Laura Marcus and the train to Freud

ABSTRACT

This essay examines Laura Marcus’s chapter ‘Oedipus Express: Psychoanalysis and the Railways’ in her book Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014), which argues that the train and the railway journey are implicated in many of the fundamental principles of Freudian thought, including the Oedipus Complex. Extending Marcus’s insights, Ellmann shows how this motif of train-travel resurfaces in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his case history of the Rat Man, as well as in Melanie Klein’s case history of ‘Dick’, a four-year-old boy obsessed with trains and stations.

KEYWORDS:

• Laura Marcus
• psychoanalysis
• film
• Freud
• trains
• rat-man

Some years ago, Ray Ryan at CUP asked me to assess a manuscript by Laura Marcus. I usually dread these invitations, but I knew this one would be a treat. Sure enough, I loved the project, which was published in due course as Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014). My rave review was anonymous, of course, but I couldn’t resist revealing my identity to Laura some years later. She thanked me for the encomium but remembered my suggestion that she take up the case history of the Rat Man in her brilliant chapter ‘Oedipus Express: Psychoanalysis and the Railways’. ‘Nope, no Rat Man’, she chuckled slyly.

In the following essay I begin by discussing Laura’s argument in ‘Oedipus Express’, which – as its witty title suggests – examines how the railway insinuates itself into the fundamental concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis. What I propose is that her argument also applies to its author who, as a major scholar of autobiography, might have appreciated the autobiographical dimension of her own writing. Following the railway through Laura’s work leads to cinema, the subject of her masterwork The Tenth Muse. As she points out in ‘Oedipus Express’, moving pictures resemble the successive scenes perceived through the windowpane of a speeding train. The railway also leads to modernism, whose formal experiments emulate ‘the annihilation of space and time’ (Schivelbusch) that early passengers experienced in train travel.¹

More unexpectedly, the railway leads to Laura’s magnum opus on rhythm, which has just been published posthumously. Symptoms of this later interest in rhythm already surface in ‘Oedipus Express’ when Laura quotes Freud on ‘the production of sexual excitation by rhythmic mechanical agitation of the body’. In the Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud explains: ‘The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway-travel exercises … a fascinating effect’, becoming ‘the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway-travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement’ (49–50).² In the case of railway phobia, however – a symptom experienced by Freud himself – these sexual sensations have been repressed so that their pleasure is disguised in anxiety.

The passage from Three Essays quoted above suggests that sexuality is awoken not (or not only) by intimate relations with other human beings but by becoming train, by the fusion of the human body with the rhythm of the machine. In Laura’s words:

The animation of the machine blurs the boundaries between human and machine, animate and inanimate, and creates a new relationship between the realms of sight and sound, in which “rhythm” becomes both rhythmic sound or noise (that produced by the engine and the pleasured body) and the machine/body in motion (50).

By introducing this mechanical element into the genesis of sexuality, the railway threatens to undermine the humanist edifice of psychoanalysis.

In the present article I track the railway through Laura’s chapter to bring out the ingenuity of her analysis. I conclude by pursuing that hint that Laura laughed away, that is, the connection between the railway and the Rat Man. Along the way I venture into other spur lines of the psychoanalytic canon, ranging from Derrida to Melanie Klein. I don’t know why Laura decided to bypass the Rat Man, but I suspect it has something to do with her wonderful remark, quoted to me by Isobel Armstrong, that you have to love a book enough to write it, but you have to hate it enough to finish it. By this point Laura was probably tired of this route to Freud and wanted to move on to other intellectual adventures. Rereading ‘Oedipus Express’, however, I find it even more generative than before, both in the pathways that it takes and in the further branch lines that it promises.

