in any simple dismissal of the case as the suppression of the patient’s ‘own’ language). On the other hand, the process is missing from the case in another and more crucial sense, that of the relation between the analyst and the patient, which Freud calls the transference, and to whose neglect he partly ascribes its failure. All these points should be borne in mind as the signs of this failure, and yet each is a paradox: the process is there, but it is somehow elided; a meaning or interpretation of Dora’s ‘complaint’ is produced, but it is clearly inadequate.
To give a history of the case is therefore impossible, but a number of central points can be disengaged that I hope will be of help in the discussion to follow:7
1. The parameters of the case are defined by the sexual circuit that runs between Dora’s parents and their ‘intimate’ friends, Herr and Frau K., in which Dora herself is caught.
2. Thus, Dora is courted by Herr K., and the crisis that leads to the treatment is partly precipitated by an attempted seduction on his part, which she repudiates.
3. Behind this is the affair between Dora’s father and Frau K.; behind this, crucially, the absence of Dora’s mother in her relationship both to Dora (‘unfriendly’)8 and to Dora’s father (hence his relationship with Frau K.).
4. Behind this again, there is an intimacy which is first that between the two families but which also completes the sexual circuit between them — the intimacy of Dora and Frau K., whose precise content is never given and that functions exactly as the ‘secret’ of the case, the source of the sexual knowledge that Dora undoubtedly has, and that thus cuts straight across from the ‘manifest’ behaviour of the participants to the ‘latent’ etiology of the symptoms (Freud’s theory of hysteria).
Put at its most crude, Freud’s interpretation of the case is based on a simple identification of the Oedipal triangle, and starts with Dora’s protest at her place in the relationship between Frau K. and her father, that is, with Dora as a pawn who is proffered to Herr K. Thus her repudiation of the latter is the inevitable consequence of an outrage that takes Herr K. as its immediate object, and yet behind which is the figure of the father, who is the object of real reproach. In this way Dora’s rejection of Herr K., ‘still quite young and of prepossessing appearance’ (sic)9 can be seen as simultaneously Oedipal and hysterical (repudiation of her own desire). Dora’s own desire is defined here as unproblematic — heterosexual and genital. At this stage Freud was still bound to the traumatic theory of neurosis, and he thus traces the repudiation on the part of Dora to an attempted embrace by Herr K. when she was fourteen, which was also repulsed — ‘the behaviour of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical’.10 To be more precise, therefore, we would have to say that the Oedipal triangle is there in the case history but that it is held off by this notion of trauma, which makes of Herr K. the first repudiated object (the seducer). In his analysis of Dora’s first dream, there is no doubt that Freud interprets it as a summoning up of an infantile affection for the father secondarily, as a defense against Dora’s persistent and unquestioned desire for Herr K. (The second dream is then interpreted as revealing the vengeance/hostility against her father that could not achieve expression in the first.)
Now the way in which the case history is laid out immediately spoils the picture, or the ‘fine poetic conflict’11 as Freud himself puts it, since Dora has been totally complicit in the affair between her father and Frau K., and it had in fact been entirely through her complicity that the situation had been able to continue. Furthermore, Dora’s symptom, her cough, reveals an un-mistakable identification with her father, a masculine identification confirmed by the appearance of her brother at three points in the case history — each time as the object of identification, whether as recollection, screen memory, or manifest content of the dream. The revealing of this masculine identification leads directly to the uncovering of the ‘true’ object of Dora’s jealousy (made clear if for no other reason by the overinsistence of her reproaches against her father), that is, Frau K. herself, with whom Dora had shared such intimacy, secrecy, and confessions, even about Frau K.’s unsatisfactory relationship with her husband — in which case, Freud asks, how on earth could Dora in fact be in love with Herr K.? We may well ask.
What we therefore have in the case is a series of contradictions, which Freud then attempts to resolve by a mandatory appeal to the properties of the unconscious itself (‘thoughts in the unconscious live very comfortably side by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes’),12 revealing a theory of interpretation actually functioning as ‘resistance’ to the pressing need to develop a theory of sexuality, whose complexity or difficulty manifests itself time and again in the case. Thus in his analysis of the hysterical symptom — aphonia, or loss of voice — Freud is forced toward the beginnings of a concept of component sexuality (a sexuality multiple and fragmented and not bound to the genital function), since the symptom is clearly not only the response to the absence of Herr K. (impossibility of the communication desired) but also a fantasied identification with a scene of imagined sexual satisfaction between Dora’s father and Frau K. This is the fullest discussion of sexuality in the book, which anticipates many of the theses of the Three Essays, but it is conducted by Freud as an apology for Dora (and himself) — a justification of the discussion of sexual matters with a young girl (the question therefore being that of censorship, Freud’s discovery reduced to the articulation of sexuality to a woman) and then as insistence on the perverse and undifferentiated nature of infantile sexuality so that Dora’s envisaging of a scene of oral gratification — for that is what it is — might be less of a scandal.
The difficulties therefore clearly relate to the whole concept of sexuality, and not just to the nature of the object (for the importance of this, see later in this essay on the concept of the sexual aim), but Freud’s own resistance appears most strongly in relation to Frau K.’s status as an object of desire for Dora. Thus this aspect of the case surfaces only symptomatically in the text, at the end of the clinical picture that it closes, and in a series of footnotes and additions to the interpretation of the second dream and in the postscript.
It is in her second dream that the identification of Dora with a man (her own suitor) is unquestionable, and since the analysis reveals a latent obsession with the body of the woman, the Madonna, defloration, and finally childbirth, the recuperation of a primary autoeroticism (the masturbation discerned behind the first dream) by a masculine fantasy of self-possession now charted across the question of sexual difference is clear.13 Yet Freud makes of the dream an act of vengeance, as he does the breaking off of the case, which perhaps not suprisingly is its immediate sequel. The way this dream raises the question of sexual difference will be discussed below. It should already serve as a caution against any assimilation of Dora’s homosexual desire for Frau K. to a simple preoedipal instance. Note for the moment that Freud is so keen to hang onto a notion of genital heterosexuality that it leads him, first, to identify the fantasy of childbirth that analysis revealed behind the second dream as an obscure ‘maternal longing’14 outdoing in advance Karen Horney’s appeals to such a longing as natural, biological and pregiven in her attacks on Freud’s later work on femininity; and second, to classify Dora’s masculine identification and desire for Frau K. as ‘gynaecophilic’ and to make it ‘typical of the unconscious erotic life of hysterical girls’15, that is, to use as an explanation of hysteria the very factor that needs to be explained.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the insistence on a normal genital sexuality is obviously related to the question of transference. Freud himself attributes the failure of the case to his failure in ‘mastering the transference in good time’,16 while his constant footnoting of this discussion with references to his overlooking the homosexual desire of this patient indicates that the relation between these two aspects of the case remains unformulated. At one level it is easy that Freud’s failure to understand his own implication in the case (countertransference) produced a certain definition of sexuality as a demand on Dora, which, it should
