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PARTISAN REVIEW
Freud: If you could remember what was happening to you when
you had your first attack, it would help you. [Her hysterical
attacks were accompanied by a vision of a frightening head.]
Could the head be Franziska's? [the cousin's name]
Katharina: No, it's a man's head.
Freud: Perhaps your uncle's? [Freud had disguised Katharina's
father as her uncle in his first text.] [And here is the first real
suggestion:] If you were sick three days later, I believe that means
that when you looked into the room you felt disgusted.
Katharina: Yes,
I
am
sure
I
felt disgusted...but at what....
This reply was followed inunediately by scenes of the family quarrels, the
father's anger at Katharina, and her parents' divorce. Then, to Freud's
apparent astonishment, she told of her father's sexual advances when she
was much younger. She was not disgusted by the sight of the coitus but by
the memory of the sexual advances whose full significance then became
clear.
I would suggest that Freud's narrative is far more convincing than the
notion of an existential trauma of an unspecified nature. Freud's emphasis
on the family quarrel, her parents' divorce, and her father's anger leads her
to identifY the unknown head she hallucinates. Finally she recognizes that
the frightening face was her father's, frightening because of his rage at her
for revealing his lapse.
Swales omits in his discussion a crucial part of Freud's text turning the
passage into an example of suggestion:
Katharina: Oh, if only I knew what it was I felt disgusted at.
Freud: "I had no idea either. But I told her to go on and tell me
whatever occurred to her, in the confident expectation that she
would think of precisely what I needed to explain the case."
And the memories she came up with were her father's earlier attempts
at intimacy.
What Freud interpolated is clear: not the scene at the window, not the
earlier abuse. These she supplied. What Freud suggested was her disgust and
the full realization of the sexual nature of her father's advances, including
