What Did Freud Want? Freud—Seduction—Dora—Feminisms (1994)

by Eric Anders

Ernest Jones reports that Freud once wrote to Marie Bonaparte: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” (Freud 1925b, 244n).  Yet Freud’s question—“Was will das Weib?”—is translated by Jones in a misleading way.  According to Peter Rudnytsky, Freud “asks not what a woman wants, but what woman wants, and thereby defines women not as historical subjects but rather as an abstract . . . [and, a]s feminist critics from Karen Horney to Luce Irigaray have argued, it is this refusal to accord women full subjectivity in his theory that rendered them so baffling to Freud” (15).  A more blatantly misogynistic aspect of Freud’s question is revealed when closer attention is paid to the word “Weib,” an archaic form of "wife” often used as a derogatory form of “woman.”  According to Jonathan Goldberg, “the question of desire has already been constrained and predetermined in a language that equates woman and wife” (367).  Freud’s “Weib” abstracts women into Woman, and Woman into Wife, suggesting that the general desire that interests Freud has already been placed outside of history, the singular histories of individual women, and within ahistorical conceptions of marriage.  When Freud asks “Was will das Weib?” he reveals clues to a question I will argue must be asked to understand Freud’s researches in general: what did Freud want?

Freud’s statement to Bonaparte is ironic, moreover, since Freud’s confidence, even arrogance, regarding his knowledge of feminine desire is made clear throughout his writing.  For example, in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, otherwise known as the Dora case, Dora (Ida Bauer) at eighteen recounted to Freud a narrative of being assaulted by an acquaintance of his, Herr K., at fourteen.  Freud concluded that the kiss and embrace forced onto his patient “was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached” (28).  Freud interpreted her reaction of disgust as contrary to “the genital sensation which would certainly have been felt by a healthy girl in such circumstances” (29), and in a footnote he goes so far as to ensure the reader that Herr K. was “of prepossessing appearance” (29n3).  Freud concluded that her reaction was a “reversal of affect,” an unconscious disavowal of her true feelings for Herr K., and evidence of her being “already entirely and completely hysterical” (28).  According to Freud, Dora’s healthy desire to enjoy Herr K.’s assault was repressed, thus signifying hysteria.  The Freud of the Dora case at least believed he knew what adolescent girls should want.

Though Freud’s treatment of what many have argued is the central question of the Dora case—What did Dora want?—seems simplistic and crass in the passages above, it is far more complex in the rest of the case study.  What Dora wants, according to Freud, does not correspond to a simple heterosexual paradigm.  Freud attributes homosexual desire to Dora, thus complicating her desire.  That Dora would have had such feelings would not be surprising for Freud since he argued that he had “never yet come through a single psycho-analysis of a man or a woman without having to take into account a very considerable current of homosexuality” (60).  Though Freud believes in a universal human “predisposition towards bisexuality” (114), he also links signs of homosexual desires to pathologies such as hysteria and, in his psychoanalytic period, paranoia.

The central question of the Dora case is not concerned with Dora’s desires but, again, with Freud’s.  Even his attribution of homosexual desire to Dora can be understood with respect to his own desires.  Freud appears contradictory when, in a case where he fervently agues for many heterosexual constructions of Dora’s unconscious desire, he also alludes to a general “predisposition toward bisexuality” (114) and claims that Dora had considerable homosexual desires:

For behind Dora’s supervalent thought which was concerned with her father’s relations with Frau K. there lay concealed a feeling of jealousy which had that lady as its object—a feeling, that is, which could only be based upon an affection on Dora’s part for one of her own sex.  (60)

A month after the analysis with Ida Bauer ended, Freud wrote about the Dora case to Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon from Berlin and Freud’s closest friend in the 1890s: 

It is a hysteria . . . and the principal issue in the conflicting thought processes is the contrast between an inclination toward men and an inclination toward women. (Masson 434)

Freud also added the following footnote towards the end of the case study:

The longer the interval of time that separates me from the end of this analysis, the more probable it seems to me that the fault in my technique lay in this omission: I failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life.  (1905a, 120n).

Regarding this footnote, Judith Roof asks, “If he knew before [that psychoanalysis would lead to discoveries of homosexual ‘unconscious currents’], why didn’t he know ‘in time’?” (180).  What Freud is claiming, however, is that he did not know in time that this homosexual current was stronger than her heterosexual desire.  Though Roof’s criticism of Freud’s footnote seems misplaced, he is inconsistent when he does not take into account his and Fliess’s theory of the ambiguity of sexuality, of “our predisposition towards bisexuality” (114), when he argues that Dora is hysterical because she supposedly represses her heterosexual desires at fourteen, and when he makes the many other heterosexist assumptions and claims elsewhere in the text.  

How should we read Freud’s footnote above and Dora’s desire?  As Teresa de Lauretis points out, most of the critics in In Dora’s Case (Bernheimer and Kahane) read Freud’s footnote as unambiguous, and, regarding Dora’s desire, 

[they] mention or focus on Dora’s “homosexuality” (Gearhart 114), her “homosexual desire for Frau K.” (Moi 195), her “homosexual desires” (Ramas 164), her “preoedipal desire for the mother” (Kahane, referring to Ramas), her “beautiful, staggering, feminine homosexuality” (Cixous, quoted by Gallop 217), even her “lesbianism” (Gallop 217).  Roof, too, following Gallop, unhesitantly refers to Dora’s “lesbianism” and footnotes other essays in the collection (Rose, Gearhart, and Hertz [1985]) “that recognize the role of lesbian sexuality [sic] in the Dora case” (Roof 263).  (de Lauretis 47; de Lauretis’s sic)

De Lauretis wisely makes the distinction between “bisexual or homosexual wishes and tendencies” and “actual homosexuality” (47), and reads the Dora case in terms of the former.  As for how to read Freud’s footnote, there is another, less problematic option which has yet to be considered.  It concerns switching the focus from Dora’s desire to Freud’s, and recognizing how Freud’s belated insight could work as a defense against a type of figurative castration.  Regarding Dora, Neil Hertz is correct to point out that we can never know what she—or, more appropriately, Ida Bauer—desired because Freud wrote over her speech, thus distorting it (Hertz 1986).  Speculations on Freud’s desire are not as problematic since they are not as far removed.

Any speculations on Freud’s desires in his analysis of Ida Bauer and rendering of the Dora case should take into account how the case study, as many critics have commented, reads like a seduction.  Madelon Sprengnether writes,

In his relentless pursuit of a heterosexual interpretation of Dora’s desire, Freud often substitutes his own train of associations for hers, a tactic that reveals the extent to which he idealizes the figure of Herr K. in order to blame Dora for her refusal.  On an interpretative level, he subjects her to a process of defloration, impregnation, and parturition in an aggressively Oedipal fashion at the same time that he invalidates her rejection by naming it hysteria. (1992, 50)

Janet Malcolm also notes that the Dora case “reads like an assault, almost like a rape; we cannot but feel outraged as Freud describes the girl’s desperate attempts to elude him while he obscenely moves in on her” (319).

Dora’s rejection of Freud, his analysis, and his interpretations, were symbolically castrating for Freud.  Judith Roof, in her reading of Dora as a lesbian, argues that when “Freud explicates Dora’s lesbian desire (finally), he reveals his own weakness and failure” and that his “confessed inadequacy . . . is a figurative castration” (187).  In at least one way, Roof gives Freud credit where he may not deserve it: he never explicates Dora’s “strongest unconscious current” (120n).  More to the point, Roof does not recognize that Freud’s belated footnote works in several ways to guard against his figurative castration.  His heterosexist sexual etiologies, confused as they were at this time of theoretical transition, were not threatened if Dora’s sexuality could be categorized as one of “The Sexual Aberrations.”  This was the title of Freud’s chapter in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which Freud wrote soon after the Dora case, that treats “inversion,” Freud’s heterosexist name for homosexuality (1905b).  More poignantly, Dora’s rejection of Freud’s analytical seduction could be rationalized away if her “strongest unconscious currents” were homosexual, much in the fashion a heterosexual male at a singles’ bar might rationalize being rejected by a woman he had approached: “She’s probably a dike.”  Furthermore, Freud could feel avenged—revenge being a central theme in this case and for Freud in general—by stigmatizing Ida Bauer with the then dreaded mark of homosexuality.  Freud sought revenge in myriad ways I will discuss below even though at the end of the case he claims that, “I promised to forgive her for having deprived me of the satisfaction of affording her a far more radical cure for her troubles” (122).

I shall argue here that Freud’s “satisfaction” must be accounted for when criticizing this case and Freudian theory in general.  This case has less to offer theorists interested in something akin to “research into the feminine soul” than it does for those who recognize that the “great question” for evaluating Freudian theory is—What did Freud want?  This essay is not another exposé of Freud’s countertransferences in the Dora case, especially if this term is understood as the analyst’s “unconscious reactions . . . to the analysand’s transferences” (Laplanche and Pontalis 92).  The idea that the analyst’s unconscious desires are only reactions to the analysand’s, a counter to the analysand’s transferences, assumes that the analyst has no unconscious wishes that might be actualized prior to or independent of the analysand’s unconscious wishes.  The term “countertransference” is a loaded one, connoting a universal objectivity for the position of analyst.   Analysts are analyzed in order to make their unconscious wishes as conscious as possible—“Wo Es var, soll Ich werden”—but, of course, this process, as Freud recognized, is never complete (1937a).

I hope to show that Freud, who was only self-analyzed, brought strong conscious and unconscious wishes to his practice that shaped and most likely tainted his prepsychoanalytic practice, and, in turn, his theory.  Though I am critical of Freud throughout, my approach for speculating on his desires and their effect on his theory and practice is similar to psychoanalysis itself: it is historical, I attempt to locate origins and repetitions, sexuality is central, I am interested in castration and phantasy, and I focus on metaphor and meaning.  I shall briefly interpret Freud’s case studies of two other eighteen year old females, Katherina and the woman of “Psychogenesis,” but the linchpin of my argument is the Dora case.  This essay constitutes an expanded reading of the Dora case to include much of prepsychoanalytic and some psychoanalytic Freudian theory.  The larger focus of this essay, however, is Freudian theory in general and its relationship to some of the varied discourses of feminisms, with particular emphasis placed on Freud’s prepsychoanalytic theory.  It focuses on three themes—seduction, defense against castration, and revenge—which are pivotal to understanding Freud, his work, and, more specifically, his belated footnote regarding Dora’s “strongest unconscious current.”  

A Sexual Genesis

If Freudian theory were represented on a time line of the history of psychoanalysis, there would not only be a significant portion where there was no overlap of the two after Freud’s death in 1939, but also a small period prior to Freud’s collaboration with Joseph Breuer on Studies on Hysteria.  This earlier period of no overlap would represent the time Breuer and his patient Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.) began to formulate the cathartic method, or what Pappenheim called “the talking cure,” without Freud’s assistance.  In An Autobiographical Study, Freud wrote, 

If the account I have so far given has led the reader to expect the Studies on Hysteria must, in all essentials of their material content, be the product of Breuer’s mind, that is precisely what I myself have always maintained and what it has been my aim to repeat here.  As regards the theory put forward in the book, I was partly responsible, but to an extent which it is to-day no longer possible to determine. (1925, 21)

Strachey gives credit to Freud for the “vital concepts of resistance, defense and repression” covered in Studies (Freud and Breuer, xxi), and points out that “the chief difference of opinion between the two authors upon which Freud later insisted concerned the part played by sexual impulses in the causation of hysteria” (xxv).  Freud wrote in 1925 that the “theory of catharsis had not much to say on the subject of sexuality. . . .  It would have been difficult to guess from the Studies on Hysteria what an importance sexuality has in the aetiology of the neuroses” (1925, 22). 

What we would call today “Freudian theory” begins with a sexual etiology of neurosis that involves repression.  What is specifically Freud’s is the synthesis of these two elements of sexuality and repression.  With respect to his clinical theory, there were three fundamental questions Freud consistently tried to answer from the period he worked with Breuer through the seduction theory and into psychoanalysis: (1) What is the sexual etiology of neurosis? (2) What are the mechanisms of repression? and (3) How are sexuality and repression related?

