Sigmund and Dora: Art, Science, Patience

Science will not suffice, nor Art,
But Patience, too, must play her part.
     —lines from Goethe's Faust, quoted by Freud on page 9

Introduction
Dora is the record of Freud's three-month treatment in 1899 of Ida Bauer, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Austrian textile factory owner, for coughing and loss of voice ("aphonia") attributed to hysteria. Dora's father has his own motive for sending his daughter to therapy: he'd like Dr. Freud to help her abandon the idea that he's having an affair with Frau K.

A childhood photo of Ida Bauer (Dora)
with her  brother Otto

The crucial episode in Dora's recent past is a sexual proposition made to her two years ago by Herr K. in the Alpine town of L___. Dora rejects the proposal and slaps Herr K.; a few days later, she tells her mother about the event, and her mother tells her father. He confronts Herr K., who denies that any such thing has happened. Dora's father believes Herr K., and insists that Dora's story was fabricated, an hysterical "phantasy" brought about in part by too much reading about sex (19). Her father nonetheless believes this (fantasized) incident is the cause of Dora's nervous symptoms, and of the suicide note that her parents have discovered.

Freud's own title for this case-study is simply Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse), and he'll say a great deal about fragments in a variety of contexts. Most fundamentally, the case is a "fragment" because Dora broke off her treatment with Freud before her symptoms were cured.

Although the treatment took place in 1899 and Freud wrote up the case study not long afterwards, he chose not to publish it until 1905, five years after The Interpretation of Dreams and in the same year as Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The case study, he hopes, will provide an extended example of the clinical usefulness of his interpretive methods in resolving hysterical symptoms. (The Interpretation of Dreams contains many examples of dreams drawn from Freud's clinical practice, but no extended account of the role his interpretations played in the treatment of any one patient).

Raphael, Sistine Madonna (c. 1513)
"She remained two hours in front of the
Sistine Madonna, rapt in silent admiration" (88).

Yet in his treatment of Dora, Freud discovered a new interpretive problem even as he applied his existing methods: "transference." In the "Postscript" (102-112) to his study, he explains that he failed adequately to account for Dora's projection (or transference) of her conflicted feelings for Herr K. onto Freud himself.

Freud would later in his career ask what may seem like an obviously pressing question to us: if the patient transfers feelings to the analyst, might not the analyst also transfer feelings onto the patient? Psychoanalysis calls this projection of the analyst's a "countertransference." Since that idea hasn't occurred to Freud yet in Dora, it leaves an opening for us to ask about the feelings and associations in this study that may belong to Freud rather than to his patient. (This is something you're welcome to consider in your prewriting exercises or in your comments on the blog, or both).





Glossary of terms
roman à clef (3): French: a story of true events in which the characters' names have been changed;
     literally, the phrase means "novel with a key."
tabo-paralysis (13): paralysis resulting from tabes, a disease resulting from syphilis
anti-luetic (13): a drug, often some form of mercury, for fighting syphilis before the discovery of
     antibiotics
marasmus (13): undernourishment
dyspnoea (15): difficulty in breathing
tussis nervosa (15): Latin, a nervously induced cough
catarrh (15): a build-up of mucus, usually in the throat; Freud and Dora also use the word to refer to
     vaginal discharge (see e.g. 75)
taedium vitae (17): Latin, a mild depression; literally, weariness of life
aphonia (20): loss of voice
inter urinas et faeces nascimur (24): Latin, we are born between piss and shit
jeu d'esprit (33): French, game of wit
per os (41): by means of the mouth
J'appelle un chat un chat (41): French, I call a cat a cat
pour fair une omelette il faut casser des oeufs (42): to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs
Medea...Creusa (54): In the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, Jason abandons Medea for
     Creusa. Medea takes revenge by killing her own and Jason's children, and by giving Creusa a
     poisoned dress.
leucorrhoea (67): vaginal discharge
coitus interruptus (71): sexual intercourse interrupted to prevent pregnancy
Sistine Madonna (88): a painting by Raphael, held at Dresden's major museum (the Gemäldegalerei or
    picture gallery). See the image above.
Secessionist exhibition (90): The Vienna Secession was an avant-garde group of artists founded in
     1897 (see the image below). Its most famous member was Gustav Klimt.
perityphlitis (94): appendicitis
deus ex machina (105): literally, "God outside of the machine." This refers to a theological view of
     God as having created the universe and then set it in motion, thereafter playing no active role in
     determinig individual events. Sometimes paraphrased as the "clockmaker God."
Ça n'empêche pas d'exister (105): French, that doesn't stop it from existing

Some notes on the prewriting exercise
I'm tempted to summarize what's troubling about this case study thus: for Freud, Dora's "no" means "yes."

"Dora," whose real name was Ida Bauer,
in a photo taken long after Freud treated her.

That's a perhaps too pat statement of the problem, though, if it suggests that Freud's interpretive sensitivity to the ambiguity, even the contradictions of human sexuality automatically entails a practical and rather violent deafness to the unambiguous matter of consent. Yet interpretation and ethics, knowledge and power, are also very hard to separate in this text. It should nonetheless be possible, we might hope, to honor the integrity of Dora's will without impoverishing our (or her own) understanding of the complexity of her thoughts and feelings. We should wonder about the extent to which Freud succeeds at these two projects.

It will be important for us to think about how Freud re-orders events into a narrative in this case study; events are narrated in a different order than that in which they happened. (You may have heard these two orders called "story" and "plot" in other literature classes; the terms are from Peter Brooks' Reading for the Plot).

