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Sex, subtext, ur- text: Freud, Dora and the suggestive text
Abstract
The intertextual analysis of Dora illuminates an aspect of the cultural matrix that informed Freud's theory-building. Specifically, the trope of the suggestive text, a literal and symbolic agent of transgressive influence, signals an intertextual relationship between the case history and a vein of literary fiction that includes novels by some of Freud's favourite authors: Cervantes (Don Quijote), Flaubert (Madame Bovary) and Zola (Page d’amour). It is posited that the suggestive text in Dora acts both as an literal agent of dangerous suggestion, and as a figurative symbol of the occult literary influence that intrudes upon the text, impacting Freud's formulation of his subject; his documentation of her case; and his ensuing conceptualization of the transference. The author ventures that literary fiction and other cultural products function as important objects, shaping our fantasy life, object representations, and transferences.
... Indeed, it is nearly impossible to make art that in some way does not involve the history of art: as architect Philip Johnson (1959) insisted, despite our most strenuous efforts to be sui generis, "we cannot not know history." 2 And yet participation in the tradition of reworking aesthetic precedent hardly precludes creative innovation: every generation revisits the cultural products and forms of the past, which infiltrate and inhabit the fantasy life of the individual (and cultural) unconscious, where they are reimagined and reconfigured into new creative works that in turn inform a deeper understanding of their predecessors (Borges, 1951(Borges, /1986). This continual, cyclical, and reciprocal transformation is in evidence in all the arts-visual, literary, and musical (Tutter, 2015(Tutter, , 2020. ...
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis explains the link between literature and psychoanalysis for students, critics and teachers. It offers a twenty-first century resource for defining and analyzing the psychoanalytic dimensions of human creativity in contemporary society. Essays provide critical perspectives on selected canonical authors, such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin It also offers analysis of contemporary literature of social, sexual and political turmoil, as well as newer forms such as film, graphic narrative, and autofiction. Divided into five sections, each offering the reader different subject areas to explore, this volume shows how psychoanalytic approaches to literature can provide valuable methods of interpretation. It will be a key resource for students, teachers and researchers in the field of literature and psychoanalysis as well as literary theory.
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis explains the link between literature and psychoanalysis for students, critics and teachers. It offers a twenty-first century resource for defining and analyzing the psychoanalytic dimensions of human creativity in contemporary society. Essays provide critical perspectives on selected canonical authors, such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin It also offers analysis of contemporary literature of social, sexual and political turmoil, as well as newer forms such as film, graphic narrative, and autofiction. Divided into five sections, each offering the reader different subject areas to explore, this volume shows how psychoanalytic approaches to literature can provide valuable methods of interpretation. It will be a key resource for students, teachers and researchers in the field of literature and psychoanalysis as well as literary theory.
All publications in Freud’s fin de siècle society were subject to strict governmental censorship specifically tasked with distinguishing “real” academic scholarship from subversive “fictions” masquerading as such. Cures that relied on suggestion also became a target of mistrust. This contextualization, alongside the examination of Freud’s literary references and a variety of other literary texts, encourages the conjecture that realistic concerns over the risks of censorship and obscenity charges informed a proto-model of the topographical model, in which Freud conceptualized the mind as a subversive “manuscript” that must undergo “censorship” before it can be “published”: a “typographical” model of the mind.
A review of H. F. ELLENBERGER's book, The Discovery of the Unconscious, opens up this section. In this monumental work the author shows how the main schools of dynamic psychiatry over the past two centuries had their roots in the broad cultural movements of their time. A wide perspective of psychotherapeutic approaches ranging from faith healing to psychoanalysis is presented. J. ZUBIN highlights cultural factors regarding etiological models of schizophrenia and regarding the diagnosis of this illness. He comprehensively discusses emerging trends in descriptive psychopathology and cross-cultural studies. E. F. TORREY has provided us with a preview of his book, The Mind Game: Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists. Based on his experiences in several cultures he has identified com monalities in the activities of psychotherapists all over the world. He offers models based on his experiences with different ethnic groups for future mental health services for these groups and others. The last paper in this section concerns itself with the application of verbal psychological tests in translation for cross-cultural psychological or psychiatric purposes. K. GLATT compared differences in the responses to the MMPI in French, Spanish, and German translations (see also R. Prince and W. Mombour, Transcultural Psychiatric Research.
