Portrait of Dora: Freud's Case History As Reviewed by Helene Cixous

Abstract

case history published by Freud in 1905 under the title Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, I and popularly called The Dora Case, has over the years stuck in the throats of many analysts. Controversial, unsettling, unresolved, this fragment of a case simply will not go down even though the explicative enzymes of psychoanalysis have attacked it persistently.2 Dora-whose fictitious name was borrowed, Freud tells us, from his sister's maid3 was brought to Freud by her father when she was eighteen, not so much to cure her of her numerous hysterical symptoms which, after all, had plagued her for the past decade, but rather so that Freud could bring her to reason.'4 This aphonic hysteric was becoming unmanageably vocal about her father's long-term affair with a family friend, Mrs. K. As the case history written by Freud unfolds, a sordid network of illicit sexual activity is uncovered involving not only Dora's father and Mrs. K., but Mr. K. and numerous governesses as well. Lying behind the stiff rind of propriety maintained by these well-todo Viennese families is a rotten pulp of seduction and exploitation which is making Dora sick. Freud and Dora never get on well. She is an intelligent, vulnerable, and rebellious teenager. Freud has just published Interpretation of Dreams, which did not receive the kind of notice he had hoped for, and he is looking for confirmation of his neglected theories. Dora is the patient he looks to to provide a redeeming confluence of the two separate theoretical streams he had been following, on the one hand into hysteria, and on the other into dreams. After three months of analysis, Dora abruptly leaves treatment. tangle of unresolved psychological, social, and theoretical conflicts this case presents has lately drawn not only analysts but feminists as well into the Dora debate. As feminist commentators from Karen Horney to Nancy Chodorow have observed, the Freudian male model of psychosexual development simply does not fit the female experience. More particularly, in refer-