PARTISAN REVIEW
91
those who are already familiar with "the interpretation of dreams" -–
that is,
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), whose readership in 1901
must have amounted to a little platoon indeed -- are likely to be
satisfied at all with the present account. Any other reader "will find only
bewilderment in these pages." As much as it is like anything else, this is
like Borges -- as well as Nabokov. This off-putting and disconcerting
quality, it should go without saying, is characteristically modern; the
writer succumbs to no impulse to make it easy for the reader; on the
contrary, he is by preference rather forbidding and does not extend a
cordial welcome. The reader has been, as it were, "softened up" by his
first encounter with this unique expository and narrative authority; he is
thoroughly off balance and is as a consequence ready to be "educated,"
by Freud. By the same token, however, if he has followed these opening
few pages carefully, he is certainly no longer as prepared as he was to
assert the primacy and priority of his own critical sense of things. He is
precisely where Freud -- and any writer -- wants him to be.
At the opening of Part I, "The Clinical Picture," Freud tells us that
he begins his "treatment, indeed, by asking the patient to give me the
whole story of his life and illness," and immediately adds that "the
information I receive is never enough to let me see my way about the
case." This inadequacy and unsatisfactoriness in the stories his patients
tell is in distinct contrast to what Freud has read in the accounts
rendered by his psychiatri,c contemporaries, and he continues by remark–
ing that "I cannot help wondering how it is that the authorities can
produce such smooth and exact histories in cases of hysteria. As a matter
of fact the patients are incapable of giving such reports about them–
selves." There is a great deal going on here. In the first place there is the
key assumption that everyone -- that every life, every existence -- has
a story, to which there is appended a corollary that most of us probably
tell that story poorly. Furthermore, the relations at this point in Freud's
prose between the words "story," "history," and "report" are un–
specified, undifferentiated, and unanalyzed and in the nature of the cas,e
contain and conceal a wealth of material.
Freud proceeds to specify what it is that is wrong with the stories
his patients tell him. The difficulties are in the first instance formal
shortcomings of
narrative:
,the connections, "even the ostensible ones
-- are for the most part incoherent," obscured and unclear; "and the
sequence of different events is uncertain." In short these narratives are
disorganized, and the patients are unable to tell a coherent story of their
lives. What is more, he states, "the patients' inability to give an ordered
history of their life in so far as it coincides with the history of their