According to Freud in 1925, this theoretical synthesis of sexuality and repression lead to a change in his early practice beyond adopting Breuer’s and Pappenheim’s cathartic method:

Under the influence of my discovery, I now took a momentous step.  I went beyond the domain of hysteria and began to investigate the sexual life of the so-called neurasthenics who used to visit me in numbers during my consultation hours.  This experiment cost me, it is true, my popularity as a doctor, but it brought me convictions which to-day, almost thirty years later, have lost none of their force.  (1925, 24)

In his attempt to establish a sexual etiology of what he would later call neurosis, Freud sexualized his consultations, and, and as I discuss below, this aspect of his work would cause him professional concern for much of his career.

Though Freud emphasizes that it was in his work after Studies that he put forth his sexual theory of neurosis, there are many aspects of Studies which suggest that Freud had already settled on such a theory: “I was obliged to recognize that, in so far as one can speak of determining causes which lead to the acquisition of neuroses, their aetiology is to be looked for in sexual factors” (1893-5, 257).  The best example of practical application of this theory in Studies is the Katherina case.  As in the Dora case, Freud treated Katherina when she was eighteen and was told memories of an unwanted sexual advance made by an elder male when she was fourteen.  Though Dora’s experience was interpreted by Freud as “just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached” (28), Katherina at fourteen is treated as a presexual or asexual being and her experience is part of what Freud considers to be sexual trauma.  The Katherina case foreshadows the theory of seduction, though the sexual trauma occurs in adolescence rather than in childhood.  Despite Katherina’s relatively advanced age at the time of the trauma, what Freud calls her “period of working-out, of ‘incubation’” (131) is comparable to what he would later call “Nachträglichkeit,” or deferred action of repression, an aspect of the theory of seduction equally as important as sexual trauma.    

Freud writes in the Dora case, “. . . I can only repeat over and over again—for I never find it otherwise—that sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general.  No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door" (115).  Though I will argue later that Freud has no single key in the Dora case, he does have a primary key, one that is the same as his key in the Katherina case.  When Dora recounts her narrative of being assaulted by Herr K. at fourteen, the absence of Dora’s desire for Herr K.’s advances is for Freud a telltale bit of the “unconscious disingenuousness” (17) that leaves “gaps unfilled” (16) in the narratives of hysterics who suffer from repression.  Effecting an abreaction of these repressed memories, according to the Freud of the Dora case, would require a catharsis of the repressed ideational content via its dialogical reconstruction from the analysand’s free associations and the analyst’s interpretations.  Freud, however, does not report filling this supposed gap in Dora’s narrative with such reconstructions.  Rather, Freud, as he often does, employs his own associations: “I believe that during the man’s passionate embrace she felt not merely his kiss upon her lips but also the pressure of his erect member against her body” (30).  In Katherina’s case, the cathartic method, where the analysand’s talking was theorized as potentially curative, was displaced by one of suggestion where the analyst does almost all of the talking:

“Tell me just one thing more.  You’re a grown-up girl now and know all sorts of things . . .”

“Yes, now I am.”

“Tell me just one thing.  What part of his body was it that you felt that night?”

But she gave me no more definite answers.  She smiled in an embarrassed way, as though she had been found out, like someone who is obliged to admit that a fundamental position has been reached where there is not much more to be said.  I could imagine what the tactile sensation was which she had later learnt to interpret.  Her facial expression seemed to me to be saying that she supposed that I was right in my conjecture.  But I could not penetrate further . . .  (Freud and Breuer 131-2, my italics)

Though there seems to be an absence of repression since Freud’s method, as he himself observes, is merely one of “guessing” (133) and her remembering, Freud suggests that a primary pathogen in this case, as in the Dora case, is a supposedly repressed memory of an “erect member.”

Freud’s primary key to the hysteria of his patients that constitute what I will argue is his prepsychoanalytic period is repeatedly an “erect member,” which he uses to “know” his patients, to “penetrate” their unconscious desires.  Freud theoretically distinguishes himself from Breuer and his other mentors and predecessors by his focus on sexuality and its relationship to repression; and, as a result, Freud’s practice becomes sexualized.  Due to the nature of repression, the reliability of his (re)constructions of his patients unconscious ideational content is dependent on the absence of his desires, on his professionalism.  According to Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud’s “wish to cure sexually abstinent patients could be realized quite simply: Freud could give his patients sexual satisfaction” (124), and Freud considered this a medical solution since sexuality was both biological and psychical.  To free up the libido of these eighteen-year-old patients, to sexually satisfy them, Freud offers them an “erect member.”  Ironically, the analytic setting, Appignanesi and Forrester point out, is “a hothouse for the eroticization of language, for taking of pleasure in knowledge” (159).  There seems to have been two types of seductions in Freud’s prepsychoanalytic practice: a straightforward kind, where Freud’s eroticization of the analysis is a thinly veiled, if veiled at all, seduction of his patient, and a transferential kind, where Freud’s treats his analysands as if they were what Appignanesi and Forrester call his “mistress … [that is,] his psychoanalytic science, embodying his own desire to know about female desire” (157).

Freud’s sexual desires toward females seem to precede his “researches into the feminine soul,” therefore we should begin with Freud himself in order to determine the value of these researches—or, more specifically, the value of Freudian theory for feminisms.  I focus below on the theory of seduction and the Dora case becuase Freud’s theoretical writings of this period—the latter part of the the 1890s and the first years of the twentieth century—laid the foundation for psychoanalysis, and becuase his clinical writing of the same period is nearly limited to female analysands.  I hope to show that Freud’s theorizing and practice during this period were dominated by unconscious themes of “seduction” for the analyst and theoretician, thus making the utility of Freudian theory at least problematic for feminisms since the dynamics of Freudian “seduction,” which I will argue is a euphamism for rape, would then be an integral part of the foundation of psychoanalysis.

(Re)constructing Seduction

“‘[T]he reader of thoughts merely reads his own thoughts into other people.’”

Wilhelm Fliess on Freud, as quoted by Freud on August 7, 1901 

Freud’s analysis of Ida Bauer took place three years after Freud’s September 21, 1897, letter to Fliess, where he writes, “I no longer believe in my neurotica” (Masson 1985, 264).  Freud is referring here to his theory of seduction, which Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis define as a theory “developed between 1895 and 1897, and subsequently abandoned, which attributes the determining role in the aetiology of the psychoneuroses to the memory of real scenes of seduction,” these being scenes “in which the subject, generally a child, submits passively to the advances of sexual manipulation of another person—an adult in most cases” (404).  Though Freud claims to no longer believe in the theory of seduction in his letter of 1897, the Dora case shows many signs that he had not abandoned every aspect of it, and that his major theoretical transition between this theory and oedipal psychoanalysis was by no means complete.  Indeed, there are also strong indications that he is avoiding the theory of seduction as a possible explanatory paradigm in his interpretation of what he had diagnosed as Dora’s “petite hystérie” (1905a, 24-5).  Though most critics have analyzed this case in terms of psychoanalytic theory, I hope to show that historicizing the Dora case requires a reconsideration of its relation to the theory of seduction.

The theory of seduction currently has a renewed currency in the U. S. within the context of what some feminists call the “recovered memory movement”—or simply “recovery”—and others call “false memory syndrome.”  Proponents of “recovery” argue that there is extremely wide-spread sexual abuse in the U. S. and that the memories of these real scenes of abuse are being repressed by many of the victims.  Another related factor in this renewed interest in Freud’s theory of seduction is the 1984 publication of a book by a staunch advocate for the “recovery” movement: The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory  by Jeffrey Moussaief Masson.  Following Masson’s theory that the seduction theory never should have been abandoned by Freud—i.e., that its abandonment represented an “assault on truth”—Lawrence Frank’s “Freud and Dora: Blindness and Insight” (1989) precedes my essay by making the connection between the seduction theory and the Dora case central to its argument.  Though my argument, in some ways, is in harmony with Masson’s position that Freud suppressed the seduction theory after 1897, my intention here is to criticize The Assault on Truth in such a way that will both shed light on Freud’s theory itself and distance my position in this essay from Masson, Frank, and the “recovery” movement.

Freud’s theory of seduction, which reached its zenith of influence in his work four years prior to Ida Bauer’s analysis, had many forms, but its “formal version” (Blass and Simon 173n) was presented by Freud in “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” a lecture given to the Viennese “Verein für Psychiatrie und Neurologie” on April 21, 1896.  This lecture, according to Freud’s correspondence to Fliess on the same day, 

was given an icy reception by the asses [of the psychiatric society] and a strange evaluation by Krafft-Ebing: “It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.”  And this, after one has demonstrated to them the solution of a more-than-thousand-year-old problem, a caput Nili!  They can all go to hell, euphemistically expressed. (Masson 1985, 184)

The source of the Nile that Freud disclosed to this group of medical men was the sexual abuse of children.  According to the seduction theory, all hysteria is the result of such abuse.

        Ironically, Freud never used the term “seduction theory” for the theory he described in this lecture; and, as Masson explains, given the violence Freud depicts there, the name was an odd choice made by Freud’s followers:

Freud uses many words to describe these “infantile sexual scenes” [in this lecture]: Vergewaltigung (rape), Missbrauch (abuse), Verführung (seduction), Angriff (attack), Attentent (the French term, meaning an assault), Aggression (aggression), and Traumen (traumas).  All of these words explicitly state something about violence being directed against the child expressed in the sexuality of the adult, with the exception of the word “seduction,” which was an unfortunate choice, since it implies some form of participation by the child. (1984, 3-4)

According to the history of psychoanalysis in its official version, psychoanalysis began when Freud abandoned the seduction theory.  This suggests another irony.  One difference between seduction and sexual abuse has to do with the element of complicity that the former has and the latter lacks.  Seduction involves persuasion—persuasion to do what one really wants to do.  What Freud describes as the “infantile sexual scenes” of the “seduction” theory seem to lack this element, thus making “the child rape theory” a more appropriate name.  On the other hand, “seduction” seems appropriate to an understanding of these scenes in a psychoanalytic context where one presupposes the existence of infantile sexuality—thus making psychoanalytic narratives of such sexual abuse narratives of “seduction.”

When we add Freud’s later theory of feminine masochism to the picture, it is easy to see why some feminists who theorize rape would most likely find psychoanalysis offensive: if desire is linked to consent, and all females are naturally masochistic and universally phantasize about being “seduced,” especially by father figures, then rape becomes a moot category.  Even before his theorization of femininity as inherently masochistic and female desire as phallocentric, Freud believed that a female is suspect of being hysterical if she rejects a male’s sexual advances, as found in the Dora case (28), which suggests that whatever antipathy there is between psychoanalysis and feminist rape theory would be rooted in early Freudian theory.

Freud’s eventual disbelief in the seduction theory seems to correspond to a disbelief that the narratives he constructed with his patients, who were primarily female, corresponded to an event in their lives.  Beginning in 1905, Freud would argue that these narratives were actually his patients’ phantasies, and even their “falsifications” (1905c, 274).  In The Assault on Truth, Masson cites Freud’s 1925 autobiography:

. . . I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up. [sic]  (1984, 11)

Here I shall switch the focus from Freud to Masson.  The period at the end of Masson’s quotation is either disingenuous or a bit of careless scholarship.  The actual quotation should have contained an ellipsis at both ends:

When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them, I was for some time completely at a loss.  (1925c, 34)

I suspect that Masson’s erroneous period is not a minor mistake of scholarship since Masson had (and still has) a lot invested in the absence of suggestion in Freud’s practice during his seduction theory phase.  If Freud had “forced” the narratives of “seduction” on his patients, then there would have been no truth to assault.  In a way, Masson attempts to sanctify the Freud of the seduction theory and villainize the later Freud, arguing that Freud assaulted the truth to gain acceptance from the “asses” in the “Verein für Psychiatrie und Neurologie.”  Though I agree that Freud was motivated by his desire for this acceptance when he turned away from repressed memories and toward repressed phantasies as the caput Nili—and, I would add, that this acceptance would probably outweigh any hesitancy toward shocking the fin-de-siècle public with the concept of infantile sexuality—I disagree with Masson’s ungrounded claim that Freud had had access to truth with the seduction theory.

