in its relation to the cure can be seen as caught in the same trap as that of his theory of sexuality, since he sees the former as the obstacle to the uncovering of ‘new memories, dealing, probably, with actual events’17 (relics of the seduction theory), just as he defines neurosis as the ‘incapacity for meeting a real erotic demand’,18 and even allows (thereby undermining the whole discovery of psychoanalysis) that neurosis might ultimately be vanquished by ‘reality’.19 The concept of a possible recovery from neurosis through reality and that of an unproblematic feminine sexuality are coincident in the case.
‘In fact she was a feminist’
The reference comes from Freud’s case on the ‘Psychogenesis of Homosexuality in a Woman’,20 and in one sense the step from the failure of the case of Dora to this case, which appeared in 1920, is irresistible — not, however, in order to classify Dora as homosexual in any simple sense, but precisely because in this case Freud was led to an acknowledgement of the homosexual factor in all feminine sexuality, an acknowledgement which was to lead to his revision of his theories of the Oedipus complex for the girl. For in this article he is in a way at his most radical, rejecting the concept of cure, insisting that the most psychoanalysis can do is restore the original bisexual disposition of the patient, defining homosexuality as nonneurotic. Yet, at the same time, his explanation of this last factor — the lack of neurosis ascribed to the fact that the object-choice was established not in infancy but after puberty — is then undermined by his being obliged to trace back the homosexual attraction to a moment prior to the oedipal instance, the early attachment to the mother, in which case either the girl is neurotic (which she clearly is not) or all women are neurotic (which indeed they might be).
The temptation is therefore to see the case of Dora as anticipating, through the insistence of Dora’s desire for Frau K. as substitute for the absent mother in the case (‘the mystery turns upon your mother’21, Freud says in relation to the first dream), the nature of the preoedipal attachment between mother and girl child, an attachment Freud finally makes specific to feminine sexuality in its persistence and difficulty. All recent work on the concept of a feminine sexuality that resists or exceeds the reproductive or genital function stems from this, and since the Oedipus complex is properly the insertion of the woman into the circuit of symbolic exchange (nothing could be clearer in the case of Dora), then her resistance to this positioning is assigned a radical status. The woman, therefore, is outside exchange, an exchange put into play or sanctioned by nothing other than language itself, which thus produces the question of her place and her language simultaneously. The transition to a concept of hysterical discourse as some privileged relation to the maternal body is then easy; it is partly supported by Freud’s own ‘suspicion’ that ‘this phase of attachment to the mother is especially intimately related to the aetiology of hysteria, which is not surprising when we reflect that both the phase and the neurosis are characteristically feminine’.22
What seems to happen is that the desire to validate the preoedipal instance as resistance to the oedipal structure itself leads to a ‘materialization’ of the bodily relation that underpins it, so that the body of the mother, or more properly the girl’s relation to it, is then placed as being somehow outside repression. What we then have is a constant assimilation in feminist texts of the maternal body and the unrepressed (see Montrelay, quoted at the beginning of this article), or of the maternal body and the dream (Kristeva: ‘different, close to the dream or the maternal body’), or of the maternal body and a primary autoeroticism (Irigaray) whose return would apparently mean the return of the (feminine) exile.23 In the case of Kristeva, the relation to differing modes of language is made explicit to the point of identifying a preoedipal lingustic register (rhythms, intonations) and a postoedipal linguistic register (the phonologico-syntactic structure of the sentence). Hysteria, therefore, and the poetic language of the woman (which becomes the language of women poets, — Woolf, Plath, etc.) are properly then the return of this primary and bodily mode of expressivity.24 It is no coincidence that at this stage it is schizophrenia that is invoked as frequently as hysteria, since the relation between schizophrenia and poetic discourse is a recognized and accredited one within psychoanalysis itself. It is in a sense a feminist version of Laing, but having to include the transference neurosis (hysteria) since the relation of the latter to the feminine is too heavily attested to be ignored. More often than not, the two forms are assimilated the one to the other, so that what happens is that the specificity of the two types of disorder is lost. It is worth, therefore, looking again at Dora’s symptoms, and then (in the next section) at what Freud said about schizophrenia in its relation to language, in order to see whether such a position can be theoretically sustained.
A number of points about Dora first. First, as we saw above, Dora’s bodily symptoms (the aphonia, the cough) are the expression of a masculine identification, through which identification alone access to the maternal and feminine body is possible. This access then threatens Dora with a physical or bodily fragmentation, which constitutes the symptoms of conversion. Thus access to the (maternal) body is only possible now through a masculine identification, which access then threatens the very category of identification itself, that is, Dora as subject. Thus at neither point of her desire for Frau K. can Dora be placed as a ‘true’ feminine, since either she is identified with a man or else the movement is toward an instance in which the category of sexual difference is not established and that of the subject, on which such difference depends, is threatened.
Second, in the second dream, in which Dora’s desire could be defined as the desire for self-possession, her position as subject is at its most precarious. The dream most clearly articulates the split between the subject and object of enunciation at the root of any linguistic utterance (the speaking subject and the subject of the statement),25 here seen in its relation to the question of sexual difference. Thus, if Dora is there to be possessed, then she is not there as a woman (she is a man), and if she is not there to be possessed, her place as a woman is assured (she remains feminine) but she is not there (Lacan’s lethal vel).26
Third, and as a corollary to this, what is revealed behind this dream is nothing other than this question of woman as representation: ‘Here for the third time we come upon “picture” (views of towns, the Dresden gallery), but in a much more significant connection. Because of what appears in the picture (the wood, the nymphs), the “Bild” (picture) is turned into a “Weibsbild” (literally “picture of a woman”)’,27 and then of woman as query, posed by Dora herself, of her relationship to a knowledge designated as present and not present — the sexual knowledge that is the secret behind her relation with Frau K.: ‘Her knowing all about such things and, at the same time, her always pretending not to know where her knowledge came from was really too remarkable. I ought to have attacked this riddle and looked for the motive of such an extraordinary piece of repression’.28 Thus nothing in Dora’s position can be assimilated to an unproblematic concept of the feminine or to any simple notion of the body, since where desire is genital it is charted across a masculine identification, and where it is oral it reveals itself as a query addressed to the category of sexuality itself (Frau K. as the unmistakable ‘oral source of information’).29
Perhaps we should remember here that Freud’s work on hysteria started precisely with a rejection of any simple mapping of the symptom onto the body (Charcot’s hysterogenic zones). By so doing he made of hysteria a language (made it speak) but one whose relation to the body was decentered, since if the body spoke it was precisely because there was something called the unconscious that could not. At this point the relation of dreams and hysteria, from which we started out, can be reasserted as nothing other than the inflection of the body through language in its relation to the unconscious (indirect representation). When Lacan writes that ‘there is nothing in the unconscious which accords with the body’, he means this, and he continues: ‘The unconscious is discordant. The unconscious is that which, by speaking, determines the subject as being, but as a being to be struck through with that metonymy by which I support desire, insofar
