Filmed sequence — it is the body of Dora which speaks pain, desire, speaks a force divided and contained.
Hélène Cixous, Portrait de Dora (Paris 1976), p.36.
What would it mean to reopen the case of Dora now?1 The quotations above point to an urgency that is nothing less than that of the present dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism, a dialogue that seems crucial and yet constantly slides away from the point of a possible encounter, psychoanalysis attempting to delimit an area that might be called femininity within the confines of the drive, within a theory of sexuality that constantly places and displaces the concept of sexual difference, feminism starting precisely from that difference which it then addresses to psychoanalysis as a demand, the demand for the theory of its construction. Feminism, therefore, first turns to psychoanalysis because it is seen as the best place to describe the coming into being of femininity, which, in a next stage, it can be accused of producing or at least reproducing, sanctioning somehow within its own discourse. And then, where it fails, as it did with Dora, this can be taken as the sign of the impossibility of its own project, the impossibility then becoming the feminine, which, by a twist that turns the language of psychoanalysis against itself, it represses. Quite simply, the case of Dora is seen to fail because Dora is repressed as a woman by psychoanalysis and what is left of Dora as somehow retrievable is the insistence of the body as feminine, and since it is a case of hysteria, in which the symptom speaks across the body itself, the feminine is placed not only as source (origin and exclusion) but also as manifestation (the symptom). Within this definition, hysteria is assimilated to a body as site of the feminine, outside discourse, silent finally, or, at best, ‘dancing’.
What I want to do in this essay is look at some of these difficulties through the case of Dora — not simply to accuse the case of its failure, which failure must, however, be described and interrogated; not to produce an alternative reading whose content would be the feminine; but nonetheless to bring out some of the problems of the case precisely as the problem of the feminine within psychoanalysis in its urgency for us now. To do this will involve a discussion of the case itself, how its failure relates to changes in the concept of sexuality, and how these changes, which come at least partly in response to that failure, make certain conceptions of the feminine problematic.
The essay falls into three parts: (1) the failure of the case, its relation to Freud’s concept of femininity; (2) the relation of changes in the concept of femininity to changes in that of analytic practice (transference), and then to the concept of the unconscious in its relation to representation (hysterical and schizophrenic language); and (3) how these changes make impossible any notion of the feminine that would be outside representation,2 the failure of the case of Dora being precisely the failure to articulate the relation between these two terms.
The case of Dora
The case of Dora was first drafted under the title ‘Dreams and Hysteria’ in 1901, the year after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. Yet it did not appear until 1905, in the same year as the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The space between the two dates is punctuated by Freud’s own comments on his hesitancy regarding a case that had promised so much, that he had in fact promised as nothing less than the sequel to The Interpretation of Dreams, as the link between clinical practice and dream analysis, between the etiology of the symptom and the primary process. The history of the case, its hesitancy, in this sense speaks for itself, for it is caught quite literally between those two aspects of Freud’s work, the theory of the unconscious and the theory of sexuality, whose relation or distance is what still concerns us today, as if the case of Dora could only appear finally at the point where the implications of its failure had already been displaced onto a theory of sexuality, by no means complete and still highly problematic, but at least acknowledged as such. Dora then falls, or fails, in the space between these two texts, and Freud himself writes: “While the case history before us seems particularly favoured as regards the utilization of dreams, in other respects it has turned out poorer than I could have wished”.3
What then was wrong with Dora? First, in the simple sense of diagnosis and/or symptom, leaving aside at this stage the question of the status of the diagnostic category itself, not forgetting however that it was from this very question that psychoanalysis set out (rejection of hysteria as an independent clinical entity).4 Dora, then, as first presented or brought to Freud; was suffering from tussis nervosa and periodic attacks of aphonia (nervous cough and loss of voice), ‘possibly migraines, together with depression, hysterical unsociability, and a taedium vitae which was probably not entirely genuine’.5 Her entering into the treatment had been precipitated by the discovery of a suicide note by her parents and a momentary loss of consciousness after a row with her father, subsequently covered by amnesia. The symptoms are so slight, in a sense, that Freud feels it necessary to excuse to the reader the attention he is to give to the case, the status he is granting it as exemplary of a neurotic disorder whose etiology he sets himself to describe.
The situation is all the more complex in that the case is offered as a ‘fragment’, and this in a number of different senses: first, the case was broken off by the patient; second, it was not committed to writing until after the completion of the treatment (only the words of the dreams were recorded immediately after the session); and third, as a corollary to the second factor, only the results of the analysis and not its process were transcribed. Finally, Freud explicitly states that, where the etiology of the case stalled, he appeals to other cases to fill in the gaps, always indicating the point at which ‘the authentic part ends and my construction begins’.6
Each of these notions of fragment are crucial for the case, and each is double-edged. If the case is broken off after three months, this only ‘fragments’ it insofar as the whole practice of psychoanalysis had changed from the immediate analysis of the symptom to an engagement with whatever presented itself to the mind of the patient in any one session, so that the inadequacy of the time span is the consequence of a new privileging of the discourse of the patient herself. Thus the distinction between the results and the process of analysis, which is the basis of the second and third notions of fragment, in one sense collapses on the first (this incidentally should be remembered in any simple dismissal of the case as the suppression of the patient’s ‘own’ language). On the other hand, the process is missing from the case in another and more crucial sense, that of the relation between the analyst and the patient, which Freud calls the transference, and to whose neglect he partly ascribes its failure. All these points should be borne in mind as the signs of this failure, and yet each is a paradox: the process is there, but it is somehow elided; a meaning or interpretation of Dora’s ‘complaint’ is produced, but it is clearly inadequate.
To give a history of the case is therefore impossible, but a number of central points can be disengaged that I hope will be of help in the discussion to follow:7
1. The parameters of the case are defined by the sexual circuit that runs between Dora’s parents and their ‘intimate’ friends, Herr and Frau K., in which Dora herself is caught.
2. Thus, Dora is courted by Herr K., and the crisis that leads to the treatment is partly precipitated by an attempted seduction on his part, which she repudiates.
3. Behind this is the affair between Dora’s father and Frau K.; behind this, crucially, the absence of Dora’s mother in her relationship both to Dora (‘unfriendly’)8 and to Dora’s father (hence his relationship with Frau K.).
4. Behind this again, there is an intimacy which is first that between the two families but which also completes the sexual circuit between them — the intimacy of Dora and Frau K., whose precise content is never given and that functions exactly as the ‘secret’ of the case, the source of the sexual knowledge that Dora undoubtedly has, and that thus cuts straight across from the ‘manifest’ behaviour of the participants to the ‘latent’ etiology of the symptoms (Freud’s theory of hysteria).
Put at its most crude, Freud’s interpretation of the case is based on a simple identification of the Oedipal triangle,