The old man's forehead was wet with perspiration. Beads of sweat
formed on his wizened brow and rolled gently into his grayed beard. He
was having the chair dream again. Anna could see it in the look of
concentration that spread across the old man's face, which had been so
peaceful moments before. She brushed her hand gently over his brow and
wondered if she should wake him.
He sat. The pain in his back kept him moving, squirming, trying to get into just the right position. Inadequate back support. How many times had he suffered this in the past? How many times had all men suffered for lack of quality craftsmanship?
He shifted again in the chair, looking for release. The pain spread all through his back until he was rocked with pain and arched his back against the chair, leaning perhaps too hard, too fast for his own good; not to mention the good of the chair.
Now he was again a small boy. He held his mother's hand as she walked among the selection in the small shop. A matter-of-fact woman, she got right to the point.
"This one, How much?"
"Ah, Madam, the pride of the line. Quality. Built to last that one!"
"How much?"
Too much. Another was selected that, though similar, was somewhat less than the other. Harder. Businesslike like mother. It was a model that was meant to get the job done, but nothing more.
He leaned back further, searching, ever searching- striving toward understanding. The pain in his back had moved into his left shoulder. It stabbed at him relentlessly and he twisted to alleviate its presence. A loud crack startled him, bringing him out of his thoughts and sending his upper body tumbling toward the floor, his feet flying into the air, his lower back pressing sharply against the jagged remains of the back of the chair.
The old man's eyes snapped open. "My hat, my jacket!" he cried out.
Anna went to get the tea and the sugar from the table near the door. She returned and placed a steaming cup in front of the old man.
"Papa, why do you always dream about chairs?"
He looked surprised.
"Whatever else is there to dream about, mine liebchen?"
He sipped his tea.
When he left his studies and set up his practice he was asked to a lunch with his uncle Friedreich at the gentleman's comfortable home in Vienna.
"How is the practice?" asked the old man as they sat down in the vestibule just inside the side entrance.
"It's going as well as a new practice should. I have no lack of patients. I'm somewhat interested in the nervous and anxious personality. I've been giving considerable thought to centering on the mental life of the patient as a cause to their physical symptoms of anxiety."
"How so, Sigmund? Do they not just need rest and rejuvenation; why overanalyze their needs?"
"To a case, I believe their physical symptoms mirror their mental state. I believe that their mental trauma is the direct cause of their physical ailments. After all, if they have found their outer world to be hard and cold, will not their inner world reciprocate with more of the same?"
"They are going to run you out of town on a rail, my boy. Telling people their pain is all in their head! This is what we sent you to college for? Oy." He shook his head and gazed at his shoes.
Sigmund was undeterred. This was not the first time his new theories had been questioned.
"The key is the unconscious, Uncle. All patients have a past. Needs. A secret life of the subconscious. For every person there is a perfect chair."
"Again with the chairs! Always with you it's the perfect chair, the chair that was meant for you, the right chair for the right purpose; enough! If you're so interested in chairs why not get into the chair business? I tell you there is a need for quality hand-made goods. You could open a shop. You could make three-legged stools; people would buy them. People would like them alright."
Sigmund bristled at the thought.
"The three-legged stool is a travesty. It is a pale shadow of the true chair. I would not soil my hands with the manufacture of such a thing, a mere simulacrum."
"Very well; but remember this always: people have no use for the kind of hokum you try to peddle. Laying blame on parenting. Talking of the unconscious needs, the perfect chair. You may as well be analyzing patient's dreams looking for clues into their nature and being."
With this the relationship between the Uncle and his nephew was severed as swiftly and as surely as if it had been done with a sharp knife. Never again would Sigmund sit in the parlor passing the time in the plush and fine chairs made by the E.L. Hein company of Berlin. Stately chairs, they fit the decor of the room as well as the posterior of the sitter. Made of hard woods. Cushioned with feathers. It was the latter fact that overshadowed the quality of the chair in Sigmund's mind. He thought feathers to be an inferior stuffing for this chair, that was in other respects so right, so near to perfection. But there was one thing saved from the relationship that ended that day in the sitting room. Sigmund knew a good idea when he heard it, and was want to try out the new concept suggested by his uncle in pure jest. Were it to work out, he thought, it would be a groundbreaking step in the new field of psychoanalysis.