PARTISAN REVIEW
101
some earlier person. When the substitution is a simple one, the trans–
ferences may be said to be "merely new impressions or reprints": Freud
is explicit about the metaphor he is using. Others "more ingeniously
constructed ... will no longer be new impressions, but revised editions."
And he goes on, quite carried away by these figures, to institute a
comparison between dealing with the transference and other analytic
procedures. "It is easy to le arn how to interpret dreams," he remarks,
"to extract from the patient's associations his ).mconscious thoughts and
memories, and to practise similar explanatory arts: for these the patient
himself will always provide the text." The startling group of suppositions
contained in this sentence should not distract us from noting the sub–
merged ambiguity in it. The patient does not merely provide the text; he
also
is
the text, the writing to be read, the language to be interpreted.
With the transference, however, we move to a different degree of
difficulty and onto a different level of explanation.
It
is only after the
transference has been resolved, Freud concludes, "that a patient arrives
at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connections which have
been constructed during the analysis." I will refrain from entering the
veritable series of Chinese boxes opened up by tha t last statement, and
will content myself by proposing that in this passage as a whole Freud' is
using literature and writing not only creatively and heuristically -- as he
so often does -- but defensively as well.
The writer or novelist is not the only partial role taken up uncon–
sciously or semiconsciously by Freud in the course of this work. He also
figures prominently in the text in his capacity as a nineteenth-century
man of science and as a representative Victorian critic -- employing the
seriousness, energy, and commitment of the Victorian ethos to deliver
itself from its own excesses. We have already seen him affirming the
positive nature of female sexuality, "the genital sensation which would
certainly have been felt by a healthy girl in such circumstances," but
which Dora did not feel. He goes a good deal further than this. At a
fairly early momen t in the analysis he faces Dora wi th the fact that she
has "an aim in view which she hoped to gain by her illness. That aim
could be none other than to detach her father from Frau
K."
Her prayers
and arguments had not worked; her suicide letter and fainting fits had
done no better. Dora knew quite well how much her father loved her,
and, Freud continues to address her:
I felt quite convinced that she would recover at once if only her
father were to tell her that he had sacrificed Frau K. for the sake of
her health. But, I added, I hoped he would not let himself be
persuaded to do this, for then she would have learned what a
powerful weapon she had in her hands, and she would certainly not
