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STEVEN MARCUS
him, and you took it that he was only waiting till you were grown up
enough to be his wife. I imagine that this was a perfectly serious plan for
the future in your eyes.'" But Freud does not say this in order to
contradict it or categorize it as a fantasy of the adolescent girl's uncon–
scious imagination. On the contrary, he has very different ideas in view,
for he goes on to tell her,
"You have not even got the right to assert that it was out of the
question for Herr K. to have had any such intention; you have told
me enough about him that points directly towards his having such
an intention. Nor does his behavior at
L-
contradict this view.
After all, you did not let him finish his speech and do not know
what he meant to say to you."
He has not done with her yet, for he then goes on to bring in the other
relevant parties and offers her the following conclusion:
"Incidentally, the scheme would by no means have been so imprac–
ticable. Your father's relation with Frau
K. ...
made it certain that
her consent to a divorce could be obtained; and you can get
anything you like out of your father. Indeed, if your temptation at
L-
had had a different upshot, this would have been
the only
possible solution for all the parties concerned."
(italics mine)
No one -- at least no one in recent years -- has accused Freud of
being a swinger, but this is without question a swinging solution that is
being offered.
It
is of course possible that he feels free to make such a
proposal only because he knows that nothing in the way of action can
come of it; but with him you never can tell -- as I hope I have already
demonstrated. One has only to imagine what in point of ego strength,
balance, and self-acceptance would have been required of Dora alone in
this arrangement of wife-and-daughter-swapping to recognize at once
its extreme irresponsibility, to say the least. At the same time we must
bear in mind that such a suggestion is not incongruent with the recently
revealed circumstance that Freud analyzed his own daughter. Genius
makes up its own rules as it goes along -- and breaks them as well. This
"only possible solution" was one of the endings that Freud wanted to
write to Dora's story; he had others in mind besides, but none of them
were to come about. Dora refused or was unable to let him do this; she
refused to be a character in the story that Freud was composing for her,
and wanted to finish it herself. As we now know, the ending she wrote
was a very bad one indeed.