As the reader progresses through The Assault on Truth, the vagueness of Masson’s treatment of the theoretical issues surrounding his history of the prepsychoanalytic Freud eventually suggests that Masson misunderstands the seduction theory as a theory that simply claims that childhood sexual abuse causes hysteria, and, therefore, missing the crucial difference between this simple claim and Freud’s universal claim that all cases of hysteria are caused by childhood sexual abuse.  Masson appreciates neither the significance of this necessary causal connection nor that the seduction theory was very much concerned with explaining the mechanisms of repression and the significance of unconscious processes in the formation of hysteria and its symptoms.

The truth for Masson and the Freud of the seduction theory is that the repressed memories of sexual abuse Freud and his patients’ constructed in his analyses corresponded to actual events.  The truth for the later, psychoanalytic Freud was that the narratives he uncovered during his seduction theory phase did not correspond to a repressed memory of an event but to repressed infantile phantasies.  The child of the seduction theory is not yet a sexual being—he or she is “presexual” (1905a, 31)—whereas the child of psychoanalysis is a sexual being with sexual phantasies springing from sexual drives.  Though Freud’s interpretation of the narratives changed from a focus on memory to phantasy, repression and narratives of “seduction” were always an integral part of Freud’s various etiologies of neurosis.  Patients who could simply remember being sexually abused or having sexual phantasies about a parent would not correspond directly to Freud’s seduction theory or psychoanalytic sexual etiologies of neurosis.  Masson seems to miss the significance of repression in all of Freud’s theorizing, where repression, and therefore unconscious ideational content, were always integral to pathogenesis.

Enter Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit, the deferred action or retroaction of repression.  Though a vague and untheorized form of this idea remains a member of the cast of psychoanalytic players after Freud’s abandonment of the necessary causal connection between “seduction” and hysteria, Nachträglichkeit no longer had a leading role in Freudian theory during his psychoanalytic phase—that is, not until Jacques Lacan created such a role for it.  According to this aspect of the theory, the trauma of “seduction” is not limited to the actual occurrence of sexual abuse during childhood.  Laplanche and Pontalis explain:

. . . the trauma occurs in two stages separated from each other by puberty.  The first stage—the moment of seduction proper—is described by Freud as a “presexual” sexual event in that it is occasioned by factors external to the subject, who is still incapable of experiencing sexual emotions.  (1967, 405)

The sexuality of the event is not psychologically integrated by the child since she or he has no sexual desire or corresponding sexual ideas.  The experience of the event is not repressed, nor is the memory of it—not until the child hits puberty and attains sexual desire, the corresponding ideas, and a structure in which to integrate the memories and give them meaning.  Only then are the memories repressed and become pathogenic—only after being transferred from a presexual childhood and revived within the sexual context of adolescence in association with another event.  An example of the type of event Freud had in mind for this second stage of deferred-action repression would be Herr K.’s assault on Dora at fourteen.  It is remarkable that the index of The Assault on Truth contains no reference to “deferred action,” “retroaction,” or “Nachträglichkeit” considering its importance for any understanding of the seduction theory.  Indeed, any treatment of this concept seems to be absent from Masson’s book.

Lawrence Frank, even more than Masson, misunderstands the seduction theory and its relationship to psychoanalysis.  Frank writes,

We are compelled to doubt the claims of Anna Freud, Ernst Kris, and others that the formulation of the oedipus [sic] complex is impossible without the rejection of the reality of infantile seduction.  There are neither logical nor empirical reasons for claiming an incompatibility between the seduction theory of the 1896 paper on “The Aetiology of Hysteria” and the theory of the oedipus complex formulated in the autumn of 1897.  (128)

Though I am somewhat indebted to Frank for his reading of the Dora case in terms of the seduction theory, his statement, particularly the second sentence above, is false. There is one aspect of the seduction theory that stands out as being blatantly contrary to psychoanalysis: the view of the child as a presexual or asexual being.  The presexuality of the child contributes to the psychical trauma of the event of sexual abuse: if the child were sexual, as in psychoanalysis, he or she may not be traumatized by sex.  Also, it makes deferred action necessary because it leads to the necessity of the process of repression being carried into puberty.  The repression of the sexual child of psychoanalysis would not have to wait for puberty and its sexual context, though it might have to wait for other context-defining elements as Freud argues in the “Wolf Man” case (Freud 1918, 45).

Freud, despite what he writes in his autobiography, does not abandon the psychical truth of these narratives of seduction; he abandons his belief in their correspondence to actual events and that these events are required in the etiology of hysteria.  In “Massonic Truths,” Norman Holland argues that Masson’s thesis that Freud “assaulted the truth” is mistaken because he misses the point that what Freud abandoned is the necessary causal connection between sexual abuse during childhood and the psychoneuroses.  Holland writes: “Freud abandoned the causal connection, not the events he thought he had connected” (333).  In other words, Freud did not deny that sexual abuse of children actually happens and that this abuse might cause psychological problems later, but that there was a necessary causal connection between sexual abuse of children and hysteria.  In my opinion, the first part of Holland’s statement is correct, but the second half—the part about how Freud did not abandon “the events he thought he had connected”—is erroneous because, though Freud denied neither that the sexual abuse of children happened nor that the narratives represented psychical truth, he did deny that the specific narratives he and his patients had constructed corresponded to an historical event (Masson 1984, 9 and 107-44).

All psychoanalytic claims to authority rest to a large degree on the nature of Freud’s constructions of his analysands’ supposedly unconscious ideational content—that is, to what degree they are indeed reconstructions of this content and not constructions of Freud’s own conscious or unconscious invention.  It is to this issue that my use of the term “(re)construction” is addressed.  To shed light on this issue I shall rely indirectly on the authority of Masson’s reconstruction of the psychoanalytic movement’s suppressed history—its unconscious of sorts.  Much of Masson’s claim to originality regarding the history of the prepsychoanalytic Freud is the result of his being the first person to gain access to the nervously protected Freud Archives whose beliefs were such that the experience would cause an apostasy.  Among many other interesting fillers for the gaps in the narratives of the psychoanalytic movement, Masson unearthed many more details to Freud’s involvement with Emma Eckstein, a patient he treated in common with Fliess.

After his archival research, Masson made available a complete collection of Freud’s correspondence with Fliess (Masson 1985).  Some of the formerly unpublished letters show that one of Fliess’s medical theories that Freud blindly admired posited that the cauterization of the turbinate bone of the nasal cavity could cure sexually related neurotic and physiological ailments.  In that pivotal year of 1896, Freud volunteered Eckstein for this procedure, which, by Freud’s own account, had disastrous effects: she nearly bled to death because of bone chips and a meter of gauze left in her nose after the operation.  Though Freud had witnessed their removal by a surgeon and the repeated hemorrhaging that followed, Freud, concerned about protecting himself and his friend professionally, wrote to Fliess a few months after her near death, “I shall be able to prove to you that you were right, that her episodes of bleeding were hysterical” (Masson 1984, 183).  Despite the evidence, Freud was still able to convince himself that her bleeding was a hysterical reaction, a somatic conversion of her repressed desire, which, according to Freud, was to be near him.  Freud (re)constructed his patient’s unconscious desire: she would hemorrhage to bring him near.  But would he argue that she hysterically produced bone chips too?  Or, even more difficult, the gauze?

In 1897, a year after this horrible event, Freud would write to Fliess that he had abandoned the seduction theory and its focus on memory for a theory that focused on phantasy (Masson 1985, 264-65).  The primary connection between the Eckstein debacle and the seduction theory to which Masson draws attention is based on his discovery that Eckstein had been Freud’s patient too, and that a (re)construction of a narrative of sexual abuse during her childhood probably occurred in her analysis with Freud.  Masson writes that, “[i]f Emma Eckstein’s problems (her bleeding) had nothing to do with the real world (Fliess’s operation), then her earlier accounts of seduction could well be fantasies too” (1984, 99).  Masson suggests two connections between Freud’s and Fliess’s traumatic abuse of their patient and Freud’s eventual theoretical shift: (1) the “therapy” is one based on sexuality and, therefore, was a form of sexual abuse itself, which motivated Freud to distance himself from being implicated in a version of his own sexual etiology of hysteria; and (2) Freud’s defense that the bleeding was ultimately caused by a phantasy to be near him rather than the event of sexual/surgical abuse motivated him to turn away from memory of events and toward phantasy as the new caput Nili for hysteria (Masson 1984, 55-106).  Freud, according to Masson, is suppressing the importance of events of sexual abuse in general.

Though these speculations, which Masson unfortunately treat as fact in his book, are convincing in many ways, Masson does not seem to consider fully more obvious implications of the Eckstein debacle.  The primary lesson I take from Freud’s treatment of Eckstein is that he would (re)construct what he wanted to (re)construct with his patients, even in extreme cases.  Masson seems to forget that the villain of the Eckstein affair and the saint of the seduction theory are the same man: this debacle occurs at the height of Freud’s confidence in the seduction theory.  When Masson argues that the seduction theory represents some great “truth,” he avoids this consistent and extraordinary tendency of Freud’s to, in the words of Fliess, “read his thoughts into other people”—or, in other words, to find what he wanted to find at the time, which is most often the evidence he needed to support his current theory.

Masson also seems to accept the logic of the Freud of the 1920s and 1930s and his recounting of the events surrounding the seduction theory where Freud claims that his patients “reported” falsehoods: “I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports [of seduction by their father] were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences” (1933, 120).  It is crucial to remember, as Masson and even the psychoanalytic Freud seem to forget conveniently, that repression is central to the seduction theory; therefore, Freud would have to (re)construct these unconscious memories of “seduction.”  The patients would not “report” seduction; if they had been able to do this without Freud’s assistance, then these memories would not necessarily have been pathogenic, according to Freud’s theory, because they would not be made unconscious due to repression.  The issue was not whether Freud’s patients were lying, but whether the (re)constructions Freud and his patients’ created corresponded in some way to the patient’s history.  Given Freud’s propensity to read his thoughts and desires into other people as evidenced by his response to the Eckstein affair, these reconstructions are highly suspect of being Freud’s constructions.  If these are Freud’s constructions, the grand edifice of all of Freud’s sexual etiologies, and therefore psychoanalysis in general, is built on a very shaky foundation.  Freud relies on these scenes of seduction as his theoretical foundation, either as memories of real scenes in the theory of seduction or as phantasied scenes in psychoanalysis.  

In Masson’s translation of Freud’s seduction theory lecture of 1896, we find the first moment of the “logic” that patients “reported” the narratives of “seduction” in Freud’s writing:

Doubts about the genuineness of the infantile sexual scenes can, however, be deprived of their force here and now by more than one argument.  In the first place, the behavior of patients while they are reproducing these infantile experiences is in every respect incompatible with the assumption that the scenes are anything else than a reality which is being felt with distress and reproduced with the greatest reluctance. (1984, 9-10).

Besides being misleading regarding who is “reproducing” the scenes of seduction, Freud is also misleading when he suggests it is a “reality” being felt, rather than the affect associated with the catharsis of supposedly repressed memories of some reality.  Freud’s next line from Strachey’s translation of “The Aetiology of Hysteria” reads,

Before they come for analysis the patients know nothing about these scenes.  They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge.  Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them.  While they are recalling these infantile experiences to consciousness, they suffer under the most violent sensations, of which they are ashamed and which they try to conceal; and, even after they have gone through them once more in such a convincing manner, they still attempt to withhold belief from them, by emphasizing the fact that, unlike what happens in the case of other forgotten material, they have no feeling of remembering the scenes.

