PARTISAN REVIEW
23
subject can only be collected piece by piece at various times and in
different connections."
In
sum the process resembles "reality"
itself, a word that, as contemporary writers like to remind us
should always be surrounded by quotation marks.
We are then obliged to ask -- and Freud himself more than
anyone else has taught us most about this obligation --
what else
are all these protestations of fragmentariness and incompleteness
about? They refer in some measure, as Freud himself indicates in
the Postscript, to a central inadequacy and determining incom–
pleteness that he discovered only after it was too late - - the
"great defect" of the case was to be located in the undeveloped,
misdeveloped, and equivocal character of the "transference," of
the relation between patient and physician in which so much was
focused. Something went wrong in the relation between Freud and
Dora -- or in the relation between Dora and Freud. But the
protestations refer, I believe, to something else as well, something
of which Freud was not entirely conscious. For the work is also
fragmentary or incomplete in the sense of Freud's self-knowledge,
both at the time of the actual case and at the time of his writing it.
And he communicates in this piece of writing a less than complete
understanding of himself, though like any great writer he provides
us with the material for understanding some things that have
escaped his own understanding, for filling in some gaps, for restor–
ing certain fragments into wholes.
How else can we finally explain the fact that Freud chose to
write up this particular history in such extensive detail? The
reasons that he offers in both the Prefatory Remarks and the
Postscript aren't entirely convincing - - which doesn't of course
deny them a real if fractional validity. Why should he have chosen
so problematic a case, when presumably others of a more com–
plete yet equally brief kind were available? I think this can be
understood in part through Freud's own unsettled and ambiguous
role in the case; that he had not yet, so to speak, "gotten rid" of
it; that he had to write it out, in some measure, as an effort of
self-understanding -- an effort, I think we shall see, that re–
mained heroically unfinished, a failure that nonetheless brought
lasting credit with it.
(Continued on page 89)
