Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Jacqueline Rose

is proffered to Herr K. Thus her repudiation of the latter is the inevitable consequence of an outrage that takes Herr K. as its immediate object, and yet behind which is the figure of the father, who is the object of real reproach. In this way Dora’s rejection of Herr K., ‘still quite young and of prepossessing appearance’ (sic)⁹ can be seen as simultaneously Oedipal and hysterical (repudiation of her own desire). Dora’s own desire is defined here as unproblematic — heterosexual and genital. At this stage Freud was still bound to the traumatic theory of neurosis, and he thus traces the repudiation on the part of Dora to an attempted embrace by Herr K. when she was fourteen, which was also repulsed — ‘the behaviour of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical’.¹⁰ To be more precise, therefore, we would have to say that the Oedipal triangle is there in the case history but that it is held off by this notion of trauma, which makes of Herr K. the first repudiated object (the seducer). In his analysis of Dora’s first dream, there is no doubt that Freud interprets it as a summoning up of an infantile affection for the father secondarily, as a defense against Dora’s persistent and unquestioned desire for Herr K. (The second dream is then interpreted as revealing the vengeance/hostility against her father that could not achieve expression in the first.)

      Now the way in which the case history is laid out immediately spoils the picture, or the ‘fine poetic conflict’¹¹ as Freud himself puts it, since Dora has been totally complicit in the affair between her father and Frau K., and it had in fact been entirely through her complicity that the situation had been able to continue. Furthermore, Dora’s symptom, her cough, reveals an un-mistakable identification with her father, a masculine identification confirmed by the appearance of her brother at three points in the case history — each time as the object of identification, whether as recollection, screen memory, or manifest content of the dream. The revealing of this masculine identification leads directly to the uncovering of the ‘true’ object of Dora’s jealousy (made clear if for no other reason by the overinsistence of her reproaches against her father), that is, Frau K. herself, with whom Dora had shared such intimacy, secrecy, and confessions, even about Frau K.’s unsatisfactory relationship with her husband — in which case, Freud asks, how on earth could Dora in fact be in love with Herr K.? We may well ask.

      What we therefore have in the case is a series of contradictions, which Freud then attempts to resolve by a mandatory appeal to the properties of the unconscious itself (‘thoughts in the unconscious live very comfortably side by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes’),¹² revealing a theory of interpretation actually functioning as ‘resistance’ to the pressing need to develop a theory of sexuality, whose complexity or difficulty manifests itself time and again in the case. Thus in his analysis of the hysterical symptom — aphonia, or loss of voice — Freud is forced toward the beginnings of a concept of component sexuality (a sexuality multiple and fragmented and not bound to the genital function), since the symptom is clearly not only the response to the absence of Herr K. (impossibility of the communication desired) but also a fantasied identification with a scene of imagined sexual satisfaction between Dora’s father and Frau K. This is the fullest discussion of sexuality in the book, which anticipates many of the theses of the Three Essays, but it is conducted by Freud as an apology for Dora (and himself) — a justification of the discussion of sexual matters with a young girl (the question therefore being that of censorship, Freud’s discovery reduced to the articulation of sexuality to a woman) and then as insistence on the perverse and undifferentiated nature of infantile sexuality so that Dora’s envisaging of a scene of oral gratification — for that is what it is — might be less of a scandal.

      The difficulties therefore clearly relate to the whole concept of sexuality, and not just to the nature of the object (for the importance of this, see later in this essay on the concept of the sexual aim), but Freud’s own resistance appears most strongly in relation to Frau K.’s status as an object of desire for Dora. Thus this aspect of the case surfaces only symptomatically in the text, at the end of the clinical picture that it closes, and in a series of footnotes and additions to the interpretation of the second dream and in the postscript.

      It is in her second dream that the identification of Dora with a man (her own suitor) is unquestionable, and since the analysis reveals a latent obsession with the body of the woman, the Madonna, defloration, and finally childbirth, the recuperation of a primary autoeroticism (the masturbation discerned behind the first dream) by a masculine fantasy of self-possession now charted across the question of sexual difference is clear.¹³ Yet Freud makes of the dream an act of vengeance, as he does the breaking off of the case, which perhaps not suprisingly is its immediate sequel. The way this dream raises the question of sexual difference will be discussed below. It should already serve as a caution against any assimilation of Dora’s homosexual desire for Frau K. to a simple preoedipal instance. Note for the moment that Freud is so keen to hang onto a notion of genital heterosexuality that it leads him, first, to identify the fantasy of childbirth that analysis revealed behind the second dream as an obscure ‘maternal longing’¹⁴ outdoing in advance Karen Horney’s appeals to such a longing as natural, biological and pregiven in her attacks on Freud’s later work on femininity; and second, to classify Dora’s masculine identification and desire for Frau K. as ‘gynaecophilic’ and to make it ‘typical of the unconscious erotic life of hysterical girls’¹⁵, that is, to use as an explanation of hysteria the very factor that needs to be explained.

      Finally, it should be pointed out that the insistence on a normal genital sexuality is obviously related to the question of transference. Freud himself attributes the failure of the case to his failure in ‘mastering the transference in good time’,¹⁶ while his constant footnoting of this discussion with references to his overlooking the homosexual desire of this patient indicates that the relation between these two aspects of the case remains unformulated. At one level it is easy that Freud’s failure to understand his own implication in the case (countertransference) produced a certain definition of sexuality as a demand on Dora, which, it should be noted, she rejects (walks out). On the other hand, and more crucially, Freud’s own definition of transference in its relation to the cure can be seen as caught in the same trap as that of his theory of sexuality, since he sees the former as the obstacle to the uncovering of ‘new memories, dealing, probably, with actual events’¹⁷ (relics of the seduction theory), just as he defines neurosis as the ‘incapacity for meeting a real erotic demand’,¹⁸ and even allows (thereby undermining the whole discovery of psychoanalysis) that neurosis might ultimately be vanquished by ‘reality’.¹⁹ The concept of a possible recovery from neurosis through reality and that of an unproblematic feminine sexuality are coincident in the case.

      ‘In fact she was a feminist’

      The reference comes from Freud’s case on the ‘Psychogenesis of Homosexuality in a Woman’,²⁰ and in one sense the step from the failure of the case of Dora to this case, which appeared in 1920, is irresistible — not, however, in order to classify Dora as homosexual in any simple sense, but precisely because in this case Freud was led to an acknowledgement of the homosexual factor in all feminine sexuality, an acknowledgement which was to lead to his revision of his theories of the Oedipus complex for the girl. For in this article he is in a way at his most radical, rejecting the concept of cure, insisting that the most psychoanalysis can do is restore the original bisexual disposition of the patient, defining homosexuality as nonneurotic. Yet, at the same time, his explanation of this last factor — the lack of neurosis ascribed to the fact that the object-choice was established not in infancy but after puberty — is then undermined by his being obliged to trace back the homosexual attraction to a moment prior to the oedipal instance, the early attachment to the mother, in which case either the girl is neurotic (which she clearly is not) or all women are neurotic (which indeed they might be).

      The temptation is therefore to see the case of Dora as anticipating, through the insistence of Dora’s desire for Frau K. as substitute for the absent mother in the case (‘the mystery turns upon your mother’²¹, Freud says in relation to the first dream), the nature of the preoedipal attachment between mother and girl child, an attachment Freud finally makes specific to feminine sexuality in its persistence and difficulty.