"Freud's Last Session"

Last Sunday, Mothers’ Day, our houseguest, who is a German psychoanalyst, my wife, and I attended a matinee performance of “Freud’s Last Session,” an imaginary conversation in 1939 between C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud in the latter’s study.  Before the play began, a young woman announced that in honor of Mothers’ Day, all mothers in the audience would be invited one by one to mount the stage and have their picture taken on Freud’s analytic couch, with the actor who played Freud.  The photos would be sent to the mothers by e-mail.  I looked at my wife.  “She’ll never do that,” I thought to myself.

She was among the first to line up for a photo.   She is not,  thank whatever gods may be, like me.  Not only is she not like me, she was not like the other mothers, all of whom lay down on the couch, with the actor playing Freud sitting in Freud’s chair. Instead, my wife sat in his chair and asked him to lie on the  couch, which he smiling did.  “I’m tired,” he said.  So in the photo she seems to be analyzing Freud.

Why did I think she wouldn’t want to be photographed on stage?  Because I wouldn’t.  I recalled an incident when I was nine or ten years old.  The group of boys of which I was a member – I think it was a cub scout troop – was taken to the Boston Garden to watch a performance (a rodeo?) in which Gene Autry was the star.    Our counselor had arranged for us to meet the great man, who appeared in cowboy boots and chaps, ready to autograph our programs and shake our hands.  Shake our hands?  I was far too shy to shake his hand.  Instead, I kept to the back of the line and never did meet him.  I don’t remember a thing about the performance.  I only remember being too shy to shake Gene Autry’s hand.

Had it been Fathers' Day, I told my wife later, I wouldn’t have accepted an invitation to be photographed with the actor who played Freud.  “What if the actors were women?” asked my wife.  ‘‘Would you have accepted an invitation to be photographed with them?”  I told her I wasn’t sure.

In my last post, I recounted my conversation with our psychoanalyst friend about my surprise at being old.  The reason, he said, is that our emotions don’t change, don’t grow older.  So there I was, an 80-year-old man at “Freud’s Last Session," still ten years old.

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