‘Oedipus Express’ begins with a discussion of ‘railway shock’ or ‘railway spine’, which were nineteenth-century terms for a pathology induced by railway accidents that would probably be diagnosed today as PTSD. This condition, like the disorder that used to be called hysteria, involved the transformation of psychic trauma into somatic symptoms, as well as the compulsive repetition of the accident in dreams. Railway spine provides a prototype for shell shock, which came into being – whether as a malady or a diagnosis – in World War I, when battle-scarred soldiers found themselves compelled to repeat the horrors of the trenches in their nightmares. Freud interpreted this compulsion to repeat, which he also attributed to his grandson’s fort/da game, as a symptom of the death drive that either overrides the pleasure principle or fulfils it in self-annihilation.

What Laura doesn’t mention, or leaves to Derrida, is the intrusion of the railway into Freud’s account of the fort/da game. As Derrida points out, Freud is perplexed that little Ernst insists on throwing his spool into his crib instead of rolling it behind him like a train.³ In Strachey’s translation, ‘It never occurred to [Ernst] to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage’ [Wagen].⁴ In German the word for railway car or carriage is Eisenbahnwagen, but Derrida puns Freud’s Wagen with the verb wagen, meaning to wager, dare, or speculate, thus linking Ernst’s wager with his spool (will it come back?) with Freud’s daredevil ‘speculation’ on the death drive: ‘What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation’, Freud opens his metapsychological excursus (SE 18:24). Why, Derrida wonders, does Freud imply that little Ernst – who is ‘not at all precocious in his intellectual development’ (SE 18: 14), unlike his gifted brother Heinele, Freud’s preferred grandson, who died in early childhood – that Ernst is playing the game wrong or the wrong game? If Freud had been pulling the string(s), Derrida suspects, the spool would have rolled along behind him like a train, instead of swinging like a boomerang.

According to Freud, the fort/da game marks the little boy’s attempt to master the anxiety of separation from his mother Sophie by staging her departures and returns. The spool therefore stands for Sophie, Freud’s favourite daughter, who died in 1920 of complications of the Spanish flu when her father was writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Had he been analysing someone else, Freud later told his biographer, he would have emphasised the connection between the death of the daughter and the newly formulated concept of the death drive. ‘Yet still it is wrong’.⁵ There is no such connection, no such train of thought involved. Freud wrote to Max Eitingen in 1920, ‘The Beyond is finally finished. You will be able to certify that it was half finished when Sophie was alive and flourishing’.⁶

Concurring with Freud that the dates don’t match up, Derrida rejects the kind of interpretation ‘that takes us outside of the writing toward a biographical signified’.⁷ The fallacy of psychobiography, as Derrida sees it, is to subordinate the writing to the writer, to treat the work as the representation of the life. Instead, he suggests that the autobiographical makes itself felt in Freud’s writing, not in one-to-one representation, but in the unexpected deviations of the argument, such as the curious intrusion of the train into the discussion of the fort/da game. Freud ‘misses’ this phantom train, perturbed by its absence from Ernst’s game, much as Sophie’s parents missed the trains that failed to run when she was dying.

We had been worried about her for two days, but ... could not, as we wished to, go to her at once when the first alarming news came, because there were no trains, not even a children’s train. The undisguised brutality of the times weighs heavily on us. Our poor Sunday child is to be cremated tomorrow.⁸

Thus, the train that Freud seeks in vain in Ernst’s performance harks back to the trains that were shut down when Sophie died. In this instance, the autobiographical refers not to the fullness of a human presence, nor to the intentions of the author, but to the irruption of contingency into the writing, signalled by sidetracks in the express line of the argument. If the death drive propels the organism on ‘circuitous paths’ (SE 18:38) to its own extinction, so the spectre of the train derails Freud’s argument, driving it back to the lost fort daughter.

Having taken this circuitous path through Derrida I now want to return to Laura’s ‘Oedipus Express’. Central to her argument is a railway journey that Freud shared with his mother as a child, during which he later thought he ‘must have had an opportunity to see her nudam’ (45). Although based on shaky circumstantial evidence, this ‘memory’, as Laura points out, ‘founds the theory of the Oedipus complex and thus, in more than one way, the railway journey “founds” psychoanalysis’ (45). The journey in question resulted from Freud’s father Jacob’s business failure, which necessitated the family’s economic migration from Freiburg to Leipzig and ultimately Vienna. According to Diane O’Donoghue, Freud’s supposed memory serves to reconstruct this transition ‘as an exclusively sexualized – and immediately universalized – 'arrival’ at his mother’.⁹ Agatha Christie, in The 4:30 from Paddington, observes that ‘a train is full of strangers coming and going’,¹⁰ but Freud’s train is disturbingly familial.

