Eric Portman credited as playing...
Dr. Theodore Meynert
- Dr. Theodore Meynert: Freud? Come in. Closer, come closer. I read all your pieces in the Neurological Journal. Your style has become more sober, less belligerent. You learned how to set forth your views without wounding anyone. In short, they are fit for the waste basket.
- Sigmund Freud: If you asked me...
- Dr. Theodore Meynert: Spare a dying man, please. Breuer tells me that you've given up your idea of proving the existence of hysteria. Pity. I could've settled the question by presenting you with a classic case.
- Sigmund Freud: Who?
- Dr. Theodore Meynert: Myself. I have a whole complex of symptoms. Migraine, night tears, even paralysis. Remember how I carried my right hand thumb hooked around the waistcoat button, as though I was having my portrait painted? You never suspected, did you?
- Sigmund Freud: Did you know all this when you drove me away from your clinic?
- Dr. Theodore Meynert: I knew it before Charcot. I've known it for 20 years.
- Sigmund Freud: And yet you held me up to ridicule before our colleagues, made me out a charlatan?
- Dr. Theodore Meynert: Ham was cursed by his father for seeing him naked. You were my spiritual son... I'm not sleeping. I'm gathering my energies. Sit down. Don't interrupt... Neurotics form a brotherhood. They learn to recognize each other as I did you. There's only one rule: silence in the presence of the enemy. Our common enemy. The normal people would knock out deformities, torment and degrade us. You, Freud, belong to the brotherhood. I feared you because you seemed determined to betray us. So I did what I could to discredit you. My life has been a sham. I misused my talents, hiding the truth even from myself. I suppressed my real being. Result: I'm dying in the state of pride and ignorance. I don't know who I am. It's not I who lived my life, but another: the creation of my vanity. Break the silence. Do what you set out to do. Betray us. We need a traitor. Go to heart of our darkness. Find out the dragon.
- Sigmund Freud: Angels and saints slay dragon. I'm neither.
- Dr. Theodore Meynert: If you lack the strength, make a pact to the devil. What a splendid thing - to descend to hell and light your torch with its fires. Farewell.
- Sigmund Freud: Farewell.