Gildiner - Seduction

PART I:

PART II:

PART III:

PART IV:

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
FREUD , One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis

I TS REALLY EMBARRASSING to admit, but I forget why I killed my husband.

The vast majority of people do not kill their spouses. Ive faced that Im in an extreme minority. Since Im locked in here anyway, I decided to try to figure out what I missed that everyone else seems to understand. In a former life I studied Darwin and examined how drives become instincts. It was great for watching birds make their nests and fly south, but it didnt give me any clues as to why I killed my husband, or help me figure out how to conduct myself when, and if, I ever get out of this cinder-block cell. I tried reading religion, but it didnt grab me. Philosophy was interesting, but it only made me wonder if I was here at all.

However in 1974, about eight years agoIve been in this cooler surrounded by frozen tundra for nine years nowI ran across Freud. I started with volume one of his collected works, because Im that kind of person, and read all twenty-three. (Im that kind of person too.) Freuds theory is a turnkey operation. You only have to buy into the unconscious and the rest falls into place. Its like buying the model suite: you may have quibbles with the furnishings, but you have somewhere decent to live.

My greatest interest was early Freud, in all the discoveries he made before he was famous. In his letters he would explain that hed seen patients all day and was then alone in his small study working through the night. Even when he went to sleep, he had dreams of planing woodstill honing the theory. Freud called this first decade of his most original discoveries, before he had any followers except for one loopy buddy named Wilhelm Fliess, his time of splendid isolation.

I was also alone, reading Freud day and night in my six-by-nine-foot cell. Maybe it was the similarity of our splendidly isolated circumstances, but I felt Freud was writing to me. I even answered his letters in a notebook that I kept hidden in my cell. When I got on a real roll in the middle of the night after ten straight hours, I felt we were co-authors.

They say prison is hell and I suppose it is in most conventional ways, though I look at it as a monastic opportunity where all distraction is mercifully wiped away. Not many people share a cell for nearly a decade with one of the greatest geniuses of all time. Of course, I never said as much to my prison psychiatristhe would think it was delusionalbut I feel doing time with Freud kept me sane.

Fifty percent of female prisoners have a grade nine or lower education; forty percent are illiterate; the majority were unemployed at the time of their crime. Even though Native people make up two percent of the population nationally, they are thirty-eight percent of the Canadian prison population. Two-thirds of female prisoners are single mothers. Eighty percent have histories of sexual or physical abuse. Less than one percent of women in prison are there for violent crimes. On the rare occasions when their crimes are violent, the aggression is almost always toward a spouse who has repeatedly abused them first.