The scene on the train could therefore be understood as a ‘screen memory’¹¹ that concealed the trauma of migration and estrangement in the guise of incest. Doubly disavowed, the pain of dislocation, along with the shame attached to the figure of the impotent father and the Wandering Jew, is transposed into a fantasy of forbidden voyeurism. The spectre of the naked mother marks and masks what might be diagnosed as a migration complex, in which the image of the train provides a ‘slip switch’ (in railroad jargon) between (unacknowledged) exile and (acknowledged) sexual desire. Contrary to Freud’s view that sex is that which is repressed, his screen memory suggests that migration is repressed by sex, the train of exile by the theory of the Oedipus complex.

If dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud declared, the train metaphor provides the means of transport to this undiscovered country in his prose.¹² The train, Laura writes, ‘functions as a way of imaging the mental apparatus and its lines of conduction’ (51). In this way the railway metaphor harks back to the neuronal pathways envisaged in Freud’s unfinished Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950 [1895] SE 281–391). Such pathways are responsible for the Freudian slip – the verbal equivalent of a slip switch in railway tracks – in which the speaker’s intended meaning is diverted by unconscious linkages. These pathways also generate the trains (or chains) of thought that emerge in (so-called) ‘free’ association.

A propos of his patient Dora’s dreams, Freud writes,

In a line of association, ambiguous words (or, as we might call them, “switch-words”) act like points at a junction. If the points are switched across from the position in which they appear to lie in the dream, then we find ourselves on another set of rails; and along this second track run the thoughts which we are in search of but still lie concealed behind the dream (51).¹³

Here the rail metaphor implies that ‘free’ association is far from free but predetermined by tracks and junctions laid down in the past. Elsewhere Freud compares the technique of free association to a railway journey, recommending the hypothetical analysand to ‘say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside’ (52).¹⁴ While the railway carriage moves forwards, however, the patient’s associations supposedly move backwards to the repressed memories of early life. Specifically, they lead back to the primal scene (Urszene), a scene which – like the glimpse of maternal nudity in the train – is always reconstructed retrospectively in Freud.

Michel de Certeau points out that the view from a moving train reduces the landscape to immobility, petrified like Pompeii in the fleeting instant of perception. ‘Immobile in the train’, the passenger watching ‘immobile things slip by’¹⁵ resembles the stationary movie-goer watching stills unreeling in the cinema. Laura connects this immobility to the Wolf Man’s famous childhood dream, in which the dreamer is confronted by the sight of ‘six or seven’¹⁶ white wolves perched in the branches of a walnut tree: a spectacle that Freud decodes as a disguised rendition of the primal scene, in which the passionate commotion of the copulating parents is represented by its opposite – the frozen stillness of the snow-white wolves. All these scenes – those perceived through the window of the train or through the bedroom window of the Wolf Man’s dream or Freud’s screen-memory about his mother – all these scenes ‘freeze-frame’ (54) the event, replacing living motion with a tableau vivant, or more precisely a tableau mort. The train, which provides the setting for so many of these scenes (including the episode recalled in ‘The “Uncanny”’ when Freud misrecognises his own mirror-image as a stranger in the train [55; SE 17:248]) seems to represent a drive to stasis, not unlike the death drive that strives to restore the organism to its original inanimate state. Perhaps the death drive, like the train, represents a will to make a scene, to still life into an unmoving picture.

