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STEVEN MARCUS
keep himself in the company of Frau
K.,
Freud felt "obliged to point
out to the patient that her present ill-health was just as much actuated
by motives and was just as tendentious as had been Frau K.'s illness,
which she had understood so well." At such .moments Dora begins to
mirror the other characters in the case, as they in differing degrees all
mirror one another as well.
Part of that sense, we have come to understand, is that the writer is
or ought to be conscious of the part that he -- in whatever guise, voice,
or persona he chooses -- invariably and un avoidab ly plays in the world
he represents. Oddly enough, although there is none of his writings in
which Freud is more vigorously active than he is here, it is precisely this
activity that he subjects to the least self-conscious scrutiny, that he
almost appears to fend off. For example, I will now take my head in my
hands and suggest that his extraordinary analysis of Dora's first dream is
inadequate on just this count. He is only dimly and marginally aware of
his central place in it (he is clearly incorporated into the figure of Dora's
father), comments on it only as an addition to Dora's own addendum to
the dream, and does nothing to exploit it. Instead of analyzing his own
part in what he has done and what he is writing, Freud continues to
behave like an unreliable narrator, treating the material about which he is
writing as if it were literature but excluding himself from both that
treatment and that material. At one moment he refers to himself as
someone "who has learnt to appreciate the delicacy of the fabric of
structures such as dreams," intimating what I surmise he incontestably
believed, that dreams are natural works of art. And when, in the analysis
of the second dream, we find ourselves back at the scene at the lake
again; when Dora recalls that the only plea to her of Herr
K.
that she
could remember is "You know I get nothing out of my wife"; when
these were precisely the same words used by Dora's father in describing
to Freud his relation to Dora's mother; and when Freud speculates that
Dora may even "have heard her father make the same complaint . .. just
as I myself did from his own lips" -- when a conjunction such as this
occurs, then we know we are in a novel, probably by Proust. Time has
recurred, the repressed has returned, plot, double plot, and counterplot
have all intersected, and " reality" turns out to be something that for all
practical purposes is indistinguishable from a systematic fictional
creation.
Finally when at the very end Freud turns to deal -- rudimentarily
as it happens -- with the decisive issue of the case, the transferences,
everything is transformed into literature, into reading and writing. Trans–
ferences, he writes, "are new editions or facsimiles" of tendencies,
fantasies, and relations in which "the person of the physician" replaces
