98
STEVEN MA Reus
There is something questionable and askew in this passage of
unquestionable genius. In it Freud is at once dogmatically certain and
very uncertain. He is dogmatically certain of what the normative sexual
response in young and other females is, and asserts himself to that effect.
At the same time, he is, in my judgment, utterly uncertain about where
Dora is, or was, developmentally. At one moment in the passage he calls
her a "girl," at another a "child" -- but in point of fact he treats her
throughout as if this fourteen-, sixteen-, and eighteen-year-old adoles–
cent had the capacities for sexual response of a grown woman -- indeed
at a later point he conjectures again that Dora either responded, or
should have responded, to the embrace with specific genital heat and
moisture. Too many determinations converge at this locus for us to do
much more than single out a few of the more obvious influencing
circumstances. In the first instance there was Freud's own state of
knowledge about such matters at the time, which was better than anyone
else's, but still relatively crude and undifferentiated. Second, we may be
in the presence of what can only be accounted for by assuming that a
genuine historical-cultural change has taken place between then and now.
It may be that Freud was expressiI)g a legitimate partial assumption of
his time and culture when he ascribes to a fourteen-year-old adolescent
-- whom he calls a "child" -- the normative responses that are
ascribed today to a fully developed and mature woman. This supposition
is
borne out if we consider the matter from the other end, from the
standpoint of what has happened to the conception of adolescence in
our own time. It begins now in prepuberty and extends to -- who
knows when? Certainly its extensibility in our time has reached well
beyond the age of thirty. Third, Freud is writing in this passage as an
advocate of nature, sexuality, openness, and candor -- and within such
a context Dora cannot hope to look good. The very framing of the
context in such a manner is itself slightly accusatory. In this connection
we may note that Freud goes out of his way to tell us that he knew
Herr K. personally and that "he was still quite young and of prepossess–
ing appearance."
If
we let Nabokov back into the picture for a moment,
we may observe that Dora is no Lolita, and go on to suggest that
Lolita
is
an
anti-Dora.
Yet we must also note that in this episode -- the condensed and
focusing scene of the entire case history -- Freud is as much a novelist
as he is an analyst. For the central moment of this central scene is a
"reconstruction" that he "formed in [his] own mind." This pivotal
construction becomes henceforth the principal "reality" of the case, and
we must also observe that this reality remains Freud's more than Dora's,
since he was never quite able to convince her of the plausibility of the
