PARTISAN REVIEW
21
wright; he is also and directly one of the characters in the action,
and in the end suffers in a way that is comparable to the suffering
of the others.
What I have been reiterating is that the case of Dora is first
and last an extraordinary piece of writing, and it is to this
circumstance in several of its most striking aspects that we should
direct our attention. For it is a case history, a kind or genre of
writing -- that is to say a particular way of conceiving and
constructing human experience in written language - - that in
Freud's hands became something that it never was before.
III.
The ambiguities and difficulties begin with the very title of
the work, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria."
It
is a
fragment in the sense that its "results" are "incomplete." The
treatment was "broken off at the patient's own wish," at a time
when certain problems "had not been attacked and others had
only been imperfectly elucidated." It follows that the analysis
itself is "only a fragment," as are "the following pages" of writing
which present it. To which the modern reader, flushed with the
superior powers of his educated irony, is tempted to reply: how is
it that this fragment is also a whole, an achieved ' totality, an
integral piece of writing called a case history? And how is it,
furthermore, that this "fragment" is fuller, richer, and more com–
plete than the most "complete" case histories of anyone else? But
there is no more point in asking such questions of Freud -–
particularly at this preliminary stage of proceedings -- than there
would be in posing similar "theoretical" questions to Joyce or
Proust.
The work is also fragmentary, Freud continues, warming to
his subject, because of the very method he has chosen to pursue;
on this plan, that of nondirectional free association, "everything
that .has to do with the clearing-up of a particular symptom
emerges piecemeal, woven into various contexts, and distributed
over widely separate periods of time." Freud's technique itself is
therefore fragmentary; his way of penetrating to the micro–
structure -- the "finer structure" as he calls it -- of a neurosis is
to allow the material to emerge piecemeal. At the same time these
