PARTISAN REVIEW
93
No larger tribute has ever been paid to a culture in which the
various narrative and fictional forms had exerted for centuries both
moral and philosophical authority and which had produced as one of its
chief climaxes the great bourgeois novels of the nineteenth century.
Indeed we must see Freud's writings - - and method -- as themselves
part of this culmination, and at the same moment, along with the great
modernist novels of the firs t half
0
f the twentieth cen tury, as the
beginning of the end of that tradition and its authority. Certainly the
passages we have just dealt with contain heroic notions and offer an
extension of heroic capabilities if not to all men then to most, at least as
a possibility. Yet we cannot leave this matter so relatively unexamined,
and must ask ourselves how it is that this "story" is not merely a
"history" but a "case history" as well. We must ask ourselves how these
associated terms are more intimately related in the nexus that is about to
be wound and unwound before us. To begin to understand such ques–
tions we have to turn back to a central passage in the Prefatory Remarks.
Freud undertakes therein "to describe the way in which I have overcome
the
technical
difficulties of drawing up the report of this case history."
Apparently "the report" and the "case history" referred to in this
statement are two discriminable if not altogether discrete entities.
If
they
are then we can further presume that, ideally at any rate, Dora (or any
patient) is as much in possession of the "case history" as Freud himself.
And this notion is in some part supported by what comes next. Freud
mentions certain other difficulties, such as the fact that he "cannot make
notes during the actual session ... for fear of shaking the patient's
confidence and of disturbing his own view of the material under observa–
tion." In the case of Dora, however, this obstacle was partly overcome
because so much of the material was grouped about two dreams, and
"the wording of these dreams was recorded immediately after the ses–
sion" so that "they. thus
~fforded
a secure point of attachment for the
chain of interpretations and recollections which proceeded from there."
Freud then writes as follows:
The 'case 'history itself was only committed to
~riting
from memory
after the treatment was at 'an end, but while my recollection of the
case was still fresh and was heightened by my interest in its
publication. Thus the record is not absolutely -- phonographically
-- exact, but -it can claim to possess a high degree of trustworthi–
ness. Nothing of any importance has been altered in it except in
some places the order in which the explanations are given; and this
has been done for the sake of presenting the case in a more
connected form.