There’s lots more to say about Laura’s inspired and inspiring essay. The mark of a groundbreaking work of criticism is that it generates more work, provoking further trains of thought. What it provokes for me, as I’ve already indicated, is the connection of the train with the case history of the Rat Man. Laura’s omission of this case is striking, considering that she offers such exciting insights into other case histories, such as the Wolf Man’s dream. She also touches on little Hans, whose imagination, according to Freud, was ‘coloured by images derived from traffic, and was advancing systematically from horses, which draw vehicles, to railways’ (51; SE 10:84).¹⁷ In this interpretation Freud seems to be trying to subsume Hans’s horse phobia into his own railway phobia, disregarding the difference between animal and machine. Laura also discusses the Bahnhof or train station that shows up in Dora’s second dream (51–2; SE 7:94), which Freud all too predictably deciphers as a symbol of female genitals. This inference, like the Oedipus complex that Freud extrapolates from his real or imagined vision of his mother’s nakedness, substitutes the arrival for the journey, disregarding the temporal distortions of the dream to fasten on the stationary station and its iron-clad correspondence to the female body.

The Rat Man, meanwhile, who is famously obsessed with rats, is equally obsessed with trains, as well as with the networks of the postal system.¹⁸ A train of associations between rats, faeces, penises, babies, gifts, and money induces his (unacted) compulsion to enlist a fellow soldier into a labyrinthine train journey – like the proverbial rat in a maze – to repay a nugatory postal charge. So convoluted is this projected itinerary that Freud has to ask the patient to explain its tortuous reasoning three times. The train system externalises the intersecting tracks of the Rat Man’s unconscious, with its junctions, slip switches, points, spurs, relays, and crossovers, in which rats morph into a circulating currency of body-parts.

Any map of the connection between trains and psychoanalysis would be incomplete without a branch line to Melanie Klein. In her 1930 paper ‘The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego’, Klein attributes the capacity for symbolisation to anxiety, in marked contrast to Lacan who attributes this capacity to desire.¹⁹ Klein’s example is little ‘Dick’, a four-year-old patient whose ‘[a]daptation to reality and emotional relations to his environment were almost entirely lacking’, his development arrested at the level of ‘a child of fifteen or eighteen months’.²⁰ Indifferent to most of the objects and playthings provided by his analyst, Dick was interested only in ‘trains and stations’, along with opening and closing doors.²¹ With breathtaking over-confidence Klein assigns this interest to ‘a single source … the penetration of the penis into the mother’s body’.²² She proceeds to railroad the child into this interpretation by presenting him with a big train and a smaller one, calling them ‘Daddy-train’ and ‘Dick-train’, and pronounces that ‘[t]he station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy’. At this juncture, she reports,

[Dick] left the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room, shut himself in, saying ‘dark’ and ran out again directly. He went through this performance several times. I explained to him: “It is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.”²³

Klein justifies this outrageous overreach on the grounds of Dick’s incapacity for symbolisation.

In Dick’s case I have modified my usual technique. In general I do not interpret the material until it has found expression in various representations. In this case, however, where the capacity to represent it was almost entirely lacking, I found myself obliged to make my interpretations on the basis of my general knowledge. … Finding access in this way to his unconscious, I succeeded in activating anxiety and other affects.²⁴

This final claim is hard to swallow, almost as hard as the toy man or ‘tea daddy’ that little Dick ‘gnashed his teeth’ on, where ‘tea’ (an anagram of ‘eat’) is interpreted by Klein as a cannibalistic introjection of the father.²⁵ Yet if Klein is indulging in what Freud called ‘wild’ psychoanalysis,²⁶ Dick’s improvement testifies to the benefits of her concern and attention, if not to her heavy-handed interventions. Possibly this very heavy-handedness proved curative by bludgeoning the little patient out of his benumbed apathy. It certainly induced a lively reaction, reminiscent of a variation of Ernst’s fort/da game in which the child himself disappears and reappears, alternately ‘gone’ and ‘here’ (SE 18:15n1). By running back and forth into the dark, Dick, like Ernst, may be trying to master his separation from his mother or even the separation from himself implicated in symbolisation.

