104
STEVEN MARCUS
part of the interpretation," but this does not deter him for a moment
from pressing on with further interpretations of the same order; and this
entire transaction is in its character and quality prototypical for the case
as a whole. The Freud we have here is not the sage of the Berggasse, not
the master who delivered the incomparable
Introductory Lectures
of
1916-1917, not the tragic Solomon of
Civilization and Its Discontents.
This is an earlier Freud, the Freud of the Fliess letters, the Freud of the
case of Dora as well.
It
is Freud the relentless investigator pushing on no
matter what. The Freud that we meet with here is a demonic Freud, a
Freud who is the servant of his
daimon.
That
daimon
in whose service
Freud knows no limits is the spirit of science, the truth, or "reality" -–
it doesn't matter which; for him they are all the same. Yet it must be
emphasized that the "reality" Freud insists upon is very different from
the "reality" that Dora is claiming and clinging to. And it has to be
admitted that not only does Freud overlook for the most part this
critical difference; he also adopts no measures for dealing with it. The
demon of interpretation has taken hold of him, and it is this power that
presides over the case of Dora.
In fact as the case history advances it becomes increasingly clear to
the careful reader that Freud and not Dora has become the central
character in the action. Freud the narrator does in the writing what
Freud the first psychoanalyst appears to have done in actuality. We begin
to sense that it is his story that is being written and not hers that is being
retold. Instead of letting Dora appropriate her own story, Freud became
the appropriator of it. The case history belongs progressively less to her
than it does to him. It may be that this was an inevitable development,
that it is one of the typical outcomes of an analysis that fails, that Dora
was under any circumstances unable to become the appropriator of her
own history, the teller of her own story. Blame does not necessarily or
automatically attach to Freud. Nevertheless, by the time he gets to the
second dream he is able to write, "I shall present the material produced
during the analysis of this dream in the somewhat haphazard order in
which it recurs to my mind." He makes such a presentation for several
reasons, most of which are legitimate. But one reason almost certainly is
that by this juncture it is his
own
mind that chiefly matters to him, and
it is
his
associations to her dream that are of principal importance.
At the same time, as the account progresses, Freud has never been
more inspired, rpore creative, more inventive; as the reader sees Dora
gradually slipping further and further away from Freud, the power and
complexity of the writing reach dizzying proportions. At times they pass
