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Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.
- Nell in Samuel Beckett's Endgame
Semiotic Plenitude
"If you are waiting for me to break the silence you will be deeply disappointed. The silence is yours alone, and is far more eloquent than you imagine."1 These are the opening lines of Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis, Terry Johnson's hilarious account of the meeting that took place between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí in London, in July 1938, shortly before Kristallnacht and a little more than a year before the outbreak of World War II. The audience has been looking at an old man dozing in a chair. When he suddenly speaks, his words never fail to startle, until the audience realizes it is not being addressed. Laughter relieves the tension. The audience has just been introduced to the power game and inconsistencies of psychoanalysis - the patronizing attitude of the therapist and the contradictions involved in the therapeutic transaction, as Freud is the one breaking the silence while denying he is doing so.
Freud realizes he is alone in his study and moves to his desk to alert his daughter Anna, a psychoanalyst herself and here an offstage figure supposedly at the other end of the intercom. It is the middle of the night, and he is confused about a newly installed light pull that dangles in front of him, "a four- foot cord with a brass knob on the end":
FREUD. [....] What's this thing?
...........................................
ANNA. What thing?
FREUD. This thing in my hand.
ANNA. Um . . .
FREUD. It's just dangling here. It's got a knob on the end.
ANNA. Mmm hmm?
FREUD. What am I supposed to do with it?
ANNA. Shall I call the nurse?
FREUD. Shall I give it a pull?
ANNA. No, just . . . leave it alone, father.
He pulls it. The lights go out.
FREUD. Scheisse! (2)
In theatre, where ideas and situations have to unfold quickly, opening scenes are crucial. Here, too, information is closely packed as, beat by beat, hints are dropped about what is to come. Nothing is random - not even the choice of the expletive "Scheisse" (shit), which Freud repeats several times in...