An erotics of knowing is posited that comprises embodied aspects of psychological and emotional closeness, and derives not from transference dynamics but from psychological and emotional intimacy—both component and consequence of the analytic process. The experience of knowing and being known is invested with erotism via its interpenetrative and interreceptive aspects; regardless of gender, to know the other is to enter a hidden interior “space” that represents that person’s embodied inner world. Yet the interrogation of the intrinsic relationship between knowing and loving is stunningly absent from the psychoanalytic literature. This historical neglect is traced to a split in the discourse presaged by Freud’s essay on transference love, which distinguishes between the qualified reality of the erotic transference and the de-erotized but “real” construct of the “analytic love” relationship. A more recent split relocates erotism to the maternal transference, divesting it of aggression and oedipal sexuality. These splits constitute a vigorous collective defense against engaging with the erotics of knowing: from Oedipus to Genesis, our forbidden fruit.
The Mediterranean region of Liguria, where the Maritime Alps sweep down to the coasts of northwest Italy and southeast France, the Riviera, marks the intersection of two of Europe's major cultural landscapes. Remote, liminal, compact, and steep, the terrain has influenced many international authors and artists. In this study, Martina Kolb traces Liguria's specific impact on the works of three seminal German-writing modernists – Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Gottfried Benn – whose encounters with Ligurian lands and seas led to an innovative geopoetic fusion of word and world. Kolb examines each of these authors' acquired affinities with Ligurian and Provençal landscapes and seascapes, revisiting and reassessing the long tradition of northern longing for a Mediterranean south. She also shows how Freud and Benn followed in the footsteps of Nietzsche in his most prolific years, a topic which has received little critical attention to date. Nietzsche, Freud, Benn, and the Azure Spell of Liguria offers a fresh approach to these writers' groundbreaking literary achievements and profound interest in poetic expression as cathartic self-liberation.
Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls investigates the creation of “obscene writings and images” as a category of print in nineteenth-century Germany. Sarah L. Leonard charts the process through which texts of many kinds-from popular medical works to stereoscope cards-were deemed dangerous to the intellectual and emotional lives of vulnerable consumers. She shows that these definitions often hinged as much on the content of texts as on their perceived capacity to distort the intellect and inflame the imagination. Leonard tracks the legal and mercantile channels through which sexually explicit material traveled as Prussian expansion opened new routes for the movement of culture and ideas. Official conceptions of obscenity were forged through a heterogeneous body of laws, police ordinances, and expert commentary. Many texts acquired the stigma of immorality because they served nonelite readers and passed through suspect spaces; books and pamphlets sold by peddlers or borrowed from fly-by-night lending libraries were deemed particularly dangerous. Early on, teachers and theologians warned against the effects of these materials on the mind and soul; in the latter half of the century, as the study of inner life was increasingly medicalized, physicians became the leading experts on the detrimental side effects of the obscene. In Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls, Leonard shows how distinctly German legal and medical traditions of theorizing obscenity gave rise to a new understanding about the mind and soul that endured into the next century.
The essay provides a detailed reading and analysis of Leoš Janáček’s letters to his late-life muse, Kamila Stösslová. By placing the letters alongside the literary texts on which Janáček based his important late works, it provides insight into the tangle of emotions and conflicts that he organized within the rubric of fantasy. Janáček’s muse was also “composed”: the contours of the person he loved and his relationship to her were not only rooted in fantasy but also mapped onto the characterizations and narratives specified in the works of literature he chose to set to music. The author proposes that cultural fantasy exists in continual dynamic interaction with individual unconscious fantasy, within which it is absorbed, incorporated, and re-expressed in new works of art.
Imperial Germany's governing elite frequently sought to censor literature that threatened established political, social, religious, and moral norms in the name of public peace, order, and security. It claimed and exercised a prerogative to intervene in literary life that was broader than that of its Western neighbors, but still not broad enough to prevent the literary community from challenging and subverting many of the social norms the state was most determined to defend. This study is the first systematic analysis in any language of state censorship of literature and theater in imperial Germany (1871-1918). To assess the role that formal state controls played in German literary and political life during this period, it examines the intent, function, contested legal basis, institutions, and everyday operations of literary censorship as well as its effectiveness and its impact on authors, publishers, and theater directors.
