96
STEVEN MARCUS
agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward
nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure
for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for
the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." We know very well that
Freud had a more than ordinary capacity in this direction, and that one
of the most dramatic moments in the prehistory of psychoanalysis had
to do precisely with his taking on faith facts that turned out to be
fantasies. Yet Freud is not only the reader suspending judgment and
disbelief until he has heard the other side of the story; and he is not only
the poet or writer who must induce a similar process in himself if he is to
elicit it in his audience. He is also concomitantly a principal, an actor, a
living character in the drama that he is unfolding in print before us.
Moreover, that suspension of disbelief is in no sense incompatible with a
large body of assumptions, many of them definite, a number of them
positively alarming.
They have to do largely with sexuality and in particular with female
sexuality. They are brought to a focus in the central scene of Dora's life
(and case), a scene that Freud orchestrates with inimitable richness and
to which he recurs thematically at a number of junctures with the tact
and sense of form that one associates with a classical composer of music
(or with Proust, Mann, or J oyce). Dora told this episode to Freud toward
the beginning of their relation, after "the first difficulties of the treat–
ment had been overcome." It is the scene between her and Herr K. that
took place when she was fourteen years old -- that is, four years before
the present tense of the case -- and acted Freud said as a "sexual
trauma." The reader will recall that on this occasion Herr K. contrived to
get Dora alone "at his place of business" inthe town of B__, and then
without warning or preparation "suddenly clasped the girl to him and
pressed a kiss upon her lips." Freud then asserts that "this was
surely
just
the situation t(') call up a
distinct
feeling of sexual excitement in a
girl
of
fourteen
who had
never before
been approached. But Dora had at that
moment a violent feeling of disgust, tore herself free from the man, and
hurried past him to the staircase and from there to the street door." (all
italics are mine) She avoided seeing the K.'s for a few days after this, but
then relations returned to "normal" -- if such a term survives with any
permissible sense in the present context. She continued to meet Herr K.,
and neither of them ever mentioned "the little scene." Moreover, Freud
adds, "according to her account Dora kept it a secret till her confession
during the treatment," and he pretty clearly implies that he believes this.
This episode preceded by two years the scene at the lake that acted
as the precipitating agent for the severe stage of Dora's illness; and it was
