"my former railroad phobia" (Freud To Fliess, Dec 21, 1899, 392)

There would be many passages in Zola's novel, The Beast Within, to illustrate a railroad phobia. In fact, reading the novel might by itself trigger a railroad phobia. The French title is more ambiguous, and more Freudian: La bête humaine. For this “human beast” is both the one that we all have inside, and the monster that we have created outside, the monster in which we exteriorize our own beast, spitting fire and black vapors, and which may be screaming in a high pitch and growling loud as thunder: the locomotive.

The locomotive which we endlessly follow from Paris to Le Havre, back and forth, or those that we see passing at high speed in the small station, Barentin, crystallize every aspect of fear. The locomotive seems to agglomerate all objects of fear. It is a monstrous animal. Its speed is vertigo. Its regularity belongs to the loudest of clocks, reminding us that time is passing and bringing us to our death. Its force is that of the drives that pull us in unknown directions and which nothing can stop. It is a woman, of course, with which the chauffeur and the mechanics are involved in a sort of ménage à trois, not exempt from jealousy. But it also takes cosmological values. In turns, it incarnates all four cosmical elements of Bachelard's imagination, which, brought outside of their natural equilibrium, produce in us dread, an incomprehensible fear. There is fire, of course, and air, in the smoke of the monster (or in the wind, which is pulling Severine off the door she is holding onto, when after the crime she comes back to her car on the outside of the train); there is earth in the hot metals that make the body of the monster and which, after the crash, will indeed return to Earth; there is also water. At the beginning of the novel, the train station appears as a wet and cold hell.

Cela était immense et triste, noyé d'eau, çà et là piqué d'un feu sanglant, confusément peuplé de masses opaques, les machines et les wagons solitaires, les tronçons de trains dormant sur les voies de garage; et, au fond de ce lac d'ombre, des bruits arrivaient, des respirations géantes, haletantes de fièvre, des coups de sifflets pareils à des cris aigus de femmes qu'on violente, des trompes lointaines sonnant, lamentables, au milieu du grondement des rues voisines. (Zola, La bête humaine, Ch. 1).

All the cosmical elements appear in this urban landscape: there are bloody fires, air in the breathing of the beasts, earth in these opaque masses emerging from the lake of shadows, and water is dominating. All the elements participate in the landscape but they do not appear in their usual, reassuring proportions. The mixture is wrong. That is where the dread comes from in the first place. Then, the dark lake and the locomotives screaming like tormented women recall Don Juan's hell, in Baudelaire's poem:

Des femmes se tordaient sous le noir firmament,
Et, comme un grand troupeau de victimes offertes,
Derrière lui traînaient un long mugissement.
(Baudelaire, “Don Juan aux Enfers,” Les fleurs du mal)

Except that Don Juan, in Baudelaire's poem, remains impassible:

Mais le calme héro, penché sur sa rapière,
regardait le flot noir, et ne daignait rien voir.

Whereas the impassibility is beyond reach for the characters of The Beast Within. They are driven by incomprehensible desires, which cannot be stopped, or rerouted, any more than a locomotive running at full speed.

Locomotives, in Zola's novel, are hellish women, but also animals, monsters, and strange loci where the cosmical elements (on which our Bachelardian therapy is centered) seem to fight against each other to gain preeminence, and in this fight, always displace their equilibrium.

Freud's own railroad phobia does bear a relation to fire. As in Zola's novel, the train station is reminiscent of hell:

At the age of three years I passed through the station when we moved from Freiburg to Leipzig, and the gas flames which I saw for the first time reminded me of spirits burning in hell. I know a little of the connections. My travel anxiety, now overcome, also is bound up with this (Freud to Fliess, Dec 3, 1897, 285).

But Freud does not say more. There is no point in describing this hell, or turning it into a story, a piece of writing, for his friend Fliess or for himself. In fact, it might even be counterproductive to dwell on this décor. The train station as a hell is just a façade, which both expresses and hides what is behind it and makes the railroad fearsome. Thus Freud's work goes in another direction. And it would certainly go like this: hell, punishment, father.