This article examines Freud's use of the Spanish language during his adolescent years. Based on an analysis of Freud's letters to Eduard Silberstein, Gallo examines the different affective relationship to Spanish and German: one was the language of love, the other the tongue of reason. The article links Freud's Spanish to his reading of Cervantes's Exemplary Novels and shows that a young Freud imitated the Cervantine portrayal of a dangerous female sexuality. Spanish was a secret language for Freud, one that he never used again after his correspondence with Silberstein came to an end.
I revisit Freud's case of Dora from the vantage point of current literary and psychoanalytic perspectives. Mahony (this issue) argues that Freud's understanding of Dora is unconvincing to the modern reader because Dora is a victim of trauma rather than sexual repression. I extend Mahony's ideas in terms of the development of psychoanalytic ideas, place Freud's view in the context of my psychoanalytic education in the mid-20th century, and suggest that modern contributions to trauma theory and memory further support the thesis that Dora was a victim of trauma rather than of conflicted libidinal desires.
Attentively reading Ferenczi's works and his scientific and ?auto-analytic? correspondence with Sigmund Freud, the author insists on the important contribution of the Hungarian psychoanalyst concerning the contemporary matter of the complex relations between biology and psychoanalysis: Ferenczi considered in fact that the unconscious was an occult phenomenon allowing an intersubjective thought-transference and was desperately searching for the material evidence of traumatic scenes and life events, reducing the psychical reality to body-writing. Freud was contrarily and prudently convinced that the unconscious processes were dependent on the materiality of the registration of the signifier, constituted by corporeal traces, but which had to be understood more in relation to language and speech phenomena than the reality of fallacious sensations.
The references to letters in Freud's dream of Irma's injection are utilized as a springboard for an examination of letters in the Dora case. Invoking the hypothesis that the outcome of an action can be heuristically regarded as having been its intended purpose, the author argues that Dora intended her parents to find the letter in which she threatened to commit suicide so that they would take her to a consultation with Freud, who would then write up her case in a manner that simultaneously exposed the sordid living arrangements of her family and inadvertently also incriminate himself as a domineering patriarch. Thus, the Dora case is not simply Freud's letter to Fliess, or even Freud's letter to posterity, but ultimately Dora's letter to posterity in which she purloins Freud and becomes the Other of his discourse.
American Imago 62.2 (2005) 193-216
Freud's first major case history, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), has long been recognized as one of the classic texts of psychoanalysis. While analysts have been inclined to mine the Dora case for its description and treatment of hysteria, feminists have reframed it as an illustration of the gender conflicts in Victorian Europe. From this standpoint, Freud is seen as a typical patriarch who, by using his position of power in the analytic situation, suppressed a woman's desperate attempt to extricate herself from a stifling role and reinforced the inequality that had caused her distress in the first place. Romanticizing hysteria, some feminists regard Dora as a heroine whose "illness" is a form of revolt against societal norms, while others tend to pity her as a victimized figure who constitutes her subjectivity around a pathological narrative that renders her protest impotent.
In the present essay, I seek to reexamine Dora's hysteria in the context of her "extended family," comprising both members of the family and close friends, which I conceptualize as a system. Grounding my interpretation in Christopher Bollas's (2000) theory of hysteria as a form of identification, I shall argue that hysteria was the preferred mode of communicative interaction governing this system. Thus, I shall present Dora's hysterical symptoms as emanating from and representing her relations with family members, especially her father, all of whom manifested illnesses. I shall conclude with an analysis of Dora's two dreams that shows them to express her evolving recognition of the role that disease played within her familial environment and her ambivalent attitude towards this "family law" of hysteria.
