A liberating thought.

Another great source of consolation is that the past can be changed. I do not think Herr Hitler will force his version of our encounter upon me, if indeed he retains any conscious memory of it, or its significance. That it is there, in both of us, I am convinced - just as a city - for example, London, which has hitherto barely suffered under the depradations of an enemy - retains in all but invisible ways the marks of its earlier development.

I think that perhaps the greatest shock I have suffered from recent events was being told that, as I was Jewish, I could no longer be German, that I no longer had any right to involvement with the culture of that language - I cannot say that country, because of course political boundaries are particularly unstable and unreliable in that context. Had I chosen to take this ban seriously, I would have been deprived of many pleasures and many insights. It is a foolish analyst who assumes that all insights come from a patient on a couch. There are many more to be acquired from lying on the same couch yourself and reading.

One particular ballad of Schiller's comes repeatedly into my mind. It is the tale of a young page who takes up a wager his king makes and dives into a whirlpool to recover a golden cup the king has flung there. He survives and returns. You would think that the horrors he reports having encountered would suffice to dissuade him from daring to dive a second time, but the hand of the princess is a prize that proves too great a temptation for him to resist, and he is never seen again.

His speech after the first successful dive has always held significance for me:

Long live the King! May those be pleased

Who breathe in rosy light up here.

Down there is horror unappeased.

Let Man not tempt the Gods, but fear,

And never desire to have in his sight

What they graciously cover with terror and night.

I leave it to you whether you think I identify with the king, the page, or the whirlpool.

It seems to me that I have talked for long enough, that I have teased out enough threads from the fabric of my discourse to enable you to unravel it and incorporate it into whatever you are wearing - a sheet for a bridal bed, a shroud, or the endlessly prevaricating pastime of Penelope.

My strength is far from what it used to be, and so I must draw to a conclusion, which is something we academics like to have at the end of our little talks, though of course you may feel that it has already appeared somewhere in the middle.

Two points: firstly, a diagnostic matter. Adler - another former associate of mine, who has done considerably less harm than Herr Hitler - has popularised the term 'inferiority complex', which I understand has achieved the status of a familiar term of abuse in England. It may seem that the case we have been discussing could best be described by such a designation. However, as I have said before, I feel that Adler is merely substituting aggression for sexuality in his psychic equations and neglecting to consider the source of that aggression. Though even I can see the attraction of saying that before Hitler came to see me, he believed he was inferior, but that after he left me he knew he was superior.

And that, I suppose, is one way of putting my second point. It is not vanity - neither for myself, nor my method, if I conclude by drawing your attention to the title of this evening's talk and remind you with a shudder that I have been talking about my most successful case.

Mike Rogers

Finished 9 p.m. Sunday 28th June 1987.