This latter piece of behaviour seems to provide conclusive proof.  Why should patients assure me so emphatically of their unbelief, if what they want to discredit is something which—from whatever motive—they themselves invented?  (1896, 204; emphasis mine)

Why is absence of recall proof?  Who invented the scenes?  Freud begs the last question when he assumes that his patients invented the narratives of “seduction.”  One wonders if Freud included his patients in the construction of these scenes at all since he seems to have made up his mind that he will find them before the patient arrives—much like his later case studies where he was convinced he would find an Oedipus complex before the case began, and much like “recovery” movement therapists of today who are convinced they will find repressed memories of sexual abuse if their patients’ descriptions of themselves correspond to a checklist of vague questions.  Given his extravagant confidence he will find repressed memories of “seduction” with those patients that correspond to his hysteria checklist, his patients’ lack of feeling of remembering the scenes is not surprising.  A 1924 footnote to the 1896 passage above reads: “All this is true; but it must be remembered that at the time I wrote it I had not yet freed myself from overvaluation of reality and low valuation of phantasy” (1896, 204).  Though “all this is true,” Freud would write in 1925, only a year after the footnote above: “I was obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up” (Masson 1984, 11).  Again, who made them up?

Frederick Crews claims that “Freud had no empirical warrant for shifting to an oedipal perspective” (Crews 1994b, 52).  This becomes clear when we consider how Freud would not concern himself with empirical evidence since his theories were based on repression and his analyses were based on the (re)construction of what was repressed.  As with his shift “to an oedipal perspective,” Freud had no “empirical warrant” for adopting his earlier sexual etiology of the seduction theory.  Scientific empiricism as some kind of method or value, problematic as this may be in general, becomes an impossibility in a context that attempts to reconstruct something that supposedly has been repressed.  One reason why the Freud of the 1920s and 1930s equivocates and calls his patients’ narratives of sexual abuse “reports” may have been because he realized that such an about-face in his theory—such as the one that occurred when he abandoned the seduction theory and its presexual child for the infantile sexuality of psychoanalysis—suggests that the “infantile sexual scenes” he reported as reconstructions of his patients’ memory were highly suspect of being his constructions.  After arguing so fervently for acceptance of the seduction theory, Freud realized that his abandonment of it would ultimately suggest that he was biased toward his theories, that he would find the evidence he wanted to find, and that he would conclude what he wanted to conclude from that evidence—thus Freud’s (re)constructions become his patients’ phantasies, and then their “reports” and “falsifications.”

It seems that whether it is gauze in Eckstein’s nose, memories of child abuse, the Wolf Man’s primal scene, or Dora’s love for Herr K., Freud consistently finds evidence that corresponds to his current theory, or to what he is trying to prove at the time.  Other examples of how Freud justified interpreting a case as he wanted can be found in the Dora case, where he argues that the incoherence of parts of Dora’s personal narrative is a sign of hysteria, and that the coherence of other parts of her narrative is also a sign of her hysteria, hiding the pathology behind a water-tight story (1905a, 16-7 and 35).  It seems that Freud could find hysteria behind either an incoherent or coherent narrative, which would suggest that there is no relation between the coherence of a patient’s narrative and his or her hysteria.  In Freud’s 1925 essay “Negation,” Freud argues that a patient’s response of “yes” to the analyst’s interpretation can be accepted by the analyst as a confirmation, but so can a response of “no” since it is a sign of the disavowal that goes along with repression (1925a, 236).  Not only do analysts enjoy freedom from actualizing their unconscious wishes prior to their analysands’ actualization of unconscious wishes—making all of their transferences countertransferences—the analyst can never be contradicted since a “yes” means yes and a “no” means yes.  As Freud would have it, the analyst is objective and always right—a godlike figure.  Foreshadowing this no-as-yes view of analysis, while at the same time laying the foundation of antipathy between Freudian theory and certain forms of feminism, Freud writes in the Dora case that “there is no such thing at all as an unconscious ‘No’” (57).

A passage from Freud’s 1937 essay—tellingly named in English “Constructions in Analysis” and not “Reconstructions in Analysis”—seems relevant to a discussion of Freud’s ability to (re)construct what he wants from an analysis and his anxiety over the problem of what is called “suggestion” in psychotherapy circles, an issue that is especially relevant to the current debates over “recovered memories”:

The danger of our leading a patient astray by suggestion, by persuading him to accept things which we ourselves believe but which he ought not to, has certainly been enormously exaggerated.  An analyst would have to behave very incorrectly before such a misfortune could overtake him: above all, he would have to blame himself with not allowing his patients their say.  I can assert without boasting that such an abuse of “suggestion” has never occurred in my practice. (1937b, 262).

All of Freud’s case studies are full of strong indications of “suggestion,” especially considering Freud’s construction of primal phantasies in cases like the Wolf Man, and his tendency to displace his analysands’ free associations with his own—another form of “not allowing his patients their say” (Sprengnether 1985, 263).  Freud’s claim that his seduction-theory patients’ “reports” were false can imply that either these narratives were his constructions or that they were the product of phantasy.  If they are the product of phantasy, the question becomes—whose phantasy, the analysands’ or Freud’s?  Since Freud, as we shall see below, was such an active and ulteriorly motivated participant in these (re)constructions, since he would have to be the first to broach the topic of sexual abuse given the analysand’s ignorance of the scenes and the centrality of repression and unconscious material in his theory, and given his propensity to have his perception shaped by his desires, as evidenced by his response to the Eckstein debacle, the phantasies in question seem to be to a large degree the product of Freud’s imagination, which would make the narratives potentially both constructions and the product of phantasy—Freud’s.  I believe that Freud is not only “boasting” with his claim about the absence of suggestion in his practice, he is “assaulting the truth.”

The minor mistake Masson makes in his Assault on Truth is not recognizing the centrality of the necessary causal connection in the seduction theory, as Holland points out.  The necessity of this connection is what Freud theoretically abandoned, not the simple idea that sexual abuse during childhood may lead to neurosis.  Freud’s later focus on phantasy to the exclusion of memory and events, however, does imply that Freud had also abandoned actual sexual abuse as a possible cause of neurosis.  That this was done in the interest of supporting his theory of the ubiquity of oedipal phantasies, something in which Freud had a lot invested, seems to be a very dark side of the history of psychoanalysis, much as Masson argues.  The result is that, whereas the Freud of the seduction theory and the therapists of the “recovered memory” movement are motivated to (re)construct supposedly latent memories of sexual abuse which most likely leads them to suggestion, classically trained psychoanalysts are trained to treat manifest memories of sexual abuse as potential phantasies or as memories of a seduction that was partially the result of the child’s desires.  All of these forms of “therapy,” in my opinion, have gone awry.

The major mistake Masson makes—one that seems to be motivated by his desire to assert the “truth” of his simplistic understanding of the seduction theory as a theory that connects sexual abuse and mental illness—is granting the Freud of the seduction theory the appearance of being an objective psychological scientist in the best traditions of empiricism.  Holland and other proponents of classical psychoanalytic tenets make this mistake for  both the Freud of the seduction theory and of psychoanalysis, constructing a narrative of the invention of psychoanalysis in terms of a series of scientific “discoveries” rather than pseudo-scientific hypotheses: unconscious processes, sexual etiology of neurosis, phantasy replaces memory as the form of what is repressed, just as the sexual child replaces the presexual child, and then the Oedipus complex.  This narrative is not one of traditional science in the sense that the invention of psychoanalysis was based on some empirical evidence.  Given the nature of the methodology and “data,” it cannot be.  As Robert Holt argues, “[p]sychoanalysts must begin to face the fact that their primary and typical form of research, the uncontrolled clinical case study, is devoid of scientific value except as a source of hypotheses” (1989, 330).  This holds for any form of psychotherapy that deals with some form of supposedly repressed ideational content, especially those in an uncontrolled clinical setting.

Masson’s attack on Freud ironically reinvigorates Freud’s authority by representing him as once having had access to objective truth.  How does Masson know that Freud’s (re)constructions of “seduction” represent some event, some truth or reality that he later “assaults” with his turn toward psychoanalysis?  Masson doesn’t know—he can’t know.  He can only do what Freud could do: speculate and form hypotheses.  Arguing as if he could know, as if he could see events of sexual abuse beyond Freud’s rhetoric and (re)constructions, Masson himself commits an “assault on truth.”  Yes, Freud eventually turned his back on what Masson convincingly argues was a rampant social problem at the time: childhood sexual abuse.  But this certainly does not mean that Freud’s seduction theory represented some “truth.”  As I shall show below, Frank makes the same mistake when he interprets the Dora case in terms of Masson’s “truth” as if he could validate some historical event beyond Freud’s (re)constructions.

Dora as the Last Prepsychoanalytic Case History

The Dora case is widely regarded as the first psychoanalytic case study and is the only one of Freud’s five main studies that concerns a female analysand.  For many this case provides a point of origin for the intersection of a variety of feminisms and psychoanalyses (Bernheimer and Kahane).  Though it does provide a useful site for the intersection, or interweaving, of these two mulitvocal fields, I shall argue that the Dora case is not psychoanalytic; it marks the end of Freud’s prepsychoanalytic case studies rather than the beginning of his psychoanalytic ones.  Historicizing the Dora case in this way encourages us to view Freud’s practical application of his theories as divided along lines of gender, where female analysands are Freud’s choice to display his theories based on repressed memories of psychical trauma, while male analysands are the focus for his theories based on repressed oedipal phantasies.  Moreover, categorizing this case as prepsychoanalytic groups it together with the theory of seduction.  I read the Dora case in terms of “seduction” in the following two sections.

The Dora case was written during a transition period in Freud’s theorizing, a period between two fully developed Freudian clinical theories: the seduction theory and psychoanalysis proper based on the Oedipus complex.  These theories could be considered fully developed because they answer the three questions above regarding a sexual etiology, the mechanisms of repression, and the relationship between them.  During the transitional period none of these questions was fully answered, and so the Dora case is neither psychoanalytic nor a practical application of the seduction theory, but a product of a period marked by a confusion of sexual etiologies and ideas on repression.  The transitional nature of this case study and its significance have not been appreciated by many of its critics who, accept for Frank and Rachel B.  Blass (Blass 1992), invariably read it psychoanalytically.

When Ernest Jones asked Freud which were his “favorites among his writings,” he chose The Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Gay 1988, 228).  Freud would continue to revise these two seminal works of psychoanalysis late into his life.  According to Strachey, Ida Bauer’s analysis took place during the latter part of 1900, soon after the publication of Dreams, and seems to have been written for the most part during the early part of 1901 and before Three Essays (1905, 5).  Roughly speaking, Freud explains his conception of unconscious processes in Dreams, and in Three Essays he theorizes what it is fueled by and what it works for—i.e., sexuality.

The Dora case has been considered by many as a practical application of the early foundation of psychoanalytic theory represented by Dreams and Three Essays.  Its original title, “Dreams and Hysteria,” suggests that Freud’s primary goal in the case study was to demonstrate “how dream-interpretation is woven into the history of a treatment and how it can become the means of filling in amnesias and elucidating symptoms” (10).  With its heavy reliance on symptom and dream interpretation, Freud believed “Dora” would supplement Dreams by showing the therapeutic application of the process of interpretation he describes there.  Regarding his theory of sexuality, Freud was “anxious to show” in this case study “that sexuality does not simply intervene, like a deus ex machina, on one single occasion, at some point in the working of the processes which characterize hysteria, but that it provides the motive power for every single symptom, and for every single manifestation of a symptom” (114-15).

There are elements of the Dora case, however, that contradict Freud’s groundbreaking thesis of infantile sexuality in Three Essays.  Though these works were published the same year, much of the Dora case seems to have been written before Freud had fully settled on this fundamental idea of psychoanalysis.  The most obvious indication of this occurs during Freud’s wild discussion of Herr K.’s assault on Dora when she was fourteen and her response of disgust.  Buried in his tangential discussion of the dual function of the male member—i.e., sexual and excretory—Freud claims that “the function of micturition is the earlier known of the two, and the only one known during the pre-sexual period” (31, latter emphasis added).  Freud’s reference to a “pre-sexual period” in childhood is evidence that he had neither abandoned every aspect of the seduction theory nor adopted the idea of infantile sexuality of psychoanalysis when he wrote at least this part of the Dora case.