The family was allotted a prominent position in Freud's most distinctive vehicle for representing his theory and practice—the case history, which had evolved from the genre of the medical case study. The case study, employed in the practice of neuropathology, had viewed familial heredity as a determinative category in the etiology of disease, comparable in status to organic causation. Although Freud was critical of the notion of the neuropathic family and the clinical practices it entailed, believing that admitting heredity as a causative agent impeded understanding how nervous illness could be acquired, he did not relinquish the family as an etiological category. Upon developing the genre of the psychoanalytic case history, he reintroduced the family in an amended form, conceptualizing its influence as mainly social rather than biological. No longer a vehicle for the hereditary transmission of illness, the family in Freud's case histories creates a circumstantial setting in which a symptomatology is developed in common by the co-resident members. Illness is thus situated within a social network of object relations. In the Dora case, Freud delineated the methodological principles, derived from his conception of the family's function in the development of hysteria, which should guide the psychoanalyst's work:
Building on Freud's fundamental premise, Christopher Bollas, in Hysteria (2000), describes the family as a small "world" governed by its own conventions and laws, which are evoked through countless negotiations and interactions among its members. It thus forms a type of "primary object." Bollas views maturation as a movement through the family world, during which the child learns the prevailing conventions. These are internalized to form an inner object, which in turn functions as a prototype for further interaction with the world. A family, then, is for Bollas a complex system governed by rules and practices. In a family that communicates hysterically, the child absorbs this...
The author discusses some of the characteristics of Roy Schafer's contributions to psychoanalysis that he finds most valuable, such as his openness to uncertainty, his anti-reductive view of analytic constructions, his unique formulation of the analyst's role, and his close attention to how the patient engenders particular emotional reactions in the analyst. The author also presents a clinical vignette illustrating the value of the analyst's tolerance of uncertainty in the face of the patient's push for interpretations, explanations, and reassurance.
Starting with an exploration of how the concept of interpretation in analytical treatment has evolved, the author goes on to discuss the role and importance of interpretation in the changes that psychoanalysis brings about. Although interpretation is looked upon as the key element in psychoanalytic activity, the fact that it is subsumed within the transference raises questions as to its influence in the analytical domain. After discussing the foundations of interpretation with respect to the theory of psychoanalytic treatment and examining Strachey's views on this, the author defines the conditions and constraints surrounding interpretation and preparatory interventions in order to outline the essential nature of the interpretative process as seen against the wider background of the analyst's activity as manifested through speech. This leads to a discussion of the relative influence of insight and suggestion in bringing about therapeutic change. The author draws the conclusion that interpretation works as a metaphor in lifting repression.
Lacan reopened Dora's case in 1957. In his 1951 talk (published in 1952), transference was the key; in the 1957 seminar, he focused on hysteria. Dora loved by proxy and refused to be an object of heterosexual desire. Her object was homosexual because Mrs. K embodied Dora's essential question, femininity—a question that cannot be divorced from that of the lack of the phallus and her father's gift of nothing, which is the gift of love. There is no greater gift than the gift of what one does not have. Drawing from Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, Lacan concluded with an analysis of the cultural meaning of the gift.
This first English edition of "Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie" has been translated by James Strachey. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Madame Bovary is the story of a beautiful young woman who marries a luckless country doctor. She tries to escape the narrow confines of her life through a series of passionate affairs, hoping to find in other men the romantic ideal she always dreamed about. Flaubert's daring description of adultery and sinfulness caused a national scandal when it was first published, and this masterpiece of realist literature has lost none of its impact today.
Scarcely any theoretical discourse has had greater impact on literary and cultural studies than psychoanalysis, and yet hardly any theoretical discourse is more widely misunderstood and abused. In Psychoanalyzing, Serge Leclaire offers a thorough and lucid exposition of the psychoanalysis that has emerged from the French âreturn to Freud,â unfolding and elaborating the often enigmatic pronouncements of Jacques Lacan and patiently working through the central tenets of the âEcole freudienne.â As a concise but nuanced introduction to the subject, Psychoanalyzing will prove indispensable to anyone interested in psychoanalysis, especially those curious about its Lacanian reconceptualization and the linguistic theory of the unconscious and its effects. Leclaireâs study is particularly valuable for the way its author links theoretical issues to psychoanalytic practice. The opening chapterâon listeningâhighlights the necessity, and the impossibility, of the âfloating attentionâ required from the analyst, while preparing the reader for the following chapters, which deal with such topics as unconscious desire, how to speak of the body, and the intrication of the object and the âletterâ (i.e. the signifier, the âmaterial support that concrete discourse borrows from languageâ). The final chapterâon transferenceâshows how the analytical dialogue differs from other dialogues. Despite the intricacy of its subject matter, the book takes very little for granted. It does not simplify the issues it presents, but does not assume a reader familiar with the concepts of psychoanalysis, let alone a reader acquainted with its French inflection. Each basic concept and term is carefully explained, so that the reader knows the meaning of âtransferenceâ or âprimal sceneâ before proceeding to more advanced elements of psychoanalysis. Leclaireâs text is not intended merely to be âuser friendlyâ; its purpose is to clarify and advance, rather than to impress or convert.
Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905a,b) is well recognized for making psychoanalytic history. In the Dora paper Freud first publicized a new theory of the etiology of neurosis that made fantasy and repression central. And yet the paper also refers to trauma and seduction. What role do they play in the text? Part 1 shows that this is not a case of Freud broadening his etiological framework by adding a new focus to older ones. Rather, the references to trauma and seduction in Dora need to be understood in two ways. First, there is in the 1905 paper an implicit theoretical autobiography, of which Freud's references to the trauma and seduction theories early in the paper are part. Second, Freud's reference to seduction later in the paper constitutes Freud's first public critique of the seduction theory. The Dora paper is the actual site of the abandonment of the seduction theory. In Part 2 the focus shifts to the text's "theoretical unconscious." Despite its rejection of the seduction theory in its avowed theorizing, the text is haunted by displaced signifiers of the theory. This suggests that Freud was unconsciously conflicted about not applying the insights of the seduction theory to Dora.
Early advances in psychoanalytic knowledge, profound though they were, were incomplete structures to be built upon, modified, and partially discarded. In addition to errors due to insufficient knowledge, Freud's difficulties with Dora stemmed from countertransference. Dora's transference included an identification with a governess/maid. Important oedipal role played by a nursemaid in Freud's life made him vulnerable to being left by Dora. The maid, Monika, "the prime originator" of Freud's neurosis, seduced him, chastised him, and taught him of hell. In his self-analysis she was associated with Freud's mother who left him when she gave birth to his sister. When he was two and a half years old, Monika was discharged and jailed for stealing. I suggest that Freud's attraction to Dora revealed itself in his libidinal imagery of the treatment and his premature sexual interpretations, the effects of which he misjudged. Defending against his attraction, he pushed her away from him, did not act to keep her in analysis or allow her to reenter analysis later. In addition, since Dora had left him as he must have felt his childhood nursemaid had, he reacted as if she were that maid. Hurt, saddened, and angered, he used reversal and deserted her, thus damping his feelings.
This paper discusses some technical problems arising from the diverse ways our patients have of making themselves understood or not understood. It aims to show how patients who have reached the depressive position are able to use understanding in a way that is very different from those in the paranoid-schizoid position. It describes particular methods that the latter patients have of avoiding understanding by splitting and projection and attempting unconsciously to draw the analyst into a type of acting out in the transference. It stresses the importance for the analyst, of listening to the patient in terms of the position from which he is operating, so that contact can be achieved and with it real understanding, as opposed to subtle acting out and pseudo-understanding.
We have focused this paper on an attempt to examine the process occurring in the transformations which Alonso Quijano undergoes when becoming Don Quixote as an expression of his disturbance, and the evolution at work during his travels to dissipate his grandiose narcissism by means of a cure of humiliation which makes him humble and able to recognize dependence and internal conflicts, finally culminating in the working through of the depressive position and the resolution of the prior schizo-paranoid phase just before his death. The disturbances of Alonso Quijano begin when he is faced with the anxieties provoked by approaching old age and death. The internal conflict over not-worked through mournings may lead to making reparations and to the stimulus of creativity and towards maturity. Badly resolved, it progresses to involutive psychosis which may result in psychotic destruction. Cervantes creates a 'hero' whom he treats in humorous and tragicomic ways, a hero who rises regressively from his unresolved Oedipus conflict, and with the traits of a grandiose self and with the need to 'repair' the projected image, deforming reality and at the same time being slowly obliged to take it into account.