Gabriel Jeroschewitz, July 17th, 2025.   Dedicated to my grandmother, Nora

My name is Gabriel. I’m the author of this sad little history, pieced together from my mother’s stories and the heavy, ghost-laden objects my grandmother left behind. My mother always said I had Nora’s eyes, which I took as a compliment, though I knew it was meant as a warning. Nora von Puttkamer, my grandmother, was a woman who saw the world through a different kind of lens, one that shimmered at the edges with things the rest of us pretend aren’t there.

In the late 1920s, beleaguered by a malady the family diagnosed as “nerves” but which I suspect was the chaotic blossoming of a profound soul, she was sent to Vienna. To Sigmund Freud. And for fuck’s sake, that was the greatest tragedy of them all. My mother told me stories of Freud’s office, and Carl Jung’s—both bohemian dens of intellectual ferment, cluttered with artifacts and antiquities, smelling of old paper and ambition. But where Jung’s collection pointed toward a universal, mythic human story, Freud’s, I’ve always imagined, was a museum of pathologies, each statue and relic a testament to a neatly labelled neurosis.

The most famous family story, the one trotted out after the second glass of wine, was about the slap. One day, my mother would recount with a grim satisfaction that Freud had gotten a little “fresh” with Nora. His clinical observations had strayed into the personal, the physical. So she gave him a good smack across the face, gathered her things, and walked out of Berggasse 19 forever. That’s why it would have been better if she’d gone to see Carl Jung. He would have understood. He wouldn’t have needed to touch the body to know the soul was on fire.

After Nora died, I inherited a large, sea-worn trunk. It wasn’t filled with jewels or deeds, but with the sediment of her life: pressed flowers brittle as moth wings, scarves that still held the faint scent of L’Heure Bleue and anxiety, and a single, leather-bound diary. It is from this diary that the true horror of her Viennese excursion unfolds. It’s not a horror of ghouls or goblins, but of a soul undergoing a sacred, terrifying process, being observed by a man with the wrong map.

October 19, 1928, Vienna is a city of ghosts. They cling to the damp coats of the living. Dr. F’s office is warm, but it is a sterile warmth. He watches me from behind his desk, a little god behind a mahogany altar. He has artifacts, yes, but they feel like captured animals. Lifeless. He asks about my dreams of the flooded ballroom. He says the water is a symbol of latent desire. I tried to explain that it wasn’t a symbol. The water was real. I could feel its cold silk on my ankles and see the chandeliers glittering beneath the surface like trapped stars. The water wasn’t desired; it was memory. Not my memory, but the world’s.

Here, reading in my dusty study decades later, I felt a familiar chill. Jung understood this. He understood that you can’t have depth psychology without history, without the “deep history” that flows through us all. Nora wasn’t dreaming of her repressed psyche; she was tapping into something vast, an archetypal flood. But Freud, with his psychology of consciousness, could only see the individual, the immediate, the sexual. He was a brilliant cartographer of a single, small island, utterly blind to the ocean that surrounded it.

November 2, 1928. Today, I told him about the wood grain. On his desk. When he speaks, his voice is dry, and the grain of the wood begins to flow. It moves like a slow river, the dark lines swirling into eddies and whirlpools. I told him it frightens me, that the solid world feels… porous. He lit a cigar, the smoke a foul cloud between us. He said I was projecting my fluid nature, my “hysteria,” onto the inanimate object. He used the word ‘inanimate.’ But it isn’t. I see the spirit in it. The tree’s life is still trapped and dreaming in the wood. It is not me. It is the wood itself.

This entry made me put the diary down. My God, she was living it. The unus mundus. The unity of psyche and matter that the alchemists sought, that Jung revered. There was no division between the inner mind and outer matter for them. Nora was experiencing this unity not as a philosophical concept, but as a raw, terrifying reality. The walls between her soul and the world were dissolving. She was in the nigredo, the alchemical opus’s blackening, dissolution stage. She needed a guide, an alchemist, to help her contain the process and move toward the albedo, the whitening, and the purification. Instead, she got a clinician who told her she was sick.

The alchemists knew their work was oriented toward a goal: the creation of the Stone, the integration of the self. It was a transformative process, not a cyclical sickness, which Freud saw only.

November 28, 1928, He speaks of my father. Always my father. He believes he cast every shadow in my heart. Today, as I described the feeling of my skin turning to silver dust in the sunlight, of seeing the golden veins in the marble floor pulse with a faint light, he fell silent. Then he leaned forward, his eyes small and wet. He spoke of sublimation, of transmuting carnal urges into these… fantasies. He believes my soul’s work is a gilded cage for my unspent passion.

He does not understand its simplicity—the res simplex—the simple, impossible thing. That the gold in the stone is the same in my spirit is not a metaphor. He thinks I am building elaborate castles of the mind to hide from a simple truth. But he is the one who is blind. He lives in a complex world of theory and diagnosis, and he cannot see the simplest thing: everything is one.

The final entry before the slap is brief, the handwriting a frantic scrawl.

On December 5, 1928, He tried to illustrate his point today. As he spoke of the body’s base desires, the root of my ‘condition,’ his hand fell upon my knee. It was not a gesture of comfort. It was an act of… reduction. He was trying to pin my soaring, terrifying soul to a simple piece of flesh. To prove his point. To say, ‘See? It all comes down to this.’ In that moment, the river of the wood grain, the gold in the marble, and the ghost-water in the ballroom all rushed into my arm. It was the world’s anger, not mine. I struck him. The sound was like a book falling shut. The spell was broken. I saw him, a small, frightened man, amidst his dead idols.

She never wrote in it again. She left Vienna, but the alchemical process was interrupted and misdiagnosed, and she never completed its work. It curdled inside her. She didn’t find the Philosopher’s Stone; she didn’t achieve the psychic totality that Jung knew was an unreachable ideal but a worthy goal. She was left in the chaos of the dissolution, her parts scattered. She spent the rest of her life as a woman haunted not by ghosts, but by the shimmering potential of a world she could no longer bear to see, its unity a source of terror rather than wholeness.

The horror of Nora von Puttkamer’s story is not the slap, nor the “freshness” of a famous doctor. It is the horror of being seen, but not understood. It is the terror of a sacred transformation being labelled a sickness. For all his genius, Freud was deaf to the music of deep history. He saw a broken machine and sought to fix it. Jung would have seen a crucible and known how to tend the fire. For my grandmother, that difference was everything. She was an adept whose opus was ruined because the laboratory master believed gold was just a shiny yellow metal. He could not grasp the simple, terrible truth: it was also her soul’s substance.