PARTISAN REVIEW
95
never more of a historical virtuoso than when he reveals himself to us as
moving with compelling ease back and forth between the complex group
of sequential histories and narrative accounts, with divergent sets of
diction and at different levels of explanation,
t~at
constitute the extra–
ordinary fabric of this work. He does this most conspicuously in his
analytic dealings with Dora's dreams, for every dream, he reminds us,
sets up a connection between two "factors," an "event during child–
hood" and an "event of the present day -- and it endeavors to reshape
the present on the model of the remote past." The existence or recre–
ation of the past in the present is in fact "history" in more than one of
its manifold senses, and is one of Freud's many analogies to the follow–
ing equally celebrated utterance.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as
they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given
and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead gen–
erations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just
when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in
creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such
periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits
of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle
cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world
history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.
(The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.)
And just as Marx regards the history-makers of the past as sleepwalkers,
"who required recollections of past world history in order to drug
themselves concerning their own content," so Freud similarly regards the
conditions of dream-formation, of neurosis itself, and even of the cure of
neurosis, namely the analytic experience of transference. They are all of
them species of living past history in the present.
If
the last of these
works out satisfactorily, then a case history is at the end transfigured . It
becomes an inseparable part of an integral life history. Freud is of course
the master historian of those transfigurations.
v.
At the very beginning, after he had listened to the father's account
of "Dora's impossible behavior," Freud abstained from comment, for, he
remarks, "I had resolved from the first to suspend my judgement of the
true state of affairs till I had heard the other side as well." Such a
suspension inevitably recalls an earlier revolutionary project. In describ–
ing the originating plan of
Lyrical Ballads,
Coleridge writes that it "was