Keep Foucault's arguments in mind as you read. Terms that feel a bit abstract in History of Sexuality, (e.g. "confession," "incitement to discourse," sex as a "secret") become rather wonderfully concrete in Dora.

I'd encourage you to make a timeline of events in Dora in your notes as you read--this helps to clarify the basic facts of the case, which Freud will reorder and interpret in his narrative. You might organize it thus:

Dora's age:                       4         6         8           10             12            14             16              18

Dora's symptoms:

Her father's illnesses:

Other important events:

Below is an example of the sort of analysis (or 'close reading') that I'd like you to attempt in the pre-writing exercise for this Wednesday. The passage analyzed is about 140 words long, and the commentary is about twice as long as what I'm asking you to write. Some features to notice in what follows:

*the commentary points back to (quotes) specific moments from the passage

A poster for the 1899 5th Secessionist Exhibition in
Vienna, where Dora saw a painting of nymphs
in a wood (90). 

*it considers form as a part of the passage's content, and connotation as well as denotation. For example, it's important not just that Freud says that the grandmother's letter is irrelevant, but that he repeats the idea twice. To "tear" a secret away is importantly different from taking it or revealing it. 

* it looks for tension and contradiction both within the passage (e.g. between "torn" and "play"), and between this passage and others.

*it considers the relation of the order of narration ("plot") to the order of events ("story")

*its method is very often to put the same sorts of interpretive questions to Freud's narrative that he puts to Dora's.

* its paragraphs aren't all that continuous with one another--each takes up a slightly different line of analysis, and they often end by asking questions rather than asserting answers. That kind of looseness if just fine (and even productive) in a draft, though I'd want to see it tightened up in a paper.

* it occasionally makes reference to passages from Dora other than the primary one being analyzed; you're also welcome to do this.

Sample Passage

Dora’s symptomatic act with the reticule did not immediately precede the dream. She started the sitting which brought us the narrative of the dream with another symptomatic act. As I came into the room in which she was waiting she hurriedly concealed a letter which she was reading. Something then came out which was a matter of complete indifference and had no relation to the treatment. It was a letter from her grandmother, in which she begged Dora to write to her more often. I believe that Dora only wanted to play “secrets” with me, and to hint that she was on the point of allowing her secret to be torn from her by the physician. I was then in a position to explain her antipathy to every new physician. She was afraid lest he might arrive at the foundation of her illness[.] (70; 143 words)

Sample Commentary

           What drew my attention to this passage at first was Freud’s rather unusual assertion that something is irrelevant to his interpretation of Dora’s illness. More often, Freud takes pains to remind us that her actions and symptoms are “overdetermined,” saturated with multiple meanings. Here, though, the content of the letter that Dora hides is “a matter of complete indifference and had no relation to the treatment.” The redundancy of Freud’s phrasing is striking: he tells us twice that this matter is irrelevant. Elewhere, Freud is sensitive to the obsessive quality of Dora’s “incessant repetition” (47) of certain ideas; we might wonder here what Freud’s own repetitive insistence signals. Why must the request of Dora’s grandmother that she write more often have nothing to do with her treatment? Why is this detail insignificant when so many others are overcharged with meaning?

            Bracketing the content of what Dora hides allows Freud to emphasize the act of hiding itself, the form of the act: it’s a game of “secrets.” The tension between the light-heartedness of “play” and the hint of violence in “torn” might disconcert us here. And why must Dora’s hiding of her letter be taken as a sign that she is “on the point of allowing,” and not preventing, her secret to be discovered? One reason is surely that in allowing Freud to see the letter before she puts it away, Dora is making manifest the act of concealing; she’s showing hiding. Yet elsewhere Freud has no problem simply calling her resistance resistance, and interpreting it nonetheless as confession (see e.g. notes 8 and 9 on p. 61). It’s curious that here, his language both admits (Dora’s secret is “torn” from her) and disavows (she “plays,” “hint[s] that she was point of allowing this to happen”) the conflictual nature of his interpretive work. 

            Freud speaks of his “position” here. He’s in a position to know Dora’s secret, of course. As he walks into the “room”—a word that has received special emphasis in his interpretation of the first dream (59n6)—and stands over her, though, he’s also in a position strikingly similar to that of Dora’s father in the dream. This may be significant (or it may be overreading).

            The first two sentences of this paragraph quietly signal Freud’s structuring work as a narrator of Dora’s history: while her concealment of her grandmother’s letter happens before her dream, and before her playing with her purse, he tells us about it only afterwards. What happens first in the order of events comes second in the order of narration. Again, Freud is sensitive to this sort of belatedness when it’s Dora doing the telling, as in her “addendum” about the smell of smoke in her dream (65). One thing that Freud’s re-ordering of events permits here is for the idea of masturbation to precede the anecdote about the letter in the narrative; Dora’s concealment of the letter is really, in this telling, about the concealment of masturbation more clearly signaled by her play with the purse. Yet why couldn’t we reverse the order of this interpretation; could the purse not rather be a reminder of the letter, which after all preceded it?

            Finally, it’s interesting that the irrelevant object here happens to be a piece of writing. It would be interesting to consider the grandmother’s letter in the context of other texts mentioned in this case study (e.g. Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis [43], Mantegazza’s Physiology of Love [19]) and of Freud’s often pointed comments about the nature of his own writing (e.g. 52).