Fear of Flying

Isadora is on a flight to Vienna with more than 100 psychoanalysts. She’s been treated by six of them, and she’s married to one, and although she’s spent 13 years in analysis, she’s still terrified of flying. She’s convinced that only her careful concentration keeps the plane in the air. She introduces the various analysts for whom she’s been a patient, noting her eating disorder as well as her first husband’s belief that he was Jesus Christ. Vienna is welcoming analysts for the grand opening of the Freud museum, even though Freud was forced to flee the city in 1938 because of the Nazis. Isadora attends because she was asked to write a satirical article on the gathering for a magazine.

She satirizes the language of psychoanalysis and sarcastically describes her dreams, in which she inevitably laments her missing penis (a mocking reference to the concept of “penis envy,” one of Freud’s most famously discredited ideas). She describes her marriage as a “ménage a quatre” because it includes herself, her husband Bennett, and their respective psychoanalysts (12). Things are not going well between Isadora and Bennett; their marriage has become staid and boring. She longs for excitement and romance, beauty and eroticism, and she thinks of how society brainwashes women into believing that marriage will solve all their problems.