20
STEVEN MARCUS
Freud got the date of his case wrong. When he wrote or rewrote it,
either in January 1901 or in 1905, he assigned the case to the
autumn of 1899 instead of 1900. And he continued to date it
incorrectly, repeating the error in 1914 in the "History of the
Psychoanalytic Movement" and again in 1923 when he added a
number of new footnotes to the essay on the occasion of its
publication in the eighth volume of his
Gesammelte Schrtften.
Among the many things suggested by this recurrent error is that in
some sense he had still not done with Dora, as indeed I think we
shall see he had not. The modem reader may be inclined to remark
that these questions of date, of revision, problems of textual status
and authorial uncertainties of attitude would be more suitable to a
discussion of a literary text -- a poem, play, or novel -- than to
a work of "science." But such a conception of the nature of
scientific discourse -- particularly the modes of discourse that
are exercised in those disciplines which are not preponderantly or
uniformly mathematical or quantitative -- has to undergo a
radical revision.
The general form of what Freud has written bears certain
suggestive resemblances to a modem experimental novel. Its nar–
rative and expository course: for example, is neither linear nor
rectilinear; instead its organization is pl-astic, involuted, and heter–
ogeneous, and follows spontaneously an inner logic that seems
frequently to be at odds with itself; it often loops back around
itself and is multidimensional in its representation of both its
material and itself. Its continuous innovations in formal structure
seem unavoidably
to
be dictated by its substance, by the danger–
ous, audacious, disreputable, and problematical character of the
experiences being represented and dealt with, and by the equally
scandalous intentions of the author and the outr:ageous character
of the role he has had the presumption to assume. In content,
however, what Freud has written is in parts rather like a play by
Ibsen, or more precisely like a series of Ibsen's plays. And as one
reads through the case of Dora, scenes and characters from such
works as
Pillars of Society, A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of
the People, The Wild Duck,
and
Rosmersholm
rise up and flit
through the mind. There is, however, this difference. In this
Ibsen-like drama, Freud is not only Ibsen, the creator and play-
