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PARTISAN REVIEW
measure of the revolution effected by one man." Additional remarks
by Jones on Freud's "close attention to detail" reflect the difficulty of
presenting case studies: the rhetorical strategy he was forced to
adopt. Here again his ideas had advanced since his work with
Breuer. Although in writing
Studies on Hysteria
he had been distressed
by producing something like short stories on the course of each
patient's illness, he nonetheless managed to make them into vigorous
and illuminating narratives . But in his
Fragment
of
an Anarysis ofa Case
of
Hysteria
-
already an awkward title - Freud professed surprise that
other scientific writers "can produce such smooth and exact histories
in cases of hysteria." He had observed that "the patients are
incapable of giving such reports about themselves ." And their
incapacity to give such reports was found to be an integral part of
their illness: "the repression of memories and the expression in the
form of symptoms of the conflicts associated with these memories
that constitutes hysteria precludes the possibility of an orderly
recounting of a patient's life." Moreover, Freud recognized that
there were several stories which could not be told simultaneously . In
the Dora case, he had distinguished only between the narration of
his interpretive technique and the reconstructed biographic story in
which the patient's pathology had developed . Later, he felt that he
could not weave these stories together, noting that "I have in this
paper left entirely out of account the technique, ... by whose means
alone the pure metal of valuable unconscious thoughts can be
extracted from the raw material of the patient's associations."
Freud had learned a great deal about the epistemological status
of the knowledge he was deriving from hysterical patients since
1895. Paradoxically, what he had learned made him both more and
less sanguine about the prospects of communicating this knowledge .
He was much more aware of the difficulties of demonstrating the
validity of his observations and hypotheses to the medical world at
large, but he had begun to see that other initiates and especially
practitioners of psychoanalysis were in a particularly advantageous
position to appreciate his case studies. ErnestJones writes that we do
not know why Freud hesitated so long to publish the Dora case, but
the way his thinking had changed since 1895 suggests a very strong
reason. He took the case's incompleteness very seriously and was
influenced also by the absence of a psychoanalytic community in
1901. By 1905 the illustrative value the case held for other psycho–
analysts outweighed his reservations about its reception by the
uninitiated.
"Dora" was the last of Freud's case studies to appear in a
