“Freedom is an illusion,” Bennett would have said (agreeing for once with B. F. Skinner) and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability… I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up?

Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my “hunger-thump.” It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it-with men, with books, with food, with gingerbread cookies shaped like men and poems shaped like men and men shaped like poems-it refused to be still. Unfillable-that’s what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.

What was this pounding thing inside of me? A drum? Or a whole percussion section? Was it all air in a stretched skin?

Was it an auditory hallucination? Was it maybe a frog? Wasn’t he thumping about a prince? Wasn’t he thinking he was a prince? Was I doomed to be hungry for life?

At the end of the paper about artists, we all applauded from our rickety gold-backed chairs and politely stood and yawned.

“I must have a copy of that paper,” I said to Bennett.

“You don’t need it,” he said. “It’s the story of your life.”

I may have neglected to report another aspect of the paper on artists (whose author, as I recall, was a certain Dr. Koenigsberger). This concerned the love life of the artist, particularly the tendency of artists to latch on (with considerable ferocity) to quite unsuitable “love objects” and idealize them wildly like the idealized parents they thought they never had. This unsuitable “love object” was mostly a projection on the part of the artist-lover. In fact, the object of passion was often quite ordinary in the eyes of others. But to the artist-lover, the beloved became mother, father, muse, the epitome of perfection. Sometimes the epitome of bitchy perfection or evil perfection, but always a deity of sorts, always omnipotent.

What was the creative purpose of these infatuations, Dr. Koenigsberger wanted to know. We bent our heads forward in eager anticipation. By recreating the quality of the Oedipal infatuation, the artist could recreate his “family romance” and thus recreate his idealized childhood world. The numerous and often rapidly changing infatuations of artists were designed to keep the illusion alive. A new, strong sexual infatuation was the closest approximation one had in adult life to the passion of the small child for the parent of the opposite sex.

Bennett grinned throughout this part of the paper. I sulked.

Dante and Beatrice. Scott and Zelda. Humbert and Lolita. Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. King Kong and Faye Wray. Yeats and Maud Gonne. Shakespeare and the Dark Lady. Shakespeare and Mr. W.H. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Sylvia Plath and the Grim Reaper. Keats and Fanny Brawne. Byron and Augusta. Dodgson and Alice. D. H. Lawrence and Frieda. Aschenbach and Tadzio. Robert Graves and the White Goddess. Schumann and Clara. Chopin and George Sand. Auden and Kallmann. Hopkins and the Holy Ghost. Borges and his mother. Me and Adrian?

At four o’clock that afternoon, my idealized object reappeared to chair a meeting in another one of the baroque meeting rooms. This was to the the final event before the end. The next morning Anna Freud and her Band of Renown would have another go at the lecture podium to sum it all up for the press, the participants, the weak, the halt, and the blind. Then the Congress would be over and we’d leave. But who would leave with whom? Bennett with me? Adrian with me? Or all three together? Rub-a-dub-dub-Three analysands in a tub?

Adrian’s meeting concerned proposals for the next Congress and it was mainly a bore. But I wasn’t even trying to listen. I was looking at Bennett and looking at Adrian and trying to choose. I was in such a state of agitation that after ten minutes I had to get up and leave to pace the halls by myself. Fate of fates, I ran into my German analyst, Dr. Happe. He was embracing Erik Erikson after what appeared to be a friendly chat. He greeted me and asked me if I wanted to talk for a little while.

I did.

Professor Dr. med. Gunther Happe is a tall, slim, beaked-nosed man with masses of wavy white hair. He is something of a celebrity in Germany where he appears on television frequently, writes articles for popular magazines, and is known as a fierce enemy of neo-Nazism. He is one of those radical, guilt-ridden Germans who spent the Nazi period in exile in London but returned later to try to salvage Germany from total bestiality. He is the sort of German you never hear about: humorous, modest, critical of Germany. He reads The New Yorker and sends money to the Viet Cong. He pronounces think “sink” and business “busyness,” but still, he is not a comic-book German.

When I started going to his high-ceilinged, badly heated office in Heidelberg and lying on the couch four times a week, I was twenty-four and totally panicked. I was afraid of riding on streetcars, afraid of writing letters, afraid of putting words on paper. I could scarcely believe that I had published some poems and gotten a B.A. and M.A. with all sorts of honors. Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything. I used to search all the closets before I stayed alone at night. And even then couldn’t sleep. I used to lie awake nights wondering if I was driving my second husband crazy too-or if it just seemed that way.

One of my most ingenious little self-tortures was the way I wrote letters. Or rather, failed to write them, especially letters concerning my work. If (as happened once or twice) some editor or agent wrote me asking to see some of my poems, my response was utter despair. What would I say? How could I answer such a difficult request? How could I phrase the letter?

One of these requests sat in a drawer for two years while I deliberated. I tried writing various drafts. “Dear Mrs. Jones,” I began. But was that too presumptuous? Perhaps I should say “Mrs. Jones”; the “Dear” might be seen to be currying favor. How about no heading? Just launch into the letter? No. That was too stern.

If I had this much trouble with the greeting, you can imagine what agonies I went through with the text.

Thank you for your kind letter asking me to submit material. However…

All wrong! It was too servile. Her letter wasn’t “kind” and why should I toady to her by thanking her? Better be self-confident and assertive:

I have just received your letter asking me to submit poems for consideration…

Too egotistical! (I crumpled up another sheet of paper.) Never, I once read, begin a letter with the personal pronoun. Besides, how could I say I had “just received” her letter when I had been holding it for a year? Try again.

Your letter of November 12, 1967, has been on my mind for a long time. I am sorry to be such a poor correspondent, but…

Too personal. Does she want you to cry on her shoulder about your neurotic letter-writing problems? Does she care?

Finally, two years later, after many more attempts, I drafted a disgustingly submissive, meek, and apologetic letter to the editor in question, tore it up ten times before mailing, retyped it eleven times, retyped my poems fifteen times (they had to be letter perfect, one typo and I threw away the page-and I had never learned to type) and sent the damned manila envelope off to New York. By return mail, I received a really warm letter (which even my paranoia couldn’t misinterpret), a notice of acceptance, and a check. How long do you suppose it would have taken me to get the next letter out if I had received a rejection slip?