Freud may be sniffy about a spa’s ‘cheap pleasures’, but I’ve been rebooted
Until rather recently, passing a week at a spa hotel in the Austrian Alps would have sounded to me more like an activity for a lovesick invalid in a Russian novel than my idea of a holiday. But having a baby, I’ve discovered, changes things.
That must be how I found myself lying facedown on a pink marble slab covered in some substance that felt an awful lot like uncooked meringue. “What is that?” I asked. “The cloud!” said the cheerful Austrian, squeezing the stuff out of what looked like a giant icing bag.
As I twisted around, he exclaimed: “No! Do not look at the cloud.”
I accepted this command. Being in the spa, I had learnt, meant accepting strange rules. There were plenty of them. Dressing gowns were positively encouraged at lunch, for example, but certainly not allowed at breakfast. Dining tables were rigidly pre-assigned. Like a home set up for a dementia patient, the whole hotel was full of meticulous little labels. Unfortunately, since nearly all the guests were locals, they were in German. This was a rigid but inaccessible social code – every English person’s nightmare.
After a day’s hiking, I plucked up the courage to push the spa door open tentatively. Behind it was a brusque Austrian man in a dressing gown. He frowned at me. I sidled past, not entirely sure whether women were allowed in this section. We were.
Inside, men and women, some naked and some in towels, were going in and out of rooms. Doors swung open and closed. In one section, people in clogs and sarongs were eating crystallised fruit out of tiny glass dishes and loitering in steamy alcoves labelled things like “eucalyptus” and “pergamum”. A woman lay on a big hexagonal stone
There was a rigid but inaccessible code – every English person’s nightmare
seemingly in a trance, her eyes closed. In another area, there were various rooms at different stages of heat (hot, very hot, very, very hot), a room with a big cold pool in the middle, a “dampfbad” and a room that was neither hot nor cold but full of strange green recliners that lifted the legs above the head. A serious man with long hair was lying in one, rather like a sloth.
An uncanny feeling gripped me. Like members of a cult I had stumbled upon, they all seemed to know exactly what they were doing. I retreated to the front desk. “I’d, uh, like a massage, please,” I said. Which is how I wound up, not long later, covered in meringue while a young Austrian lad scoured me like a groom rubbing down a horse. In the spa, I concluded, it’s best to do as you’re told.
One aspect of the spa experience that I could understand was the appeal of swimming in a cold, beautiful alpine lake. In very cold water, the body goes through a series of unusual sensations. At first, the chill takes your breath away and rushes over your skin like a straitjacket. You want to shriek, it feels like madness, like you’re going to shrivel up and sink. Then, gradually, it dissipates and starts to feel oddly normal – only better, as if you’re superhuman. You think maniacally of all the things you might achieve, the actions you’ll take, the tasks you’ll cross off. Then the true, bone-chilling cold sets in and it’s time to get out.
After that, I needed a hot room. In the furnacelike heat, the most interesting mental shift occurred. Body and mind feel suspended in the thick, hot air. Thoughts become soporific, passive. I found myself staring blankly into space, like a snake lying in the sun. Action felt irrelevant or impossible. At some point, after my face had turned tomato-red, I rose slowly and left.
Sigmund Freud once wrote that rapid shifts between hot and cold are nothing more than “cheap pleasures” that hold no benefits for the mind.
But this must be one of many things the founding father of psychology didn’t understand about the human brain, because actually, somewhere along the way in the intense cycle of cold and hot, a mysterious change takes place. The mind seems to reboot itself, and lapses in a calm, alert state. Aside from which, as “cheap pleasures” go, most spas certainly aren’t cheap.
If ever I leave journalism, perhaps I will write “massage menus” for spas, like this one: “Lomi lomi nui,” it said, “feels like a wave, which gently carries the body, turning it around itself.” This also sounds like what happens when a tsunami hits a beach.
Massage marketing relies heavily on pseudomedical claims. One massage, apparently, “acts on points connected to the organs” to “activate selfhealing”. During another, “a substance-rich interplay activates the lymphatic flow”. For men, there’s the “BALANCE ALPINE 1,000+ motion Fascination”, “based on the latest findings of science and kinesiology”.
You can be touched by a silk glove, patted by a special pillow or wafted by bowls of “yarrow, sage, dandelion” and stuff you have to Google, like “spagyric herbal essences” (literally produced by alchemy).
The real alchemy here, of course, is to turn Grade A nonsense into cash. For all that, though, the massage I bought did feel rather good.