‘But … where is the frenzy, Frank, the bang, the boom, buddy, the slang, the oof, the awe, man, the puzzling pinnacle, the dithyrambic dazzle, the mind blowing wit! Where is it? I don’t see it.’

‘Because I want to portray the slow digression in the opening, I wanted to introduce the daunting detail of every day, the common element in every one’s life, you know, the benign, the petite, the insignificant, the ordinary.’

‘Well, I can’t publish it like this. You need to drag in the stranger, grab their attention, persuade the casual reader, create their curiosity and awaken their empathy.’

‘That’s exactly why I start so small. Everyone can immediately identify with the plain, the prattle of coffee on the kitchen counter at seven in the morning. It’s a symbolic dripping through the filter of every day life.’

‘But it doesn’t distinguish the antagonist, you must create the extraordinary, the fantastic, what is special, there’s nothing heroic in there now.’

‘Precisely my point, the drama is hidden in every common person, the theater of life is present and enacted in every person’s life, and it starts on an empty stage, the tragedy slowly unfolds, never does the reader recognize when fate takes a turn, by the hour but without notice, the big drama in life is subtle sadness.’

‘No, no, no… I can’t sell such sensitive, gay nonsense, it’s too intellectual, too transgressive, if you want to sell your work, you cannot think like a play wright, think like a Hollywood director, the big picture, bro. Where is the explosive opening, the disastrous event, the fireworks, think Broadway! If no body dies, no body cares.’

I preferred to say nothing. Silently, I sat at the bar, staring, thinking, ideas bouncing off the dancing horde anonymously, my thoughts, a pinball machine jittering visuals of excited pinheads forgotten in the corner, without lust, without interest, my words slammed against the obstacles of bodies, breaking on their surface. In a fraction of a second, the option of a full conversation was fast forwarded, deterring me from approaching, from participation. I had developed a second nature like a mosquito net to avoid eye contact. I hated the buzz of shallow glimpses of conversation, females tittering, males joking loudly, the drum ruffle of alternating bass and soprano, the syrinxes of silliness clamoring their staccato joys. I opened my book and read, interrupted by jotting down notes of thoughts, the mechanical and mistaken association of random impressions in my head. To actualize my self I ordered a Bloody Mary, stirred it with the celery stick and fished out the olives. Quietly I spent around an hour before I decided to leave. I had exhausted my thoughts, letting my frustration freely flow, and I didn’t want to drink too much tonight. I walked home, the streets were empty, the night was unusually dark. No one noticed me, like I noticed no one. Even the most remarkable men were only noticed by their own belief they mattered. The others at most tolerate man. What a man can be, he must be, Maslow wrote. But there was nothing to be, nothing to must. Who was this Maslow but the five strata of a pyramid? Who was this man that took such notice of him self, and is this how we see our self, as the filtrate of random association on a measure of logic? When we see man, we see nothing but his shadow.