Between the two distinct theoretical paradigms of Freudian theory—the seduction theory and psychoanalysis proper—Freud’s theory of repression goes through a transformation that is related to the sexual nature of the child.  In the seduction theory, memories of a traumatic event are repressed when they crystallize in meaning after an analogous event occurs during adolescence: Nachträglichkeit.  According to Laplanche and Pontalis, psychoanalytic repression is “an operation whereby the subject attempts to repel, or to confine to the unconscious, representations (thoughts, images, memories) which are bound to an instinct.” (390).  Whereas the memories of abuse during a presexual childhood would not be “bound to an instinct,” the oedipal phantasies of a sexual child would be.

Laplanche and Pontalis’ inclusion of memories in their definition stems from Freud’s ambivalence regarding the ultimate source of repression: did the source of neurosis originate “inside” or “outside” the psyche?  Freud never is conclusive on this subject.  After the seduction theory, Freud seems to be biased toward establishing his new source of the Nile as purely psychological rather than as an event.  In a brief case on paranoia in 1915, Freud posited the primal phantasies or “Urphantasien” as his new psychological caput Nili (Freud 1915, 269).  These phantasies—primarily of castration, seduction (Oedipus complex), and the primal scene—are defined by Laplanche and Pontalis as “typical phantasy structures . . . responsible for the organization of phantasy life, regardless of personal experience . . . [whose universality] is explained by the fact that they constitute a phylogenetically transmitted inheritance” (331).

Though Freud does not mention primal phantasies in the Dora case, he does mention hysterical symptoms as “representations—the realization—of a phantasy with a sexual content” (47), thus seemingly moving away from his theory of memory-based symptoms.  For this Freud of the Dora case (for there seems to be several), symptoms as representations of sexual phantasies was “a rule which [he] had found confirmed over and over again by experience, though [he] had not yet ventured to erect it into a general principle” (46-7).  The general principal would be the Oedipus complex, where repression is an operation to repel the “representations” of an instinct that surfaces within a family drama, one that could be set in the child’s reality, but would certainly be set in his or her phantasy life.

Freud mentions “the legend of Oedipus” (56) in the Dora case, but it is not close to being a complete theory at this stage of his theorizing, let alone a general principle.  Commenting on his theory that Dora is unconsciously in love with her father, Freud writes:

I have learnt to look upon unconscious love relations like this (which are marked by their abnormal consequences)—between a father and a daughter, or between a mother and a son—as a revival of germs of feeling in infancy.  I have shown at length elsewhere [Dreams and Three Essays] at what an early age sexual attraction makes itself felt between parents and children, and I have explained that the legend of Oedipus is probably to be regarded as a poetical rendering of what is typical in these relations.  (56)

When compared to his passage on the dual function of the penis that posits a presexual child, Freud’s citation of his third essay on infantile sexuality in Three Essays in a footnote to the passage above suggests either that he added this footnote after writing the Dora case or that his theorizing was very inconsistent at the time, or both.  In fact, what immediately follows his mention of “the legend of Oedipus” is an argument based on a presexual child who prematurely becomes a sexual one due to “the early appearance of true genital sensations, either spontaneously or as a result of seduction or masturbation” (57n).  Clearly, when Freud wrote the Dora case, he had yet to erect the Oedipus complex into a general principle of the sexual etiology of neurosis.  It could not be erected as such since Freud had yet to settle on infantile sexuality.  Freud’s parenthetical statement that the “love relations” between parents and their children are “marked by their abnormal consequences” implies that he considered these relations as necessarily pathogenic, whereas in his later theories they were deemed universal. 

The general significance of Oedipus’s narrative may have been “discovered” during Freud’s self-analysis, but it was not a part of a sexual etiology of neurosis until a source of repression was theorized in Freud’s 1909 case, Analysis of a Phobia in Five-Year-Old Boy, otherwise known as the case of “Little Hans.”  According to Freud’s theorizing in the 1920s, anxiety is the motive for repression, placing it at the root of all neuroses; and, at the root of all anxiety is the fear of castration.  I place the beginning of psychoanalysis in 1909, with the publication of the case of “Little Hans.”  It is in this case that Freud’s theories of an innate infantile sexuality and a castration complex appear for the first time together.  With the castration complex Freud has a sexual etiology that provides a cause for repression.  If psychoanalysis is fundamentally a clinical theory, and if psychoanalytic clinical practice is dependent on the establishment of a sexual etiology of neurosis that accounts for repression, then psychoanalysis begins with Freud’s theorization of phallocentrism as represented by the castration complex, a necessary component of the Oedipus complex.  Psychoanalysis begins with these two complexes because they connect the ideas laid out in Dreams and Three Essays in such a way that provides a sexual etiology of neuroses with a corresponding theory of repression.  The mechanisms of repression would be fine-tuned in Freud’s later writings, but a general sexual etiology had been posited in the case of “Little Hans”—that is, at least for males.

  Females, who Freud believed were already (at least) metaphorically castrated, became a problem within this theoretical system: “. . . though they have a castration complex [due to the primal phantasy of castration] they cannot have a fear of being castrated” (1933, 87).  I believe this phallocentrism is the reason Freud wrote only on male analysands during his psychoanalytic phase, only twice writing on females, both of whom he considered homosexual and masculine.  In place of a fear of castration, according to the psychoanalytic Freud, females experience a “fear of loss of love, which is evidently a later prolongation of the infant’s anxiety if it finds its mother absent” (1933, 87).  Freud believed this and other losses were analogous to castration and would posit the universality of the castration complex late in his theorizing.  Neurosis in females, according to this theoretical paradigm where loss of mother is the source of anxiety, would require Freud to explore what became known as pre-oedipal themes.  As Freud and several other theorists and critics have argued, this was analytic territory in which he was uncomfortable because it required the analyst to be comfortable with his or her feminine identification in order to cope productively with maternal transferences (Appignanesi and Forrester 188).  In her Tribute to Freud, H.D. wrote,

He had said, “And—I must tell you (you were frank with me and I will be frank with you), I do not like to be the mother in transference—it always surprises and shocks me a little.  I feel so very masculine.”  I asked him if others had what he called this mother-transference on him.  He said ironically and I thought a little wistfully, “O, very many.”  (146-7).

There is clearly a connection between the development of this phallocentric psychoanalytic theoretical framework, Freud’s discomfort with maternal transferences, and the absence of women from his case histories after the development of this framework.

The Dora case history is not the first psychoanalytic case history, but the last of the prepsychoanalytic case histories.  If we accept that “[f]ollowing Freud, psycho-analysts have consistently looked upon hysterical neurosis and obsessional neurosis as the two major divisions of the field of neuroses” (Laplanche and Pontalis 195), then we might argue that the Dora case represents Freud’s last case study that focuses on the hysterical side of the field of neuroses, and that his adoption of psychoanalysis marks the beginning of his focus on the obsessional side.  The beginning of psychoanalysis marks a tropological change in Freud’s theorizing—a turning of his focus away from female analysands, memory, psychical trauma, and the etiology of hysteria, and towards male analysands, fantasy, castration anxiety, and the etiology of what Freud considered to be more masculine neuroses, such as obsessions.  If Dora is the last prepsychoanalytic case study, if it is historically located at the time of the switch, then it should be read with consideration to both explanatory paradigms.  Many theorists have read this case history in terms of oedipal themes (Bernheimer and Kahane), but only one, Frank, has read it in terms of the seduction theory.  

Erect Members and a Collection of Picklocks: Freud’s “Seduction” of Dora

Claire Kahane, co-editor of In Dora’s Case, writes in her otherwise excellent introduction that, “in spite of having become the psychoanalytic model for the etiology of hysteria, [the Dora case] is a representation of the master’s failure, of his inability to complete the story” (19).  It is ironic if the Dora case has indeed become “the psychoanalytic model for the etiology of hysteria” since it is neither psychoanalytic nor does it contain any complete theoretical models.  In fact, its uniqueness among Freud’s case histories could be defined as the absence of any one explanatory paradigm that might provide the structure for a story of neurosis.

Rachel B. Blass asks the question, “Did Dora Have an Oedipus Complex?”  in her essay by that title.  A more useful question Blass touches on is whether there is any evidence in the Dora case of Freud having constructed a theory—one such as the Oedipus complex or the seduction theory—which could connect his ideas regarding the unconscious (i.e., repression) and sexuality in such a way as to provide an etiology of hysteria.  Blass concludes that there are seven different narratives of Dora’s hysteria given by Freud in the case history, none of them even close to being completely theorized: “A variety of etiological propositions emerge [in the Dora case] with the relative significance of each within the overall scheme of pathology never clearly stated” (162).  Freud does not present an etiology of hysteria connecting sexuality and repression since the etiologies Freud offers in the case are all incomplete, fragments within a fragment.  Perhaps this could begin to explain why Freud would publish such a fragmentary case study: a complete case study would require a complete etiology which he did not have during this time of theoretical transition.  Though Freud wrote “that sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general” and that “[n]o one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door" (115), he lacked a specific sexual etiology and a vague idea of sexuality is the only common element of the many etiologies he introduces in the case.  Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess of October 14, 1900, that he had just begun analysis with “an eighteen-year-old girl, a case that has smoothly opened to the existing collection of picklocks” (Masson 1985, 427).  The Freud of the Dora case has no single key, no sexual etiology or corresponding theory of repression—only a “collection of picklocks.”  These picklocks are not keys and, therefore, have to be either forcefully or skillfully worked to act as one.

Freud’s key-door metaphor alludes to other keys and doors in the narrative Freud writes about Dora.  Though the keys of the Dora case appear often and in ostensibly different forms, they generally can be reduced to metaphors of an aggressive male sexuality.  For example, Dora suspects that Herr K. has stolen the key to the room (Zimmer) she occupies at the K.’s house, and she despairs that she will not be able to thwart his advances by locking the door.  Freud interprets “I dressed quickly” from the first dream as an association to the anxiety she felt about not having this key, and writes in a footnote:

I suspected, though I did not as yet say so to Dora, that she had seized upon this element on account of a symbolic meaning which it possessed.  “Zimmer” in dreams stands very frequently for “Frauenzimmer” [Strachey’s note: “a slightly derogatory word for ‘woman’; literally, ‘women’s apartments’”].  The question whether a woman is ‘open’ or ‘shut’ can naturally not be a matter of indifference.  It is well known, too, what sort of “Key” effects the opening in such a case. (67n)

Later in the case, Freud reports that Dora told him that she had asked her mother “a hundred times where the key is” (97).  Dora apparently needed this key to the “side-board” to get her father some brandy.  Towards the beginning of the case, Freud writes about Dora’s father and his complaint that he, like the other married men who make appearances in the case, gets “nothing out of [his] wife” (26).  Dora “understood very clearly,” Freud writes, “what it was her father needed when he could not get to sleep without a drink of brandy” (98).  In a footnote, Freud adds that there “can be no doubt that sexual satisfaction is the best soporific, just as sleeplessness is almost always the consequence of lack of satisfaction” (98n).  A key opening a locked door is related to “sexual satisfaction” for males who “get nothing” from their wives in both cases above, first Herr K., then Dora’s father.

Around the time of the Dora case, Freud also seems to have been one of these men who was frustrated by an absence of sex with his wife, Martha Bernays Freud.  Though certainly not conclusive, an indication of Freud’s frustration is found in his March 11, 1900, letter Freud to Fliess: “You know how limited my pleasures are.  I am not allowed to smoke anything decent; alcohol does nothing for me; I am done begetting children . . .” (Masson 1985, 404).  In 1907, Freud wrote to Jung, “When I have wholly overcome my libido (in the common sense), I shall start on a ‘Love life of Mankind’.”  Freud, of course, is referring to the sublimation of his libido towards his work.  Ironically, René Laforge reports that Martha Freud referred to Freud’s work as “a form of pornography” (Appignanesi and Forrester 45), which suggests that Freud’s sublimation might have been incomplete in his wife’s opinion.  Freud’s key analogy, where sexuality is the key of his theory, is analogous to the key Herr K. stole from Dora, and the key Dora’s father needs for his brandy: all of them are ultimately phallic symbols of a male sexuality that desires to be appeased by opening a locked door (or “Dora” for Freud, the avid reader of English literature).

