The Dreams of Mabel Dodge

Diary of an Analysis with Smith Ely Jelliffe

Patricia Everett, Patricia R. Everett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000369410
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health
• Index: Psychology

In 1916, salon host Mabel Dodge entered psychoanalysis with Smith Ely Jelliffe in New York, recording 142 dreams during her six-month treatment. Her dreams, as well as Jelliffe's handwritten notes from her analytic sessions, provide an unusual and virtually unprecedented access to one woman's dream life and to the private process of psychoanalysis and its exploration of the unconscious.

Through Dodge's dreams—considered together with Jelliffe's notes, annotations drawn from her memoirs and unpublished writings, and correspondence between Dodge and Jelliffe during the course of her treatment—the reader becomes immersed in the workings of Dodge's heart and mind, as well as the larger cultural embrace of psychoanalysis and its world-shattering views. Jelliffe's notes provide a rare glimpse into the process of dream analysis in an early psychoanalytic treatment, illuminating how he and Dodge often embarked upon an examination of each element of the dream as they explored associations to such details as color and personalities from her childhood.

The dreams, with their extensive annotations, provide compelling and original material that deepens knowledge about the early practice of psychoanalysis in the United States, this period in cultural history, and Dodge's own intricately examined life. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in clinical practice, as well as scholars of the history of psychoanalysis and students of dreams.

Chapter 1

Mabel Dodge

In her dream world, where anything is possible, Mabel Dodge, an only child, can have a brother. She can be pregnant (and then become so in real life), and she can attempt to convince her father to try psychoanalysis. Her son, John Evans, can bite her hand and then transform into a dog. She can rescue a pony hanging from its reins. Dodge herself can be bundled in upholstery and fall down the stairs. Her nosebleed can soak the bed with blood, and her father can actually be cheerful. A piece of excrement can be yards long and a woman can have three light green eyes. Dodge can light dynamite and explode it in a confined place. And sheep covered in manure can jump into the sea and become white again.

Childhood, marriages, and salons

Born on February 26, 1879 to a wealthy family in Victorian Buffalo, Mabel Ganson was an only child whose parents were drastically unhappy and deeply estranged, their vast economic privilege derived solely from inheritance. Her father’s despair and violent moods permeated her childhood years, and the atmosphere in her home was barren of any closeness or warmth. Her mother was characteristically absent, both when she was actually home and when she was away, leaving her daughter to fend for herself in her dreaded state of inactivity. In a passage from the first published volume of her memoirs, Intimate Memories: Background (1933a), which covers her upbringing in Buffalo, after describing her discovery of her mother’s unhappiness, Dodge explains: “My mother, a speechless woman herself, had set an example of mute endurance and I had modeled myself upon her. So it was, in our house, as though we believed that by ignoring and never speaking of the misery we caused each other we would thereby blot it out from our hearts” (p. 37). Mabel searched for excitement outside her house, determined to flee its emptiness and secrets, as well as “escape the fear of the pain of idleness” (p. 42). She admitted: “To be alone in a room or, worse, alone on a whole floor of a house, to be only one, has a feeling of doom in it….doom of separateness and immobility….All my life has been, then, an attempt to escape from this” (p. 34). These three early themes—flight from boredom, silence about anguish and melancholy, and fear of being alone—were central to Mabel’s life struggles and her eventual turn to psychoanalysis—a process that likely felt familiar from her crucial childhood experience of playing the game of Truth with friends in Buffalo: “We grilled each other, probing into the most hidden corners, laying bare preferences, analyzing each other and ourselves until we were in a tingling excitement. But it helped us by letting off steam and it helped us, too, to call by name the vaguer thoughts and feelings that we carried about inside us, as well as by airing those secrets that were all too defined for comfort. The unloading of secrets—what a pleasure that always was!” (p. 10).