Wolf was a gifted writer. His best work, if you asked Wolf, was a story entitled ‘The Park’. The story explored the sexual impulses of man. Wolf was puzzled by the sexual impulses of men under extreme conditions. The tragic paths of man led into many directions. But the sexual impulse was so essential to the survival of mankind, that it should persist under all conditions.
Otto Frank was trapped in a death camp with other men, separated from his wife, his children, doomed to die. For months, every day, out of nothing that death blow could come, and it was always expected. Completely delivered to the whimsical grace or vice of fellow men, who held the power to save or sentence him. Could under such bare and deprived circumstances possibly grow a homosexual tendency from such an unlikely feeling of intimacy for a rare friend?
On the other end there was a man like Willy Hitler, the ultimate opportunist. Willy was unrestrained in embracing life, not even held back by a fear for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi apparatus. While Otto Frank sat in hiding, while thousands fled Germany, Willy was attracted like a fly to shit by his opportunist instinct and attending tea dances in the Berlin of Kristallnacht.
Both men deranged, one by a cruel fate, one by his selfish nature, but in a way also both survivalists. One corrupted by the destructive effects of the death camps, the other corrupted by his own careless, loathsome lusts. But in the end, there was always still just a man.
They meet in the dark shadows of the night, where there is no good present, no wrong absent, but only a testimony to their self. Could in a perverted way, under bizarre extremes these men recognize in each other a common homosexual desire? It was an unlikely rendez-vous in the park between two radically different men, but Wolf envisioned a common need to be loved.
Like the rest of his stories, however, the story was never published, it was never send, remaining unpublished and virtuoso, while collecting dust on the shelves. Wolf was also not Wolf’s real name. Actually, the man who named himself Wolf had never send any of his stories even to any publishers, agents or magazines. His stories, like ‘The Park’, were a great embarrassment to Wolf. He loved his stories, but because of unbearable shame, he did not even read them, once finished. Wold feared the psychological pit of the soul. Of course, the stories were fiction, so being only their author, Wolf could not be held accountable on their behalf. But he was never able to believe in this innocence of fiction behind the real fantasies of his writing.
His friends nevertheless urged him to publish, more convinced by his talent than the torn Wolf himself.
‘Wolf,’ they pressed him,’everything is thinkable, there is no guilt in the imaginary, angels in heaven worry committing brutal murder, in their cells virgins imagine luscious pleasures, atheists fear a god after life, the perversities of your stories express, if anything, exactly your moral sanity!’
But Wolf was not convinced. He wrote another story and placed it on top of the others, ashamed.

All his life Arthuro had been an accountant. He had a few friends with whom he drank a port or two after work, every night, on office days, they met at the cafe on the corner in the Barrio Alto. At the cafe there was room for four small tables, each with two chairs, while outside stood a table for four under a lemon tree. But this did not matter, for Arthuro had no more than three friends. The friends joked that there was not another friend because he would not have fitted the table, while they laughed at their common jest. In the weekend however, Arthuro stayed home, he told his friends that he was writing. On Monday evening his friends asked what it was he had been writing on over the weekend, but Arthuro never said more than his usual reply: ‘oh, nothing. What do you drink?’ to which his friends would reply: ‘Port Arthuro, as always,’ and no one remember they had asked.
One day Arthuro stopped visiting his friends at the cafe. The next day his friends heard he had died in his sleep two nights ago. When they attended the wake, Arthuro’s son showed them a thick packet of papers, a manuscript of more than five hundred pages.
‘Look, this is what my father has worked on all his life. I remember, he was writing on it when I was still a child. Did he ever talk about it to you?’
‘Well yes, of course. We knew he was writing every weekend, as he was not at the cafe. But he never said what it was about.’
‘Did you read it?’ the three friends asked, naturally curious of course.
‘Yes, yes, it’s a travel adventure about four men, each living in a different capital of a different continent of the world.’
‘One friend, Tomas, lives in New York City.’
Tomas nodded.
‘Another, Vasco, lives in Paris.’
Vasco frowned.
‘And a third, Antonio, lives in Hong Kong.’
Antonio said nothing.
‘The four are brothers know nothing about each other, but they all are looking for their unknown father, a sailor named Arthuro.’
‘How does it end?’ the friends simultaneously asked.
‘It doesn’t!’ the son replied.
‘The last hundred pages are not there. There should be another hundred pages because the story abruptly ends and skips to a final and empty page, numbered a hundred pages higher. I was hoping you would know about it.’ The son looked hopeful at the three men.
The friends sighed and shook their heads with regret.
After the wake the three men went to the cafe on the corner in the Barrio Alto, sat down at their regular spots, and ordered a port.