Steven Marcus describes Freud’s construction of Dora’s repressed memory and desire in terms of an “erect member” as “pivotal” and the “principle ‘reality’ in the case” (1974, 79).  Marcus puts quotes around “reality” because he seems to suggest that it is at least partially a “reality” of Freud’s construction.  According to Marcus,

This reality was . . .  conceived of as a world of meanings.  As Freud put it in one of those stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks footnotes that he was so expert at using strategically, we must at almost every moment “be prepared to be met not by one but by several causes—by overdetermination.”  Thus the world of meanings is a world of multiple and compacted causations; it is a world in which everything has a meaning, which means that everything has more than one meaning.  (1974, 79)

In Freud’s dynamic paradigm, overdetermination is usually part of the world of neurosis, of blocked expression and unconscious repression, where anything—language, time, the body—can be used as a vehicle for expressing meanings, often meanings unavailable to the “I” of its creator, and meanings that will vent the building pressure of pent-up desire via expression.  Though Freud used the damned stream metaphor in the Dora case (51), his primary metaphor for hysteria in this case was the locked door.  He imagined that his “pivotal” trope of the “erect member” would be his key to the locked door of the Dora case.  But when the door was open, whose libido would be freed?  Would Freud be allowed to enter or would a healthy Dora be allowed to exit?

Dora’s hysteria, Freud argues, is indicated by the unpleasure she feels when she is assaulted by Herr K. at fourteen:

I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable; and I should do so whether or no the person were capable of producing somatic symptoms.  (28)

Freud also concludes that Dora has a phobia in the form of “avoidance of men who might possibly be in a state of sexual excitement” (30), which would occur due to the “attention women pay to the outlines of men’s genitals as seen through their clothing . . .” (32n).  Seemingly with little help from the patient’s free associating, Freud interprets Dora’s reaction of disgust towards Herr K.’s assault as a “reversal of affect,” and then continues with a wild set of his own associations including the smell of excrement, the dual purpose of the “male member” (31), and the “Early Christian Father’s ‘inter urinas et faeces nascimur’” (31).  Well after connecting the “uppermost layer of all her associations during the session . . . [to] her father” (32), Freud offers his grand conclusion that Dora “had all these years been in love with Herr K.” (37), the man whose sexual assault disgusted her.  Not surprisingly, Dora rejects this interpretation and eventually Freud’s analysis.

Freud argues that the “great defect” of the Dora case, the one which “led to its being broken off prematurely,” is his lack of success “in mastering the transference in good time” (118).  His theory of transference makes one of its early appearances in the Dora case, and it is arguably the most valuable contribution to Freudian theory made from this case:

What are transferences?  They are new editions of facsimiles of the impulses of phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic of their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician.  (116)

Who was the absent figure of the transference that Freud failed to master in the Dora case?

At the beginning [Freud writes] it was clear that I was replacing her father in her imagination . . .  She was even constantly comparing me with him consciously, and kept trying to make sure whether I was being quite straightforward with her, for her father “always preferred secrecy and roundabout ways.” (118)

Dora also describes her father as I have described Freud above as someone who sees “things in the light which was most convenient from the point of view of his own passions” (38).  But the primary absent figure of Dora’s transference, according to Freud, is Herr K.:

. . . when the first dream came, in which she gave herself the warning that she had better leave my treatment just as she had formerly left Herr K.’s house, I ought to have listened to the warning myself.  “Now,” I ought to have said to her, “it is from Herr K. that you have made a transference on to me.  Have you noticed anything that leads you to suspect me of evil intentions similar (whether openly or in some sublimated form) to Herr K.’s?  Or have you been struck by anything about me or got to know anything about me which has caught your fancy, as happened previously with Herr K.?  (118)

Were Herr K.’s intentions “evil,” and, if so, could his assault on Dora be considered love making (26) as Freud suggests?  If Herr K.’s intentions were evil, Dora’s response of disgust would certainly not be hysterical.  Freud contradicts himself in another way by arguing before that Herr K. “must long before have gathered innumerable signs that he was secure of the girl’s affections” (46).

Freud’s query regarding Dora’s “fancy” is a recurring theme in his theorizing of transference, and it is not the only time in the Dora case he imagines her as having a sexual desire for him: “I came to the conclusion that the idea had probably occurred to her one day during a session that she would like to have a kiss from me” (74).  Before he had settled on the seduction theory, Freud writes in Studies on Hysteria,

Transference on the physician takes place through a false connection.  I must give an example of this.  In one of my patients the origin of a particular hysterical symptom lay in a wish, which she had had many years earlier and had at once relegated to the unconscious, that the man she was talking to at the time might boldly take the initiative and give her a kiss.  On one occasion, at the end of the session, a similar wish came up in her about me.  (Freud and Breuer 302-3)

If we compare this passage with Freud’s later discussion of transference in the Dora case, it seems that transference has much to do with the analysand taking a fancy to Freud and wanting a kiss from him.  With Eckstein, the analysand wanted to him near.  Moreover, it is ironic that the wish Freud imputes to his earlier patient—“that the man she was talking to at the time might boldly take the initiative and give her a kiss”—is the same as the unconscious wish he attributes to Dora at fourteen and which opposed her conscious disgust to Herr K.’s sexual assault.

Freud’s prepsychoanalytic conception of transference dealt only with the affectionate/sexual feelings the female analysand felt for the male Freud.  With the Oedipus complex came the castration complex and a converse to affection in transferences: fear.  That transference within the context of theories based on sexuality would be theorized as sexual is not surprising.  The question that arises for me, however, is whether what Freud names as “transference,” the actualization of Dora’s unconscious wish within the context of the analysis, would be better named “countertransference,” a reaction by the analysand to Freud’s sexualization of the analysis.  Yet this assumes that Freud’s observation regarding Dora’s transference—that she took a fancy in Freud and wanted a kiss as she did with Herr K.—is correct when it is highly suspect given Freud’s bias.  That the actualization of these wishes were transferential for Dora, moreover, would be questionable since the connections being made aren’t necessarily false.  Freud seems to have been in destructive harmony with the other adults in Dora’s life who attempted to master her and “bring her to reason,” who accused her of having delusions, who betrayed and used her, and who made unwanted sexual advances.  If Dora responded to Freud as she would to the other main characters in the case, it very well could be an appropriate response, a true connection.  Freud’s actualization of his wishes, on the other hand, would more likely be transferential as he actualizes his wishes regarding his “mistress” of his “science” and his desire to penetrate the “feminine soul” within his analysis of Dora.

Throughout Freud’s theories, he begins his analyses with the ardent belief that sexual ideational content has been repressed, whether memory or phantasy, and that his (re)construction of it in analysis is curative.  Thus the transference—except in the seduction theory phase, where this idea is, not surprisingly, absent—will ultimately be one of the analysand desiring to have Freud sexually.  In Studies  and the Dora case, this desire would exist alone, whereas in psychoanalysis proper it would exist alongside a fear related to castration.  During the seduction theory phase, however, the analysand’s transference would put Freud in the position of the “seducer,” who, at the time, Freud claimed was usually the father—thus its absence during this theoretical phase.  The reappearance of transference in the Dora case, and its much fuller theorization than previously, could be attributed to Freud’s attempt to distance himself from an interpretation of the case in terms of “seduction,” which therefore allowed him to both theorize transference and distance himself from the position of the “seducer.”

Is the absence of such an interpretation justified?  Is Freud’s distance from the position of “seducer” convincing?  To answer these questions we must explore the particulars of the Dora case.  In the first dream, Dora is in bed in a burning house with her father standing near.  Here we have the metaphors of a man near Dora as she is lying in a house on fire.  Though Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams argues against the use of symbolism in dream interpretation, Freud seems to use this form of hermeneutic more than one based on the free associations of his analysands:

. . . fire is not only used as the contrary of water, it also serves directly to represent love (as in the phrase “to be consumed with love”).  So that from “fire” one set of rails runs by way of this symbolic meaning to thoughts of love; while the other set runs by way of the contrary “water”, and, after sending off a branch line which provides another connection with “love” (for love makes things wet), leads in a different direction.  And what can that direction be?  Think of the expressions you [Dora] used: that an accident might happen in the night, and that it might be necessary to leave the room.  (72)

Freud previously associates Dora’s bed-wetting with the standard conception of this phenomenon, and he imagines that her father must have attempted to prevent this by waking Dora the child.  Later in the case, however, Freud informs us that “Dora knew that there was a kind of getting wet involved in sexual intercourse . . .” (90).  As for the male next to her in the dream, Freud argues that Dora substitutes her father for Herr K. (72), who was next to her when she woke up as after sleeping on a sofa in the room in which she would later wish she could lock herself (66):

Her father had once stood by her bed, just as Herr K. had the day before, and had woken her up, with a kiss perhaps, as Herr K. may have meant to do.  (86)

All of these interpretations of Freud’s, of course, took place as Ida Bauer lay on a sofa next to him in his house.  When Dora later brings Freud an addendum to the dream, he incorporates it into his interpretation:

She had forgotten to relate, she said, that each time after waking up she had smelt smoke.  Smoke, of course, fitted in well with fire, but it also showed that the dream had a special relation to myself; for when she used to assert that there was nothing concealed behind this or that, I would often say by way of rejoinder: “There can be no smoke without fire!”  Dora objected, however, to such a purely personal interpretation, saying that Herr K. had rolled a cigarette for her before he began his unlucky proposal [by the lake].  (73)

Freud, a heavy smoker, later concludes that the kiss Herr K. forced on Dora “smelt of smoke; so she smelt smoke in the dream, and the smell persisted till after she was awake” (92).

Freud’s mistake, I believe, is not his recognition that Dora’s reaction to him was similar to her reactions to Herr K. and her father, but his interpretation of this reaction as transferential, a “false connection.”  Moreover, Freud is even more errant when he strains to interpret the nature of this “transference” as one of attraction rather than of repellence, as one of love and sexual longing rather than of fear and sexual aggression.  In “Intervention on Transference,” Jaques Lacan argues the following:

It is because he put himself rather too much in the place of Herr K. that, this time, Freud did not succeed in moving the Acheron. . . . Freud keeps reverting to the love that Herr K. might have inspired in Dora, and it is odd to see how he always interprets as confessions what are in fact the very varied responses that Dora argues against him.  (101)

Freud ascribes his reconstruction of Dora’s thoughts in the dream—“I must fly from this house, for I see my virginity is threatened here …” (85)—to the level of conscious thought, which suggests this is the manifest dream thought and therefore not the deepest truth of the dream.  Freud’s desire to have Dora accept his key, his “erect member,” might have led him to suppress the significance of what Freud might have considered her merely manifest concerns.  Furthermore, Dora’s so-called phobia of “men who might possibly be in a state of sexual excitement” might not be irrational, making it a justified fear rather than a phobia.  Freud and his “erect member” might have triggered this fear, which provides a motive for Dora’s departure from the analysis.

Though Herr K.’s two sexual advances toward Dora are either rebuffed with a slap or met with disgust, Freud seems fixated on an interpretation of Dora’s hysteria in terms of her desire for Herr K.  Even Freud asks,

If Dora loved Herr K., what was the reason for her refusing him in the scene by the lake?  Or at any rate, why did her refusal take such a brutal form [a slap], as though she were embittered against him? (38n)

And later, while discussing Dora’s relationship with Frau K., he states:

How Dora managed to fall in love with the man about whom her beloved friend [Frau K.] had so many bad things to say is an interesting psychological problem.  (61)

Since Freud and his key are analogous to Herr K. and his key, Freud is indirectly bent on an interpretation of her hysteria in terms of her desire for himself—an interpretation which is similar to his interpretation of Eckstein’s bleeding being an hysterical somatic conversion of her desire to be near him.

