The Spanish regions of Cantabria and Asturias have ordered trains that cannot fit in tunnels. A case for psychoanalysis! A guest post.
RENFE Talgo 350 high speed train on the Madrid – Barcelona line at Roda de Bera in Spain.Markus Mainka/imago
Even the most simplistic and superficial reception of psychoanalysis in mainstream culture has emphasized the sexual symbolism of cars and trains, unconsciously perceived as substitutes for the penis. This modern, all-too-modern, phallic imagery is reinforced by a car parked in a garage or a train entering the tunnel: it is the act of performing a sexual act, transferred to a safer territory of objects, be they toys or the real thing World.
Just think of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic spy thriller The Invisible Third (1959) – especially the end of the film. While Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) is dangling from a cliff and fighting for her life, she is rescued by Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant). It then seamlessly switches to the inside of a sleeper compartment, where Thornhill helps Kendall into the upper compartment just as the train enters the tunnel – an ironic version of Hollywood’s “happy ending”.
The earlier film Strangers on a Train (1951) applies this structure to a boat ride entitled Tunnel of Love, in which a shadow theater-style fake sex act is performed as the boat glides through the tunnel. The actual execution of this illusion, however, is death: Bruno (Robert Walker), who had followed the “love boat” through the tunnel, strangles Miriam (Kasey Rodgers).
Michael Marder
To the author
The act cannot be completed
Clearly, then, there is more to the recent case of newly commissioned train carriages for Cantabria and Asturias proving to be too big for the existing tunnels in these northern Spanish regions. As mentioned several times, this fiasco highlights the lack of communication and discoordination within and between various public companies (such as Renfe and Adif) and levels of government.
Ein Tunnel. zwischen Lleida nach Pobla de Segur in Pallars Jusso.Sergi Reboredo/imago
But at a deeper level, which cannot be reduced to precise engineering calculations and good management practices, it draws attention to the workings of the unconscious. It is a sexual dysfunction, in the sense of Freud’s description of the whole human being as a sexual being: the act performed when a train enters the tunnel cannot be performed. Not because of impotence or lack of desire (here: funding, money, flows of money), but thanks to the incompatibility, the mutual unfitness of the two fetishized actors who represent public administration and companies on the one hand and the public itself on the other.
A coincidence that made history
Beyond the symbolic meaning of traits, we can also refer to what Freud himself wrote on the subject in his 1901 book on the psychopathology of everyday life. In it, the father of psychoanalysis treats clumsy actions, slips of the tongue, forgetting names or other words as symptoms of unconscious processes. Interestingly, in the section on “Errors,” which primarily include misjudgment, Freud analyzes various cases of people catching the wrong train, missing their train, and so on.
Never shying away from self-analysis, he recalls a journey by train and boat through Germany and the Netherlands to England to visit his “strict older brother”. Freud’s host did not agree that he should stay overnight in The Hague and Amsterdam on the way to England, and instead suggested that he make this stopover on the way back to Vienna. Freud obeyed, but he missed his train connection (because he walked away from the sign indicating this) and was forced to go to Rotterdam and spend the following day in the Netherlands. This error allowed him to see the paintings by Rembrandt exhibited in the Dutch museums.
The light at the end of the tunnel
Freud interprets the error about the train as a case of unconscious wish-fulfilment: without his realizing it, the unconscious gives him an excuse to do what he wanted to do from the start (make a stopover in the Netherlands and enjoy the cultural treasures there), despite the rigid commandments that emanate from the conscious inner life (and the superego, represented by the strict brother). Coming back to “our” case, could it be that something similar is at stake when new train carriages and tunnels in northern Spain don’t match?
While this question or hypothesis may sound far-fetched – who would want to waste public money denying passengers much-needed new public transport – there is more than a grain of truth to it.
Apart from the high-level political resignations that followed the fiasco, it was decided that train travel in the affected regions would remain free until at least 2026. The repressed wish that is fulfilled in this distorted form is for free and well-functioning public services, which include not only transport but also housing, schools and medicine.
As in Freud’s analysis, the error gave us the opportunity (actually an excuse) to enjoy free public trains while bypassing the conscious demands of corporate sanity. That’s the light at the end of the tunnel. One can only hope that such a wish does not linger in the gloomy regions of the unconscious, but has a chance to be directly expressed and fulfilled without being directly contradicted and accused of harboring utopian dreams.
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