Freud and friends are on the case

JED RUBENFELD’S first novel, “The Interpretation of Murder,” arrives freighted with expectations that have less to do with its content than with the financial and marketing details surrounding its publication.

A number of publishers are betting that the seismic anomaly called “The Da Vinci Code” will trigger a tidal of wave of similar books sweeping across bookstores’ valuable shelf space. The genre is known in the trade as “edutainment,” fictional works that graft some interestingly esoteric or scholarly body of knowledge to a propulsive, Saturday matinee cliffhanger of a plot in the manner of Dan Brown’s all-conquering bestseller. (Why this is regarded as something new says more about attention spans than it does about history. In the not-very-distant past, a wildly popular American novelist by the name of James Michener made quite a career of producing just this sort of book. In fact, working through a big, fat, high-minded Michener novel was a lot like taking an extension course with a plot.)

In any event, Rubenfeld’s publishers felt there was enough of a chance that his book would ride the crest of the anticipated wave that they paid the unpublished novelist an advance of “around $800,000” and committed at least as much to a full-throated advertising campaign on the book’s behalf. Well, business decisions have to be based on something, and hunches often are as productive as anything else.

This one, though, may not quite pan out.

Rubenfeld, who occupies a chair in constitutional law at Yale, has written a period thriller based on Sigmund Freud’s brief and only visit to the United States in 1909. Freud, along with his colleagues Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi, had come so that the master could receive an honorary degree and deliver a series of lectures at Clark University in Massachusetts. Rubenfeld, however, sets his plot in New York City, where they initially debarked. He imagines a series of sadomasochistic assaults on socially prominent women. The visiting analysts, along with the actual American psychiatrist A.A. Brill and one the author has invented, Stratham Younger -- who also is, intermittently, the novel’s narrator -- are called upon to deploy their specialty to solve the riddle of the assaults.

Younger is analyzing the only woman to survive one of the attacks, Nora -- a character loosely based on Freud’s famous patient Dora -- and is romantically attracted to her. That makes it slightly difficult for him to accept Freud’s diagnosis of Nora’s hysteria’s roots -- a desire to sodomize her father. Meanwhile, the characters traverse a period New York landscape like something from one of those engrossing PBS specials, encountering everything from Tammany Hall to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. There’s also an intricate subplot involving attempts to subvert Freud’s lectures that owes much to actual criticisms of his work on the sexual origins of neurosis and a recurring preoccupation with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

So far, so promising, but as they say, there are issues. One has to do with the calculation behind the narrative. It’s all a bit too much like a Hollywood pitch: “What I see, C.B., is kind of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ meets ‘The Alienist,’ if you know what I mean?”

We do -- wearily.

Then there’s the “new” element that Rubenfeld brings to this generic table -- a healthy does of rather-too-lovingly rendered sadistic and oral sex. One doesn’t have to share the American puritanism Freud so loathed to find this material a trifle prurient in execution.

That brings us to the novel’s organizing conceit, which is, why was Freud, who visited the United States only once, so unremittingly, even irrationally hostile to America for the rest of his life? As Rubenfeld writes in his introduction, “Freud’s biographers have puzzled over this mystery, speculating about whether some unknown event might have happened in America that could make sense of his otherwise inexplicable reaction.”

Actually, the answer is fairly well known: Nothing happened.

Freud brought with him a fashionable set of haute-bourgeoisie European prejudices -- common in his era -- that conceived Americans as irretrievably lost to materialism and a destructive egalitarianism. Peter Gay devotes most of a chapter to it in his 1988 biography. As time went on, Freud’s bigotry -- it’s hard to call it anything else -- hardened into something that resembled, in its expressions at least, nothing so much as anti-Semitism. (Now, an explication of the mechanism behind that would be interesting.)

Similarly, though Rubenfeld borrows extensively from the pioneering analysts’ actual correspondence to flesh out his dialogue, it somehow comes off as merely pedantic rather than authentic, particularly when it comes to Younger. Take this snatch of his internal rumination over Nora Acton:

“I hadn’t taken on a new analytic patient all this summer -- until Miss Acton. And now she had invited me to kiss her. There was no hiding myself, what I wanted to do with her. I had never experienced so violent a desire to overpower, to possess. I very much doubted I was in the throes of the counter-transference. To be candid, I had felt the same desire practically the first instant I laid eyes on Miss Acton. But for her the case was clearly different. She was not just recovering from the trauma of a physical attack. More than this, the girl was suffering a transference of the most virulent strain.”

Whew, that’s a nasty transference you’ve got there.

One longs for the brisk, workmanlike admonition that Freud once delivered to Ernest Jones, whose indiscretions with patients and others were notorious: “Be cautious with women and do not spoil your case this time.”

The actual relationships between and among Freud and the members of his inner circle were so much richer, more complex -- and more disturbing than this work of imagination suggests. Take, for example, this authentic exchange concerning Jones -- the British analyst who did so much to advance psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world and to create a heroic aura around Freud himself with his three-volume biography. It occurred a little more than a year before Rubenfeld’s fictional setting, in an exchange of letters between Jung and Freud. “Jones is a puzzling human being to me,” Jung wrote. “I find him uncanny, incomprehensible. Is there a great deal to him, or too little? In any event, he is not a simple man, but an intellectual liar.”

Freud responded: “I find him a fanatic who smiles at me for being timid,” a colleague who “lies to the others, not to us.” In part because of Jones’ presence, Freud wrote, the “racial mixture in our band is very interesting to me. He is a Celt and hence not quite accessible to us, the Teuton and Mediterranean man.” Try to top that mixture of insight and problematic generalization -- and it’s in an unexamined inclination toward the latter, by the way, that much of Freud’s storied anti-Americanism was located.

Freud was fond of austerely oracular pronouncements, and once remarked that “much has been accomplished” when psychoanalysis “transforms hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.”

A similar diminution of expectations helps in sorting out the pre-publication hype surrounding Rubenfeld’s novel from the story he actually put on his pages. This is a sprightly book that engages in an undemanding but handsome made-for-cable-movie sort of way. As novels go, it doubtless will make a heck of a film, all sepia-hued with Merchant Ivory costumes.

In other words, something has been accomplished, if hysterical ambition can be transformed into ordinary entertainment.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com