Pinto was the only child of a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. His father was baptized as an adult and became a town official who rose through the ranks of civil servants at the end of the nineteenth century. Pinto was sent to a prominent Realgymnasium in Vienna, where he proved to be a promising young boy. He studied medicine at the the University of Vienna and worked at a psychiatric hospital. He was an adept of the school of psycho-analysis, which had so recently taken the academic circles by storm. He followed in the footsteps of his old professor Joseph Breuer and the still young Sigmund Freud. When the sentiment in Vienna became too hostile for Jews, Pinto moved to Paris and set up his practice in Montparnasse.

In Montparnasse, Pinto gradually built up a name as an unconventional analyst, which attracted evidently a colorful clientèle. Some of his patients were rich noblesse or nouveau riche, while others were poor artists, who could not spend a centime. He was most fascinated by the Bohemiens, whom he saw en gratuit. Perhaps he grew up as a Jew in a gentile society, he shared a certain compassion for these outcasts. All his patients offered the greatest variation of psychological deviations and suffered from it with such intensity that it took little effort to reveal their pathologies.

“My father was a dominant man in our household. He behaved like the patriarch of the family, a king in his own house. He always ordered me to get his cup of tea in the morning and demanded our home to be in meticulous order. As a child I was simply afraid of him.”
“Well, every child looks up at its father, and it is not abnormal that the child fears its parents . It’s not special at all, all children idolize the father and aggrandize him in their memories . You simply project your own guilt onto your father, blaming him for falling short of your own aggrandizements, but they are your own shortcomings that you detest, your own imperfections that you loath.”
“My mother on the other hand was a sweet, timid woman who sacrificed herself for my dad.”
“A weak mother figure is devastating for a child. You must reject your mother’s weakness.”

Nin was referred to Pinto by a friend of the family, who had been deeply worried about the suspected intimacy that the psychiatrist Rank had developed with her. Pinto felt a strong nausea rise in his intestines and knew he objected to Rank’s irresponsible opportunism. After the first session with Nin however, she had not returned to Pinto and returned to Rank for further treatment. He blamed his failure on treating Nin on the specific pathological characteristics of her illness. Nin, in his opinion, had not been seeking a cure at all in reality, she had not been ill to begin with. Instead, she had willingly invented an illness that would liberate her from the moral restrictions that proved she had been socially and psychologically healthy. The mental illness she claimed to suffer from, as far as Pinto believed, proved Nin to be a perfectly healthy woman.

Pinto developed his own school of psycho-analysis called the Strict School of Psycho-Analysis. But despite tits initial success among his patients, Pinto did not receive the same recognition from his colleagues as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung or Otto Rank experienced. The case of Anais Nin was typical of the prejudice against his method among his fellow psychiatrists. Anais Nin, an infamous example, was often quoted by Pinto in defense of his method, while his opponents liked to refer to the case as a success. Pinto blamed the need for recognition, the coquette attitude of his colleagues who seemed more star hungry than scientific professionals in his eyes. Pinto considered Freud nothing short of a charlatan, a typical Jew who was obsessed with becoming a part of the very high society that rejected him. Freud had created his own myth, his own dream world, in which he was a gentile of noble birth moving amidst the noblest of the gentiles as if he was one of them. The delusions that Freud suffered from were as much caused by his addiction to morphine and cocaine as by his wish to be a member of the gentile society. Pinto had seen this desire often among the Jews in Vienna. Especially, after the emancipation acts many Jews became fanatically obsessed with the new opportunities and outperformed one another in adopting gentile fashions. His own father had rushed to the church to be baptized and pretended to be as Christian as the inquisitors that had persecuted his forefathers. Pinto felt a deep repulsion about this forgivingness of the Jews toward a society that had despised and excluded them for hundreds of years, hunting them down like animals, in endless pogroms.

“I dreamed that I was never circumcised, doctor.”
“Absurd. You are a Jew.”
“I know, I know, doctor, but I dreamed that I was eight years old again. It was Sunday and my family and I were on our way to church.”
“As I walked down the aisle, the pews were filled with the important gentiles of our town.”
“An idiotic rejection of who you really are.”
“They were cheering, clapping, and I was as happy as I could be.”
“This eternal self loathing of the Jew! When will you grow some pride?”
“And then I stood in a pool. The priest locked his arm around my neck and pushed me under water. I was wrestling to get up, but I couldn’t breath and another priest grabbed my legs and held them under water.”
“This helplessness! This impotency of the Jew!”