Figure 1.1   Mabel Dodge at 23 Fifth Avenue, New York, circa 1915. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Mabel Dodge (Figure 1.1) eventually married four times. (Had she retained all her names, she would have been Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan.) Her first husband, Karl Evans, the presumptive father of her son, was killed in a hunting accident in 1903. She then married Edwin Dodge the following year and became a patron of the arts, establishing active salons at their Villa Curonia outside of Florence and at their home in New York. An early supporter of modernist art and a pioneer in her fascination with psychoanalysis, she began hosting evenings at her 23 Fifth Avenue apartment in January 1913, where artists, intellectuals, and activists met to exchange ideas with revolutionary fervor until 1917. She held a Psychoanalytic Evening around 1915 at which the psychoanalyst A.A. Brill spoke about Freudian theory, thereby providing many of her guests with their first glimpse of psychoanalysis. As a columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain from 1917 to 1918, Dodge added to the popularization of psychoanalysis with articles such as “Mabel Dodge Writes About the Unconscious” (Appendix A).

At this searching and dynamic time in New York, Smith Ely Jelliffe and A.A. Brill were two of the most prominent psychoanalysts. Dodge was in analysis twice, with Jelliffe for the first six months of 1916, and then with Brill beginning that summer (when Jelliffe was away for vacation) and continuing somewhat regularly until she moved to New Mexico in December 1917 (where she soon met Antonio Luhan, a Pueblo Indian, marrying him in 1923, after divorcing her two previous husbands, and remaining with him until her death in 1962).

Mabel Dodge’s first contact with Smith Ely Jelliffe

Dodge had urgently consulted Jelliffe in 1914, following a disastrous experimentation with peyote at her 23 Fifth Avenue apartment. In her autobiographical account of her New York years, Movers and Shakers (1936), Dodge devotes a chapter to describing this evening during which she and a number of friends, including the artist Andrew Dasburg, the scenic designer Robert Edmond Jones, and the writers Max Eastman, Hutchins Hapgood, and his wife Neith Boyce, along with an actress named Genevieve Onslow, all participated in chewing peyote buttons provided by Boyce’s cousin, who had recently arrived in New York from Oklahoma where he had been living and working with Native Americans. In the spirit of curiosity and with interest in expanding their experiences of reality, the group of friends engaged in a peyote ceremony, resulting in a night filled with intense perceptions and feelings, and ending with Genevieve’s impulsive flight and disappearance into the streets of New York. She eventually arrived at Eastman’s apartment, full of panic, speaking gibberish, and making odd movements. Worried about Genevieve’s disorganized state, Hapgood arranged for her to consult with Dr. Harry Lorber, who had not heard of peyote but wondered if the drug they took could have been mescal. Although Dodge does not mention Jelliffe in this section of her memoir, she does introduce her chapter entitled “Dr. Jelliffe” with the following: “I decided I must have help from outside and I thought of Dr. Jelliffe, whom I had been to see when Genevieve Onslow frightened us so that night we experimented with peyote” (p. 439). Jelliffe’s first extant letter to Dodge, dated December 27, 1914, concerns this consultation: “I am taking the liberty of adding to the paper which I promised you on Mescal, one of my own in an entirely different field.¹ That both are dealing with ‘mankind’ is my chief justification, but added thereto is my desire to thank you for having turned to me at a time when it seemed I might have been able to serve. In adding the little folder I am presuming on furthering an interest, the [sic] which has been brought to my attention by some that know and admire you.” No other letters between them exist to suggest any more contact until Dodge started her analysis with him in January 1916.

Note

1.   1 It is quite possible that Jelliffe sent Dodge a paper he wrote with “Zenia X—,” “Compulsion Neurosis and Primitive Culture: An Analysis, a Book Review and an Autobiography,” published in Psychoanalytic Review in October 1914 (1: 361–387).