The “erect member” and the gap it filled in Dora’s narrative are both Freud’s (re)constructions.  Using the word “phantasy” to connote the German word “phantasie” and its denotation of a “sense of the world of the imagination” (Laplanche and Pontalis 314), we can say that Freud inserts his phantasy of an “erect member” into his phantasy of a gap in Dora’s supposedly hysterical narrative—a phantasy of Dora’s gap.  In this way, the analysis becomes a scene of “seduction,” where Freud’s phantasies of “knowing” Dora in order to cure her and prove his prowess as a scientist suggest that his position of therapist may have contained elements of the position of “the-rapist.”  Any cure for Freud is a combination of knowing and sexuality: Freud’s therapy at the time consisted of making conscious the sexual secret the hysteric supposedly keeps hidden from herself.  Freud wrote about Dora: “I believe she wanted to play ‘secrets’ with me, and to hint that she was on the point of allowing her secret to be torn from her by the doctor” (78).  Freud’s aggressive tearing away at what he perceives to be Dora’s sexual secret that she wants all the men in the case study to use their keys to her “Dora” is an analysis that seems to have been structured in terms of what Sharon Marcus might call a common rape script in her essay, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention”: the rapist claims that the woman is a tease and that she really wanted it—“there is no such thing at all as an unconscious ‘No’” for Freud (57).  When Dora leaves Freud’s sofa, when she rejects his key, it may be because there is a metaphorical fire burning up the house around the smoking man next to her as she lay on his couch.  Dora’s departure was hardly a transferential reaction since the connections between Freud and Herr K., and perhaps even Dora’s father, seem to have been true.

“Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” Revisited

Frank argues that when Freud heard Dora’s account he “may have felt that her case conformed almost too perfectly to the original seduction theory he had disavowed in the September 1897 letter to Wilhelm Fliess” (118).  Though I wish to support aspects of this thesis myself, Frank’s general argument has too many similarities with Masson’s to be convincing: he treats as certainties what he can only presume, and he misunderstands the seduction theory.  Moreover, Frank neglects to cite many of the elements of the Dora case that suggest Freud’s thinking, despite his desire to distance himself from the seduction theory, was still very much influenced by the logic of this theory even three years after he had abandoned it as the sole etiology of hysteria.  In the Dora case, Freud cites “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (27n2) in a footnote to his argument that symptoms can be traced back to infancy, suggesting that this lecture still maintained some authority for him.  Despite this and the existence of aspects of the case that suggest the appropriateness of an interpretation according to the seduction theory, Freud seems to avoid interpreting the case along these lines. 

In the language of Dora’s first dream, where “Schmuckkästchen” or “jewel-case” stands in for female genitalia, part of Freud’s interpretation of what Dora was saying to herself in her dream was, “My ‘jewel-case’ is in danger, and if anything happens it will be father’s fault” (69).  Supposedly below the surface of the manifest meaning of this statement, according to Freud, the father is at fault because he brought Dora to Herr K.’s house and because he is using Dora to have his affair.  Dora was convinced, Freud tells us, “that she had been handed over to Herr K. as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and his wife” (34).  But the line above is vague and suggests a more direct interpretation: Dora’s father is a threat to her genitalia.  Freud himself explains that Dora “was afflicted with a catarrh (leucorrhoea) whose beginning, she said, she could not remember” (76), and that Herr Bauer “had fallen ill [of syphilis] through leading a loose life and [Dora] assumed that he had handed on his bad health to her by heredity” (75).  Dora’s belief in the heredity source of her catarrh, however, is undermined by Freud’s later construction of her intrapsychical communication in her first dream: “I am my father’s daughter.  I have a catarrh, just as he has.  He has made me ill, just as he has made my mother ill.  It is from him that I have got my evil passions, which are punished by illness” (82; emphasis mine). 

Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s second dream is also suggestive.  At the end of the dream Dora reads what Freud interprets as a book with sexual content while others are at her father’s funeral.  He interprets this scene as Dora’s belief that “[i]f her father was dead she could read or love as she pleased” (100).  For Freud, Dora’s father acts as an impediment to her loving.  Freud argues that it is because she is in love with him, and he posits several fragmented and rather unpsychoanalytic theories as to how this love would result in Dora’s disgust at Herr K.’s advances.  If the child Dora had been sexually abused by her father—if her dream was an allusion to how he had made her wet her bed due to sexual stimulation rather than saving her from wetting it by waking her up in order to urinate—Dora’s wish in the dream may have been simply that her father would die, and/or that the memory of her father and what he had done to her would die, so that she could love “as she pleased.”  

Regarding the deferred action of repression of the seduction theory, Herr K.’s assault on Dora at fourteen could have been the second stage of this type of repression, as I suggested before.  Another aspect of the Dora case that corresponds exactly to the seduction theory, as Frank points out, is that Dora’s “first neurotic symptoms appeared when she was eight, precisely at the time such symptoms ought to appear according to ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’” (119).  Freud writes in this paper “that in our severe cases the formation of hysterical symptoms begins—not in exceptional instances, but, rather, as a regular thing—at the age of eight . . .” (212).  For the Freud of this lecture, eight is a boundary age for hysteria “after which the illness cannot be caused” (212).  Though Freud recognized that this evidence of the regular occurrences of the formation of hysteria at the age of eight undermines his theory of deferred action, he does not address this inconsistency.  Regardless, Dora, with both her assault during puberty and symptom formation at the age of eight, fits the observations Freud made to support his otherwise conflicted seduction theory.

In his analysis of Dora’s first dream, Freud concludes that this dream is more evidence that Dora is in love with her father: 

Any one who has learnt to appreciate the delicacy of the fabric of structures such as dreams will not be surprised to find that Dora’s wish that her father might take the place of the man who was her tempter called up in her memory not merely a casual collection of material from her childhood, but precisely such material as was most intimately bound up with the suppression of temptation.  For if Dora felt unable to yield to her love for the man [Herr K.], if in the end she repressed that love instead of surrendering to it, there was no factor upon which her decision depended more directly than upon her premature sexual enjoyment and its consequences—her bed-wetting, her catarrh, and her disgust.  (87)

The specific “premature sexual enjoyment” Freud is referring to here is masturbation.  The Freud of the Dora case believed that there was one secondary source of premature sexuality in children—“the early appearance of true genital sensations”—which occurred “either spontaneously or as a result of seduction or masturbation” (57n).  The notion of “spontaneous” yet “true” genital sensation is odd, but might be explained as a foreshadowing of Freud’s later ideas of infantile sexuality and the primary phantasy of seduction.  Putting spontaneous appearances of genital stimulation aside, we are left with “seduction” and masturbation as the primary sources of premature genital sensation.  Freud explores an interpretation based on masturbation, but not one based on sexual abuse during childhood.  During the analysis of the first dream, Freud admits to leaving a gap of his own unfilled:

By inadvertence, I unfortunately left a gap in the analysis of the dream.  Dora’s father was made to say [in the dream], “I refuse to let my children go to their destruction . . .” (“as a result of masturbation” should no doubt have been added from the dream thoughts). . . .  I ought to have made inquiries as to the actual source of this speech.  The results of my inquiry would no doubt have shown that the structure of the dream was still more complicated, but would at the same time have made it easier to penetrate.  (92)

Freud is unconvincing that masturbation is what needed to be tacked on “from the dream thoughts” (i.e., Freud’s associations regarding the dream).  Why not the other possible source of premature sexuality and another potential source of the speech: “as a result of seduction”?

After reading his analysis of Freud’s interpretation of the first dream, it is clear that Frank would probably put the exclamation, “I refuse to let my children go to their destruction,” in the mouth of Dora’s mother.  He concludes that the mother’s obsession with cleanliness and locking of the interior doors in the house are both reactions—one neurotic and the other practical—to the uninhibited sexual licentiousness of Dora’s infected father: 

The household burns with the fever of illness as well as with the fever of ambiguous desires.  The embattled mother does her unavailing best to protect her children from the contaminating presence of the father within the context of her fin de siécle bourgeois world.  (117)

Though Frank, like Masson, treats as fact what he can only presume, his analysis is suggestive.  Why did Dora’s mother lock the interior doors?  Was Dora’s impotent father dispossessed of his key?  

Both Masson and Frank argue that Freud “suppressed” the seduction theory, and they use the Dora case as evidence.  If the Dora case does conform to the seduction theory, and if Freud was interested in distancing himself from this supposedly abandoned theory and the position of “seducer” with a key, then this case would be the best supporting argument for the truth of some link between sexual abuse during childhood and what Freud called hysteria.  In other words, if, despite Freud’s supposed motivation to find evidence that fit what is supposed to be an “anti-seduction” theory, Freud still (re)constructed a narrative of sexual abuse during childhood that led to hysteria, then this would support the veracity of theorizing some link between “seduction” and hysteria.  This would also suggest that Freud would see what he saw despite his motivations.

But this is not the case.  If Ida Bauer had been sexually abused by her father, it would not necessarily support the seduction theory.  It would support an idea Freud never abandoned but certainly avoided because his theory became based on the primacy of phantasy in the etiology of neuroses: sexual abuse of children may lead to neurosis later in life.  This idea, which Masson and Frank confuse as the seduction theory, seems to have been suppressed by Freud.  Also, if Ida Bauer had been sexually abused by her father, then Freud still concluded what he wanted to conclude: Dora’s hysteria did not conform to the seduction theory.  During the seduction theory, it is likely that Freud would not have bothered interpreting his “erect member” in the Dora case in terms of complex associations that involve the Early Christian fathers, reversal of affect, masturbation, bed-wetting, or the one-time wonder of “reactive reinforcement” (55).  As he did in the Katherina case and many others, Freud would likely have interpreted this erect member, without hesitation, in terms of “seduction”—that is, if he had not wanted to distance himself from his own position as seducer, the Eckstein affair, his so-called scientific fairy tale of a lecture on “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” and the embarrassment in the medical community the latter two events caused him. 

Feminine Desire, Bisexuality, Homosexuality—Revenge

Freud laid the foundation of his psychoanalytic theories of what “woman” wants in Three Essays.  Though widely attacked since, these theories formed a part of all of Freud’s psychoanalyses even as other, once fundamental concepts were discarded by him as his metapsychology evolved.  For Freud, who invariably considered desire nostalgic, what “woman” wants is a transformation into an adult context of what “girl” wants.  The development of femininity, he argued as late as 1933, is based on what he conceded was for him an idée fixe—penis envy (1933, 132).  According to Freud, when young girls recognize that they lack a penis they are “overcome by envy for the penis—an envy culminating in the wish, which is so important in its consequences, to be boys themselves” (1905b, 195).  This narcissistic wound to the girl’s ego then develops “like a scar” into “a sense of inferiority” (1925b, 253).  According to Freud, this wound can only be healed after successful negotiation of the Oedipus complex, where the girl “gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child. . . . The girl has turned into a little woman” (1925b, 256).  The oedipal “penis-child” (Freud 1925b, 256) solution to the problem of a female’s sense of inferiority forms the foundation of Freud’s theory of femininity, the key that unlocks the mystery of “Was will das Weib?”   For Freud, women want men, want to be men, want to possess a penis, and, since they cannot possess a penis, they will try to fulfill this desire with the substitution of a child, which they receive via a penis.

A penis and a child are the traditional anchors for a wandering womb—the greek translation of “hysteria”—and Freud seems anxious to provide the former for his treatment of what he diagnosed as Dora’s “petite hystérie’” (Freud 1905a, 24).  This treatment, Freud’s insertion of an “erect member” into the the dialogue of his talking cure, is a discursive variation on the prescription his medical colleague Rudolph Chrobak had recommended for a patient he had sent to Freud: “penis normalis dosim repetatur” (Gay 92).  Despite the sometimes revolutionary aspects of Freud’s approach to the definition and treatment of hysteria, his assertion in the Dora case that hysterical women can be “cured by marriage and normal sexual intercourse” (79) is the same cure Plato prescribed for a wandering womb (Bernheimer and Kahane 5 and 12).   For Freud’s last assertion in the analysis, what he calls “the only possible solution for all parties concerned,” he suggests that Dora and the others would be much happier if Frau K. married Dora’s father and Dora married Herr K. (108).  We find in the closing paragraph of this case study that Dora has married, which, for Freud, is enough to indicate that she “had been reclaimed once more by the realities of life" (122). 

