PARTISAN REVIEW
107
VI.
In this extraordinary work Freud and Dora often appear as uncon–
scious, parodic refractions of each other. Both of them insist with
implacable will upon the primClcy of "reality," although the realities each
has in mind differ radically. Both of them use reality, "the truth," as a
weapon. Freud does so by fo[cing interpretations upon Dora before she
is
ready for them or can accept them. And this aggressive truth bounds
back upon the teller, for Dora leaves him. Dora in turn uses her version
of reality -- it is "outer" reality that she insists upon -- aggressively as
well. She has used it from the outset against her father, and five months
after she left Freud she had the opportunity to use it against the K.'s. In
May of 1901 one of the K.'s children dies. Dora took the occasion to pay
them a visit of condolence --
She took her revenge on them . ... To the wife she said: "I know
you have an affair with my father"; and the other did not deny it.
From the husband she drew an admission of the scene by the lake
which he had disputed, and brought the news of her vindication
home to her father.
She told this to Freud fifteen months after she had departed, when she
returned one last time to visit him -- to ask him, without sincerity, for
further help, and "to finish her story." She finished her story, and as for
the rest Freud remarks, "I do not know what kind of help she wanted
from me, but I promised to forgive her for having deprived me of the
satisfaction of affording her a far more radical cure for her troubles."
But the matter is not hopelessly obscure, as Freud himself has
already confessed. What went wrong with the case, "its great defect,
which led to its being broken off prematurely," was something that had
to do with the transference; and Freud writes that "I did not succeed in
mastering the transference in good time." He was in fact just beginning
to learn about this therapeutic phenomenon, and the present passage is
the first really important one about it to have been written. It is also in
the nature of things heavily occluded. On Dora's side the transference
went wrong in several senses. In the first place there was the failure on
her part to establish an adequate positive transference to Freud. She was
not free enough to respond to him erotically -- in fantasy -- or
intellectually -- by accepting his interpretations: both or either of these
being prerequisites for the mysterious "talking cure" to begin to work.
And in the second, halfway through the case a negative transference
began to emerge, quite clearly in the first dream. Freud writes th.at he
