NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES IN FREUD'S CASE HISTORIES

Abstract

1 1 0 Y N A R R A T I V E T E C H N I Q U E S I N F R E U D ’ S C A S E H I S T O R I E S S H E I L A K O H L E R In his ‘‘Studies in Hysteria’’ (1895), Freud famously said, ‘‘It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.’’ Freud himself was given the Goethe prize for literature and not the Nobel for science. He maintained it was the reading of Goethe’s essay De Natura that convinced him to enter the field of medicine, thus coming, one might say, to medicine via literature. He was, of course, widely read, using Shakespeare and Sophocles to prove his theories. Dickens’s David Copperfield was one of his great favorites, and perhaps the name he gives Ida Bauer – ‘‘Dora’’ in the Dora case – comes at least partly from that source, though he never mentioned it. Still, Freud did not read the European avant-garde of his time extensively, though he was friends with Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler. The list Freud gave his publisher in 1907 of his ten favorite books might not be the ones we would choose today, though among them we find authors still widely read: Mark Twain, Émile Zola, and to some lesser extent Anatole France, who attracted Freud more perhaps because of his political ideas than 1 1 1 R for his literary talents. Freud’s taste in literature, as it was in art, was conventional and conservative. Yet reading Freud’s case histories, one feels that wherever he learned it, he learned his literary craft well. One is struck by his skill, by his brilliant use of narrative techniques, though here they are employed in an e√ort to prove and promote his budding theories . His theories run through the case histories, intertwined skillfully with the stories of the lives of his patients. The five case histories were all written toward the beginning of Freud’s career (1901–14) shortly after the book on dreams (1899), his epochal essays on the theory of sexuality, and his book on jokes, the latter two published in 1905. We forget, reading these accounts , that Freud was inventing the case history and that no one, not even D. W. Winnicott, would be able to duplicate what he does with it. Freud provides us in these accounts with all the essential elements of a good story: he creates suspense, he withholds essential information until the right moment, he knows how important every detail, every gesture, every word is in the composition of the whole. He knows that at the heart of a good story lies foreshadowing , reiteration, and reversal. He works with binary forms: he mirrors and reflects. His dramatic plots with their high stakes – threats of suicide, adultery, torture, and incest – come from credible characters who capture our sympathy and with whom we identify in their su√ering and root for in their active attempts to overcome their di≈culties. Yet unlike the storyteller, he uses all these techniques for a single aim: to convince his readers of his theories. To that end he brings up the reader’s objections to his arguments before the reader can. He addresses his readers directly, sensing when they might be confused or incredulous. He leaves out the extraneous, reduces the cast of characters. Here is a narrator who thinks on the page, a conquistador who is fearlessly finding his way, hacking down the branches of our objections to lead us through the thicket of the neuroses. He uses the dream as a gateway to the ‘‘truth’’ of the unconscious. He does not hesitate to recount the shocking sexual ‘‘truths’’ he finds as he perceives them. Though he fails, perhaps, as one must in search for the truth, particularly a uni- 1 1 2 K O H L E R Y dimensional one, paradoxically, the way he conducts that search is what give these case histories...