Chapter 2

Smith Ely Jelliffe

Figure 2.1 Smith Ely Jelliffe, circa 1910. Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Childhood

Smith Ely Jelliffe (Figure 2.1) was born October 27, 1866 on West 38th Street in New York, and spent his childhood years in Brooklyn. He was the son of Susan Emma Kitchell, a school teacher, and William Munson Jelliffe, an influential public school principal in Brooklyn who received a doctorate in pedagogy from the City University of New York in 1891, and was well known for establishing the first organized kindergarten in Brooklyn in 1886, as well as for his elocution and entertaining public readings (“Public School No. 45,” The Brooklyn Teacher, February 1898, pp. 1–2). In an unfinished, undated, and unpublished “autobiographical sketch” located among Jelliffe’s papers at the Library of Congress—and quoted from at length in John Burnham’s biography of Jelliffe (1983, pp. 8–12)—he reports that his birth “must have been a very anxious time in my parents[’] life. My next older brother Samuel had died the April of the year previous and the next older brother William Rushby died when I was but 7–8 months old” (p. 27). Jelliffe offers a different angle on these events in an autobiographical article, “The Editor Himself and His Adopted Child” (1939), a reference to his “journal baby,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. He reflected that, in the midst of their losses, “I must have been very much loved by my parents” and considers “I was probably saved from being absolutely spoiled by the birth of a brother a year and a half later and thus I became the special ward of a sister nine years older” (pp. 546–547). Jelliffe came into a world already defined by a significant loss that would soon be magnified by his older brother’s death.

Before recounting memories of his childhood in this “autobiographical sketch,” Jelliffe offers a context for them informed by psychoanalysis: “It is a fairly well understood principle of psychology that no early experiences are totally lost and the psychoanalytic technique is one whereby much of this early imagery may be recalled. It is often glimpsed in the dream life and in many illnesses bits of one’s infantile experiences come into activity” (pp. 26–27). Although Jelliffe himself was never in psychoanalysis, he did analyze his dreams and himself with his friend and fellow analyst William Alanson White for more than a decade (Jelliffe, 1933, pp. 327–328). In his autobiographical sketch, Jelliffe records a few passages from his own dreams. He reports that his “occasional night mare [sic] of ‘horses hoof’s [sic] and sparks of fire’” is a “clear cut illustration of an eidetic memory occurring in a dream” since his sister told him that he “was nearly run over by a fire engine while she was leading me across the street when I was 2–4 years of age” (pp. 27–28). He also names two images from his dreams—a “wistana vine” that he identifies from his childhood home, and a second-story porch that “I have never been able to locate. It is a cover memory of some sort” (p. 28)—to illustrate the work of finding meaning through dream interpretation.

In this sketch, Jelliffe characterizes himself as a “quickly learning” child who played running and chasing games in their Brooklyn neighborhoods and was “very agile and fleet of foot” (pp. 28, 31). “As for sickness, I knew little of it,” he claims, and from a young age, remembers being “a stoic” who tended then, and throughout his life, “rarely to complain” (pp. 32, 33). He reports “an idiosyncrasy concerning my lessons”: “For the most part I preferred to get them all done Friday. This left me all day Saturday and Sunday with no tasks ahead. It was, if I do not mislead myself[,] a general tendency to get the disagreeable or necessary task out of the way first. This trend has persisted all my life to some degree” (p. 39). Jelliffe valued a balance of work and play, as he was serious about his studies but also passionate about both his active life outside and his free time.

If Jelliffe’s dreams were the subject of this book instead of Dodge’s, evocative images in his autobiographical sketch would provide memories to inform interpretations. He enters a pigpen dressed in his best clothes, naturally soiling them, and his mother finds him there (p. 29). He remembers his uncle’s factory where high heels were manufactured from wood: “The mill wheel and the belts were a constant source of pleasure” (p. 29). He pictures a chestnut tree, a cherry tree, and an outhouse at his family’s house in Darien, Connecticut (p. 30). The sound of rain on the roof “came to me for years as a soothing m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Series editor’s foreword
• Prelude
• Author’s preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Mabel Dodge
• 2 Smith Ely Jelliffe
• 3 Mabel Dodge in psychoanalysis with Smith Ely Jelliffe
• 4 Cast of characters
• 5 The Dreams of Mabel Dodge
• Appendices
• References
• Index