PARTISAN REVIEW
97
this later episode and the entire structure that she and others had
elaborated about it that she had first presented to Freud, who continues
thus:
In this scene -- second in order of mention, but first in order of
time -- the behavior of this child of fourteen was already entirely
and completely hysterical. I should without question consider a
person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement
elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasur–
able; and I should do so whether or not the person were capable of
producing somatic symptoms.
Also, in Dora's feeling of disgust an obscure psychical mechanism called
the "reversal of affect" was brought into play; but so" was another
process, and here Freud introduces -- casually and almost as a throw–
away -- one more of his grand theoretical-clinical formulations, namely
the idea of the
"displacement
of sensation," or as it has more commonly
come to be referred to, the "displacement upward." "Instead of the
genital sensation which would certainly have been felt by a healthy
girl
in such circumstances, Dora was overcome by the unpleasurable feeling
which is proper to the tract of mucous membrane at the entrance to the
alimentary canal -- that is by disgust." Although the disgust did not
persist as a permanent symptom but remained behind residually and
potentially in a general distaste for food and poor appetite, a second
displacement upward was the resultant of this scene "in the shape of a
sensory hallucination which occurred from time to time and even made
its appearance while she was telling me her story. She declared that she
could still feel upon the upper part of her body the pressure of Herr K.'s
embrace." Taking into account certain other of Dora's "inexplicable"
-- and hitherto unmentioned -- "peculiarities" (such as her phobic
reluctance to walk past any man she saw engaged in animated conversa–
tion with a woman), Freud "formed in my own mind the following
reconstruction of the scene. I believe that during the man's passionate
embrace she felt not merely his kiss upon her lips but also his erect
member against her body. The perception was revolting to her; it was
dismissed from her memory, repressed, and replaced by the innocent
sensation of pressure upon her thorax, which in turn derived an excessive
intensity from its repressed source." This repressed source was located in
the erotogenic oral zone, which in Dora's case had undergone a develop–
mental deformation from the period of infancy. And thus, Freud con–
cludes, "the pressure of the erect member probably led to an analogous
change in the corresponding female organ, the clitoris; and the excitation
of this second erotogenic zone was referred by a process of displacement
to the simultaneous pressure against the thorax and became fixed there."