But it’s the train that gets him running. Whatever its ulterior meaning the train sets off the signifying chain and its vitalising anxiety, overcoming the child’s deathly torpor and inarticulacy. If sexuality in Freud is awoken by becoming train, by fusing the body with the rhythm of the machine, the train awakens Dick’s capacity for ‘linking one object to another’, in W.R. Bion’s terms.²⁷ It’s telling that the synonyms provided for ‘train’ in Chambers Thesaurus have nothing to do with engines and machinery but only with succession and concatenation.²⁸ In Dick’s case, the train enables him to construct a train of thought, to link one object with another to create a symbol. Incidentally, it also enables him to master toilet training.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposes that anxiety dreams about missing trains secretly fulfil a wish to stay alive. ‘‘Departing’ on a journey’, he writes, ‘is one of the commonest and best authenticated symbols of death. These dreams say in a consoling way: “Don’t worry, you won’t die (depart)”’ (45; SE 5:385). Sadly, Laura didn’t miss the train, which came far too early, cutting off her life at the height of her powers. Nor did she miss the train that runs through Freud’s writing, taking his theories on unforeseen excursions. Her ingenious trainspotting reveals how metaphor diverts Freud’s writing from the beaten track, bypassing the mainline stations, such as Oedipus, to travel through tantalising detours. The train, with all its denotations – vehicle, transport, series, chain, trail, wake, and many more – demands attention in its own right, not just as a vehicle of Freud’s ideas. As a metaphor, its destination is indeterminable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Quoted in Laura Marcus, ‘Oedipus Express: Psychoanalysis and the Railways’, in Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 42. Unless otherwise indicated, all page numbers in the present article refer to ‘Oedipus Express’.

2 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) in the Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), Vol. 7 pp. 123–246, at pp. 201–2. Henceforth cited as SE.

3 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud’s Legacy’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 314–15.

4 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) SE 18: 1-64; at p. 15. This is a summary of my fuller discussion of Derrida’s treatment of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in ‘Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis,’ in Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 211–37; at pp. 223–29.

5 Quoted in Derrida, ‘Freud’s Legacy’, p. 328.

6 Ibid.

7 Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 159.

8 Derrida, ‘Freud’s Legacy’, p. 331.

9 Diane O’Donoghue, ‘On the Train(ing)’, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 6.3 (2001), pp. 313–15; at p. 314; see also ‘Oedipus Express’, pp. 45–6.

10 Agatha Christie, The 4:30 from Paddington (1957; London: Harper Collins, 2022), p. 52.

11 See Freud, ‘Screen Memories’ (1899), SE 3:299-322

12 Metaphor itself, as Michel de Certeau points out, refers to transportation: ‘In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a ‘metaphor’ – a bus or a train’: The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 115.

13 Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) 7:1–122; at p. 65.

14 Freud, ‘On Beginning the Treatment’ (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I) (1913), SE 12:121-144; at p. 135.

15 Michel de Certeau, ‘Railway Travel and Navigation’, in The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 111–14; at p. 111.

16 Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918), SE 17: 1–124; at p. 29.

17 Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909) SE 10:1–150; at p. 84.

18 See Freud, ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (1909), SE 10:151–318, esp. pp. 168–73.

19 Melanie Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 11 (1930), pp. 24–39. For an insightful reading of this case, see Mary Jacobus, ‘Tea Daddy: Poor Mrs Klein and the Pencil Shavings,’ in First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 129–52; reprinted in Lyndsey Stonebridge and John Phillips (eds), Reading Melanie Klein (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 91–112.

20 Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol-Formation’, p. 26.

21 Ibid, p. 29.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid, pp. 30–31.

24 Ibid, p. 34.

25 Ibid, p. 32.

26 See Freud, ‘‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis’ (1910) SE 11:219-228.

27 W.R. Bion, ‘Attacks on Linking’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40 (1959), pp. 308–-15; at p. 308.

28 The entry in Chambers Thesaurus for the noun train reads: ‘1 a train of events Sequence, succession, series, progression, order, set, suite, string, chain, trail, line, path, track, stream, file, procession, convoy, cortège, caravan formal concatenation’ 2 retinue, entourage, attendants, court, household, staff, followers, following, cortège