PARTISAN REVIEW
99
construction, or, to regard it from the other pole of the dyad, she was
never quite able to accept this version of reality, of what "really"
happened. Freud was not at first unduly distressed by this resistance on
her side, for part of his understanding of what he had undertaken to do
in
psychoanalysis was to instruct his patients -- and his readers -- in
the nature of reality. This reality was the reality that modern readers of
literature have also had .to be educated in.
It
was conceived of as a
world
of meanings.
As Freud put it in one of those stop-you-dead-in–
your-tracks footnotes that he was so expert in using strategically, we
must at almost every moment "be prepared to be met not by one but by
several causes -- by
overdetermination."
Thus the world of meanings is
a world of multiple and compacted causations; it is a world in which
everything has a meaning, which means that everything has more than
one meaning. Every symptom is a concrete universal in several senses.
It
not only embodies a network of significances but also "serves to repre–
sent several unconscious mental processes simultaneously." By the same
token, since it is a world almost entirely brought into existence, main–
tained, and mediated through a series of linguistic transactions between
patient and physician, it partakes in full measure of the virtually limitless
complexity of language, in particular its capacities for producing state–
ments characterized by multiplicity, duplicity, and ambiguity of signifi–
cance. Freud lays particular stress on the ambiguity, is continually on the
lookout for it, and brings his own formidable skills in this direction to
bear most strikingly on the analyses of Dora's dreams. The first thing he
picks up in the first of her dreams is in fact an ambiguous statement,
with which he at once confronts her.
As if this were not sufficient, the actual case itself was full of such
literary and novelistic devices or conventions as thematic analogies,
double plots, reversals, inversions, variations, betrayals, etc. -- full of
what the "sharp-sighted" Dora as well as the sharp-sighted Freud
thought of as "hidden connections" -- though it is important to add
that Dora and her physician mean different things by the same phrase.
And as the case proceeds Freud continues to confront Dora with such
connections and tries to enlist her assistance in their construction. For
example, one of the least pleasant characteristics in Dora's nature was
her habitual reproachfulness --
it
was directed mostly toward her father
but radiated out in all directions. Freud regarded this behavior in his own
characteristic manner: "A string of reproaches against other people," he
comments, "leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self–
reproaches with the same content." Freud accordingly followed the
procedure of turning back "each simple reproach on the speaker her–
self." When Dora reproached her father with malingering in order to
