22
STEVEN MARCUS
fragments only
appear
to be incoherent and disparate; in actuality
they eventually will be understood as members of a whole.
Furthermore, Freud goes on, there is still another "kind of
incompleteness" to be found in this work, and this time it has
been "intentionally introduced." He has deliberately chosen not
to reproduce "the process of interpretation to which the patient's
associations and communications had to be subjected, but only
the results of that process." That is to say, what we have before us
is not a transcription in print of a tape recording of eleven weeks
of analysis but something that is abridged, edited, synthesized, and
constructed from the very outset. And as if this were not enough,
Freud introduces yet another context in which the work has to be
regarded as fragmentary and incomplete.
It
is obvious, he argues,
"that a single case history, even if it were complete and open to no
doubt, cannot provide an answer to all questions arising out of the
problem of hysteria." Thus, like a modernist writer - - which in
part he is -- Freud begins by elaborately announcing the prob–
lematical status of his undertaking and the dubious character of
his achievement.
Even more, like some familiar "unreliable narrator" in mod–
ernist fiction, Freud pauses at regular intervals to remind the reader
of this case ' history that "my insight into the complex of events
composing it [has] remained fragmentary," that his understanding
of it remains in some essential sense permanently occluded. This
darkness and constraint are the result of a number of converging
circumstances, some of which have already been touched on and
include the shortness of the analysis and its having been broken
off by Dora at a crucial point. But it also includes the circum–
stance that the analysis -- any analysis -- must proceed by frag–
mentary methods, by analyzing thoughts and events bit by discon–
tinuous bit. And at the end of one virtuoso passage in which Freud
demonstrates through a series of referential leaps and juxta–
positions the occurrence in Dora's past of childhood masturbation,
he acknowledges that this is the essence of his procedure. "Part of
this material," he writes, "I was able to obtain directly from the
analysis, but the rest required supplementing. And, indeed, the
method by which the occurrence of masturbation in Dora's case
has been verified has shown us that material .belonging to a single
