PARTISAN REVI EW
105
over into something else. Due allowance has always to be made for the
absolutizing tendency of genius, especially when as in the case of Dora
the genius is writing with license of a poet and the ambiguity of a seer.
But Freud goes beyond this.
When Dora reports her second dream, Freud spends two hours of
inspired insight in elucidating some of its meanings. "At the end of the
second session," he writes, "I expressed my satisfaction at the results."
The satisfaction in question is in large measure self-satisfaction, for Dora
responded to Freud's expression of it with the following words uttered
in "a depreciatory tone: 'Why, has anything so remarkable come out?' "
That satisfaction was to be of short duration, for Dora opened the third
session by telling Freud that this was the last time she would be there
-- it was December 31, 1900. Freud's remarks that "her breaking off so
unexpectedly just when my hopes of a successful termination of the
treatmen t were at their highest, and her thus bringing those hopes to
nothing -- this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part" are
only partly warranted. There was, or should have been, nothing un–
expected about Dora's decision to terminate; indeed Freud himself on
the occasion of the first dre am had already detected such a decision on
Dora's part and had communicated this finding to her. Moreover, his
"highest" hopes for a successful outcome of the treatment seem almost
entirely without foundation. In such a context the hopes of success
almost unavoidably become a matter of self-reference and point to the
immense
intellectual
triumph that Freud was aware he was achieving
with the material adduced by his patient. On the matter of "vengeance,"
however, Freud cannot be faulted; Dora was, among many other things,
certainly getting her own back on Freud by refusing to allow him to
bring her story to an end in the way he saw fit. And he in turn is quite
candid about the injury he felt she had caused him . "No one who, like
me," he writes, "conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons
that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can
expect to come through the struggle unscathed."
This admission of vulnerability, which Freud artfully manages to
blend with the suggestion that he is a kind of modern combination of
Jacob and Faust, is in keeping with the weirdness and wildness of the
case as a whole and with this last hour. That hour recurs to the scene at
the lake, two years before, and its aftermath. And Freud ends this final
hour with the following final interpretation . He reminds Dora that she
was in love with Herr K.; that she wanted him to divorce his wife; that
even though she was quite young at the time she wanted" 'to wait for