Rank’s treatment of Nin had created a psychological monster out of a perfectly healthy rather charming woman. Under the manipulative influence of Rank, she had transferred the limitations of Rank’s own repressed state of mind, onto her own healthy psyche and out of it had created an illness of her own. Nin had convinced herself that she was suffering from repression by adopting the mental deviations of her psychiatrist, who was her spiritual guide. Rank had not been able to restrain himself and had fully given in to the devastating chemistry between patient and doctor, betraying the sacred oath of Hippocrates. In return for this transference, Nin had found a reward in the attention by her psychiatrist and in the following by famous intellectuals and critics that admired her case. Her newly found illness had generated a cause célèbre and for the first time in her life Nin had found the celebrity that she aspired to. But her liberation was in fact the real restriction of her happiness, and the cure that she sought was the real sickness. The real cancer in her illness was Otto Rank, the man who was supposed to help her. She had not found the fame in a recognition of her own self, but instead through the proxy of Rank.

Colleagues however dismissed Pinto’s theories as conservative and uninteresting. The wave of new theories and psychiatrists who made sensational discoveries had captivated the minds of his time and generated a tide by which the fashion of his profession was moved. The apparent was rejected as false, suspicion became the foundation of every new theory. No one was interested anymore in Pinto’s theories that affirmed the existing by providing a solid scientific basis for the observations. Instead, everyone dug deeper into the unknown, into the hole of what Freud had labeled the unconsciousness.

Otto Rank of course, was the first to retaliate bitterly against the accusations that had been untactfully publicized by Pinto. Rank’s influence in the world of psycho-analysis reached beyond the modest network of Pinto and almost destroyed him. He was able to sustain only by financial support of his father, a humiliating experience for Pinto.

Pinto’s Strict Method consisted in the systematic correction of deviations from which the patient suffered, by using what Breuer had labeled the babbling method. His patient lay comfortably on a sofa while he asked them questions. He then encouraged his patient to freely associate, to not stop talking, to not let a single pause slow down their thoughts, while Pinto interrupted them methodologically and regularly by correcting the fantasies of his patient.

“So in your dream, you say, you saw a woman at a desk, correcting your exam.”
“Yes, doctor, I had to score an A in order to pass on to the next year. So, I was terribly nervous, as you will understand.”
“Very good. Very good.” Pinto commented, while taking note of this desire for approval.
“The woman was wearing glasses, her hair was black and tied to the back in a French twist. But the strange thing was that apart from her glasses and a pair of black pumps, she was absolutely naked, and her legs spread apart under the table.”
“Absurd, you must learn to control your impulses.” Pinto mumbled.

The basic principle of Pinto’s method was the notion that man belonged to a social group, and was thereby submitted to the rules governing group membership. The ethics of society were the basic principles for the individual’s moral actions. The moral nature of man distinguished him from the world of the animals. Freud however had unleashed the lower nature of man. He had not simply revealed the lower origin of man like Darwin had done, but he had elevated the ape to sit on the throne of man. Freud had revealed the hidden perversions of psycho-analysis instead of solving them. Freud had opened Pandora’s box.

Slowly, Pinto lost the little influence he had established. The theory of Freud was a self-fulfilling prophecy, popular and fashionable, and the number of patients who found salvation in it quickly dominated also the scientific debate. One by one, Pinto lost his patients. He became effectively outmaneuvered to the margins of the psycho-analytic debate, until he found himself unable to publish his research in any of the medical annals. Finally, deeply disappointed, he left for America in the early thirties, not only to escape the rising antisemitism and sentiments of war, but also his own obscurity.