FREUD AND DORA by
Steven Marcus
(Continued from page
23)
IV.
If
we tum now to the Prefatory Remarks it may be illuminating to
regard them as a kind of novelistic framing action, as in these few
opening pages Freud rehearses his motives, reasons, and intentions and
begins at the same time to work his insidious devices upon the reader.
First, exactly like a novelist, he remarks that what he is about to let us in
on is positively scandalous, for "the complete elucidation of a case of
hysteria is bound to involve the revelation of intimacies and the betrayal
of ... secrets." Second, again like a wri ter of fiction, he has deliberately
chosen persons, places, and circumstances that will remain obscure; the
scene is laid not in metropolitan Vienna but "in a remote provincial
town." He has from the beginning kept the circumstance that Dora was
his patient such a close secret that only one other physician - - "in
whose discretion I have complete confidence" -- knows about it. He
has "postponed publication" of this essay for "four whole years," also in
the cause of discretion, and in the same cause has "allowed no name to
stand which could put ,a non-medical reader on the scent." Finally he has
buried the case even deeper by publishing it "in a purely scientific and
technical periodical" in order to secure yet another "guarantee against
unauthorized readers." He has in short made his oWI1 mystery within a
mystery, and one of the effects of such obscure preliminary goings·on is
to create a kind of Nabokovian frame -- what we have here is a history
framed by an explanation which is itself slightly out of focus.
Third, he roundly declares, this case history is science and not
literature: "I am aware that -- in this city, at least -- there are many
physicians who (revolting though it may seem) choose to read a case
history of this kind not as a contribution to the psychopathology of
neuroses, but as a
roman
ii
clef
designed for their private delectation."
This may indeed be true; but it is equally true that nothing is more
literary -- and more modem -- than the disavowal of all literary
intentions. And when Freud does this again later on toward the end of
"The Clinical Picture," the situation becomes even less credible. The
passage merits quotation at length.
I must now tum to consider a further complication to which I
should certainly give no space if I were a man of letters engaged
upon the creation of a mental state like this for a short story,
instead of being a medical man engaged upon its dissection. The
element to which I must now allude can only serve to obscure and
efface the outlines of the fine poetic conflict which we have been
able to ascribe to Dora. This element would rightly fall a sacrifice to
the censorship of a writer, for he, after all, simplifies and abstracts
