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PARTISAN REVIEW
examine a young lady who had been suffering for the past four years
from severe pains in her left breast and pelvic region... ," it begins,
promising no nonsense, and one settles down to watch the Viennese
master pull things together, anticipating the sort of pleasure one gets
from Sherlock Holmes, at the very least. Initial enthusiasm at
Thomas's daring ploy - to write like Freud! - fades rather rapidly
since he cannot write anywhere near as well. (He can manage a
pastiche of Freud doing an informal letter, but Freud writing a case
history is another matter.) More often than not, Thomas's character
does not even think like Freud.
Almost immediately a small off-note is sounded, the first of
many errors of varying degrees of seriousness whose aggregate effect
is to destroy the illusion that it is Freud who writes. In his descrip-
tion of the first interview with Lisa, Thomas's Freud writes, "She was
r
extremely thin, even by the standards of that unhappy year, when
1
few in Vienna had enough to eat. I suspected an anorexia nervosa,
on top of her other troubles." A small point, but significant. Freud
was scrupulous in the extreme about such matters. Anorexia
nervosa involves amenorrhea, a faulty perception of the body image,
and an intense fear of gaining weight, and none of these were
present in Lisa. He would not have been slapdash in his diagnoses,
nor in his suspicions. In addition, although the real Freud used the
term anorexia (a condition) many times, he does not appear to have
used the term anorexia nervosa (a syndrome, and thus quite
different). The term was first proposed in 1874 by Sir William Gull,
but it was not in general use in 1919, and has only recently resur-
faced. Freud does not seem to have been aware of Sir Gull, of the
term, or indeed, of the syndrome as we now understand it. His
tendency, when he ran across anorexia, was to relate it to the
patient's individual history. No syndrome, but infinite different
anorexias. (His example of the continuously vomiting girl comes to
mind, whose anorexia he traced to her ambivalent desire both to be
pregnant (morning sickness) and to avoid intercourse (stay thin to
the point of ugliness).
Nor is the false Freud's analysis of the patient and her writings
convincing to anyone familiar with the real Freud's work. There is a
sense almost of playfulness as Thomas moves around the bits and
pieces in a relaxed mood which seems wrong. Thomas understands
the associative, nonlinear style of psychoanalytic puzzle-solving, and
he is clever with dreams, but it is not enough. Several things are
wrong with the case history.
It
is altoge.ther too loquacious (a story
