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In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism
-- The Women's Review of Books
344 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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May 21, 2018The 'problems' with this case are numerous and many of them are obvious. Janet Malcolm points out that, 'Everything we know about Dora and her father and the K.s is what Freud has chosen to tell us...The "fact" that Herr K. propositioned Dora and then lied is Freud's "fact"...for all we know, however, the actual, historical Dora may have invented the scene by the lake...'
'Facts' are slippery things. If something can be 'psychologically' true but not 'actually' true, how do we treat the merely 'psychological' truth? Should one kind of truth be privileged over another?
Whatever the truth of the scene by the lake, Freud's personal prejudice is evident in his treatment in his complete inability to accept that a sexual advance made by a middle-aged man to a teenage girl could be anything but pleasurable. Because Dora's reaction was disgust, she must have been hysterical and her symptoms were thus those of a girl who had displaced the pleasurable feelings that would have been experienced by a 'healthy' girl.
Freud interprets Dora's cough as a symptom of a repressed sexual fantasy involving the mouth, i.e. fellatio between Frau K and Dora's father. Many readers' eyebrows will surely be raised, however, at Freud's description of fellatio as an 'excessively repulsive and perverted phantasy'. One wonders if the repressed fantasy isn't Dora's at all, but Freud's. (Supposedly impotent, and sufferering from veneral disease, Dora's father seems more likely to have indulged in cunnilingus, described by Jacques Lacan as, 'the artifice most commonly adopted by "men of means" whose powers begin to abandon them'.)
Herr K represents - for Freud - 'normal' male heterosexuality. It is true that he acknowledged the sexual desires of women, but he 'refuses to consider female sexuality as an active, independent drive' (Toril Moi). In Dora's case, he identifies with both Herr K and with Dora's father. The idea of bisexuality is something Freud struggles to deal with - it threatens his concept of 'normal' male heterosexuality. In Freud's view, Dora's hysteria was caused not by her disgust at Herr K's advances, but because she repressed her true sexual desires, i.e. the desire 'to become [the] passive recipient for male desire' (Toril Moi)
[May 2008]
'Facts' are slippery things. If something can be 'psychologically' true but not 'actually' true, how do we treat the merely 'psychological' truth? Should one kind of truth be privileged over another?
Whatever the truth of the scene by the lake, Freud's personal prejudice is evident in his treatment in his complete inability to accept that a sexual advance made by a middle-aged man to a teenage girl could be anything but pleasurable. Because Dora's reaction was disgust, she must have been hysterical and her symptoms were thus those of a girl who had displaced the pleasurable feelings that would have been experienced by a 'healthy' girl.
Freud interprets Dora's cough as a symptom of a repressed sexual fantasy involving the mouth, i.e. fellatio between Frau K and Dora's father. Many readers' eyebrows will surely be raised, however, at Freud's description of fellatio as an 'excessively repulsive and perverted phantasy'. One wonders if the repressed fantasy isn't Dora's at all, but Freud's. (Supposedly impotent, and sufferering from veneral disease, Dora's father seems more likely to have indulged in cunnilingus, described by Jacques Lacan as, 'the artifice most commonly adopted by "men of means" whose powers begin to abandon them'.)
Herr K represents - for Freud - 'normal' male heterosexuality. It is true that he acknowledged the sexual desires of women, but he 'refuses to consider female sexuality as an active, independent drive' (Toril Moi). In Dora's case, he identifies with both Herr K and with Dora's father. The idea of bisexuality is something Freud struggles to deal with - it threatens his concept of 'normal' male heterosexuality. In Freud's view, Dora's hysteria was caused not by her disgust at Herr K's advances, but because she repressed her true sexual desires, i.e. the desire 'to become [the] passive recipient for male desire' (Toril Moi)
[May 2008]
December 20, 2023
DNF. I can't continue with this drivel. Apparently, a fourteen year old girl denying the sexual advances of her father's married friend is an "attempt to deny patriarchal sexuality, and...a protest against postoedipal femininity." I have better things to do with my time.
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