Whereas the prepsychoanalytic Freud would attempt to convince his female patients of the veracity of his (re)constructions of their supposedly repressed memory of the trauma they experienced when they encountered an “erect member,” the Freud of psychoanalysis would attempt to convince his female patients of the veracity of his (re)constructions of their supposedly repressed desire to possess a penis.  First they were traumatized by the presence of one, then they were traumatized by its absence.  What do they want?  Freud’s consistently phallocentric theories that insert a penis into the unconscious of his female patients suggest that this aspect of his theories has less to do with what “woman” wants and more to do with what Freud wished they wanted—i.e., what Freud wanted.

A narrative of Freud’s fin-de-siècle desires, his world of meanings at the time of the Dora case, might characterize him as a professional medical man, and a devoted family man, with a greater than usual desire to be a paragon of the nineteenth-century man of science.  His “science,” however, was hardly the usual manly mastery of feminine nature; lacking hard evidence, so to speak, it relied on phantasms of “erect members.”  Also, its particular method, as Appignanesi and Forrester note, was too suspect of being similar to a traditional conception of bawdy gossip among women (159).  His first general theory, which claimed that the cause of hysteria lies mostly in male sexual aggression, was denounced as a “scientific fairy tale” by the male medical community.  His professional reputation, already hurt by his association with the irresponsible use of cocaine, became a grave concern for him after the Eckstein debacle.  While struggling to develop a new sexual etiology of hysteria, Freud received a new patient brought to him forcefully by her father, “in spite of her reluctance” (23).  Struggling to distance himself from his former narrative of the etiology of hysteria, Freud attempted to find the source of hysteria in the patient’s desire rather than as a result of the desires of her “seducer,” who Freud had previously concluded was usually, if not always, the father.  Her “premature sexuality” seemed to have been the psychical source of her hysteria for Freud, with masturbation as his choice for the physical source, though why this supposedly pre-sexual being supposedly began masturbating in the first place remained unanswered.  Ida Bauer’s departure from the analysis hurt Freud.  He was unable to show a conclusive connection between his theory of dream interpretation and symptom interpretation, and thus redeem his professionalism in the sight of those who had criticized his previous theory, ignored his Dreams, and found him wanting with respect to medical ethics and professionalism.  He then sought revenge against this recalcitrant patient, who had reminded him of his therapeutic impotence (Moi 195), by publishing her and her family’s secrets, and by naming her after his sister’s servant (Moi 198).

If we do not ignore Freud’s Dreams, we find that the complex of themes in the narrative of revenge against recalcitrant patients for putting in question Freud’s medical professionalism is central to his fin-de-siècle world of meanings.  In the dream of Irma’s injection the “specimen dream” of Freudian theory, Freud inspects the oral cavity of a female patient: “What I saw in her throat: a white patch and turbinal bones with scabs on them” (1900, 111).  Freud’s own associations bring up several disturbing memories.  One was an incident when he prescribed what was thought to be “a harmless remedy (sulphonal)” to a patient who later “succumbed to the poison” (1900, 111).  For Freud, however, dreams fulfill wishes, so he also finds enough allusions to times he had been conscientious to conclude, “I was conscientious” (1900, 118).  Though Freud writes, “[i]t seemed as if I had been collecting all the occasions which I could bring against myself as evidence of lack of medical conscientiousness” (1900, 112), he fails to mention Emma Eckstein and Fliess’s operation on her “turbinal bones,” which occured in January or February of 1895 (Masson 1985, 107), and her relapses stretching to within months of the time Freud dreamt the specimen dream in July of 1895 (Masson 1985, 128).

   When Freud wrote the Dora case, the theme of culpability lingered.  In his “Prefatory Remarks” to the case, he insists that the analysis and publication of the case study will not do any harm to his patient.  Freud opens the case with a discussion of the propriety of writing a case history, though he also argues that patients would never betray their hysterical secrets to the analyst if they knew he would publish them later.  For Freud, however, the physician’s duty is to science first, and avoiding this duty is “a disgraceful piece of cowardice . . . as long as [the scientist] can avoid causing the direct personal injury to the single patient concerned” (8).  With respect to the Dora case, Freud concluded, “I think I have taken every precaution to prevent my patient from suffering any such injury” (8).  The precaution was supposedly to wait four years after the analysis to publish it.  Freud did, however, report to Fliess on January 25, 1901, less than a month after the analysis ended, that the Dora case had been accepted by a publisher (Masson 1985, 433).  He would later decide to wait for reasons discussed below.

More significantly, in a 1923 footnote added to the “Prefatory Remarks,” Freud wrote that, “[n]o fair judge of analytic therapy will make it a reproach that the three months’ treatment she received at that time effected no more than the relief of her conflict and was unable to give her protection against subsequent illnesses” (14n)  Freud makes this claim even though she had not accepted his interpretations, he had failed to “master” what he felt to be the transference, there is no indication that he helped her with any of her symptoms, and he had most likely added to her general suffering.  Given his yearning for professional respect and his preoccupation for being held accountable for “subsequent illnesses,” another probable reason Freud chose this case as his first case study after the seduction theory, and his first long case study, was, again, because it was fragmentary.  Ida Bauer’s departure was her choice, so any subsequent illness, in Freud’s view, would not be his fault.  Freud might as well have been talking to Dora when he said to Irma in the dream, “if you get pains, it’s your own fault” (1900, 108).

Revenge is also a dominant theme in this dream.  Freud not only takes revenge against the male medical professionals who doubt his work, he also takes revenge against the female patients who do not yield to his solution of “seduction.”  Freud’s desire for revenge with Irma is highly suggestive of his attitudes toward recalcitrant patients.  In his interpretation, Freud admits, “I took revenge as well on my disobedient patient by exchanging her for one who is less recalcitrant [Irma’s friend]” (1900, 119).  This desire for revenge against an unyielding patient manifests again in the Dora case, but the revenge is much stronger than merely depriving the patient of Freud’s care.  Freud “promised to forgive [Dora] for having deprived [him] of the satisfaction of affording her a far more radical cure for her troubles” (122) despite what he considered to be Dora’s “unmistakable act of vengeance” (109) of leaving his care.  Freud’s satisfaction is dependent on the acceptance by the patient of his “seduction” solution.  For Anna Hammerschlag-Lichtheim, the patient represented by Irma, the solution would have been Freud’s (re)construction of her repressed memories of sexual abuse as a child (Appignanesi and Forrester 125-27).  For Dora, the solution Freud wanted her to accept, though fragmentary, was her repressed love for Herr K. and his (re)construction of a repressed memory of an “erect member.”  Freud’s revenge agianst Dora takes two primary forms.  First, Freud names the recalcitrant Ida Bauer after the name his sister Rose gave to her servant who had been renamed Dora because she was also named Rose (Moi, 198).  More significantly, Freud published the Dora case even though he understood that the “complete elucidation of a case history is bound to involve the revelation of [the hysteric’s] intimacies and the betrayal of [her or his] secrets” (8).  He thus disregarded the possible damage he could have caused Ida Bauer by reproducing Frau K.’s previous betrayal of their secret conversations, a betrayal that Freud argued had produced a great “pathogenic effect” on his patient.  This obvious betrayal of Ida Bauer’s trust suggests that Freud’s desire for revenge outweighed his desire to appear as having taken all precautions, as a conscientious man of medicine, to guard against his patient’s harm.  

Yet Freud did wait four years to publish the Dora case.  The reasons he waited are complex and largely unknowable, and probably have little to do with his concern for Dora.  One otherwise overlooked reason might concern the issue of bisexuality.  Human bisexuality was an idea Fliess introduced to Freud probably before 1896 (Masson 1985, 212), and Fliess wanted to be the first to publish on it, though Freud was willing to cite him wherever it came up in his own work (Kerr 81).  Between 1901 and 1904 Freud was as prolific as he had always been before, but he published very little.  According to John Kerr, among the works that accumulated on his writing desk was a paper, “Human Bisexuality,” that would never be published (81).  Freud had to wait to publish on bisexuality for what he considered to be too long because the data required for Fliess’s book on bisexuality and biorhythms would take years to compile.  Before Fliess was able to publish, Freud leaked the theory to Otto Weininger who wrote about bisexuality in his book, Sex and Character, which also praised Freud’s theories (Kerr 84-6).  Weininger failed to cite Fliess.  Freud lied to Fliess about the leak, Fliess found out, and their friendship took a turn for the worse and ended soon afterwards.

By 1904, the friendship between Freud and Fliess had ended, and Freud risked the public accusation of conspiring in plagiarism he feared from Fliess by beginning the process of breaking what Kerr calls “the logjam of unpublished works sitting on Freud’s writing table” (84) at the time.  These works included bisexuality and Freud had hoped to have Fliess’s clearance before he published them.  Fliess published his work, The Rhythm of Life, late in 1905 (Kerr, 101), after Freud published the Dora case and Three Essays, both of which contained references to bisexuality.  Another book published in 1905, Wilhelm Fliess and His Subsequent Discoverers: O. Weininger and H. Swoboda, was by a colleague of Fliess’s, Richard Pfinnig (Kerr 101), where the description of how Fliess’s ideas had been, according to Kerr, “stolen with the connivance of Sigmund Freud” was brought out.  Kerr argues that the “taint of scandal derailed [Freud’s] plans” to publish on the theory of bisexuality, and “Freud’s response [to the scandal] was basically to lie low” between 1901 and 1905.  This would mean that he probably published the Dora case four years later for fear of Fliess and accusations of plagiarism, not necessarily because he was concerned about Ida Bauer’s well being.

Freud was anxious to include bisexuality as one of the picklocks to be used for the Dora case.  In a letter to Fliess dated January 30, 1901, Freud wrote: 

The main thing in [the Dora case] is again psychology, the utilization of dreams, and a few peculiarities of unconscious thought processes.  There are only glimpses of the organic [elements], that is, the erotogenic zones and bisexuality.  But bisexuality is mentioned and specifically recognized once and for all, and the ground is prepared for detailed treatment of it on another occasion.  It is a hysteria … and the principal issue in the conflicting thought processes is the contrast between an inclination toward men and an inclination toward women. (Masson 434)

Freud wanted to convince Fliess that he accepted his idea, but he also tended to avoid incorporating bisexuality into the logic of this case study and others.  Freud seemed to suffer from a fraternal form of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) over this subject, which might explain the contradiction between his claim to believe in an essential bisexuality and his persistent heterosexism.  Defending Freud’s originality, Marie Bonaparte wrote in her notebook: “As for Bisexuality, if Fliess was the first to talk about it to Freud, he could not pretend to priority in this idea of biology.  ‘And if he gave me bisexuality, I gave him sexuality before that.’  That is what Freud told me” (Masson 1985, 4).  Perhaps the absence of a thorough incorporation of bisexuality in psychoanalysis stems from Freud’s repudiation of his own bisexuality, which was Fliess’s gift to him in more than one way.  Moreover, perhaps Freud’s often vehement heterosexism and sexism was fueled by the anxiety surrounding the “sexuality” he “gave” to Fliess.

In 1899, a year before the Dora case would commence, Freud wrote to Fliess, “But bisexuality!  You are certainly right about it.  I am accustoming myself to regard every sexual act as a process in which four individuals are involved” (Masson 1985, 364).  Despite his claim to recognize a lesbian component in every sexual act in this letter, Freud is unable to imagine a congenital or non-reactive female homosexuality throughout his theories of sexuality.  In both “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” of 1920 and the Dora case Freud reiterates his belief in an essential bisexuality (Freud 1905a, 114; 1920, 157), but he treats the analysand’s homosexuality in “Psychogenesis” as a move away from heterosexuality rather than as a natural growth out of a bisexual predisposition.  In “Psychogenesis,” Freud interprets the analysand’s homosexuality as reactive—not as a positive love of women, but as the effect of a negative reaction to womanhood and a repudiation of men:

It was just when the girl was experiencing the revival of her infantile Oedipus complex at puberty that she suffered her great disappointment.  She became keenly conscious of the wish to have a child, and a male one; that what she desired was her father’s child and an image of him, her consciousness was not allowed to know.  And what happened next?  It was not she who bore the child, but her unconsciously hated rival, her mother.  Furiously resentful and embittered, she turned away from her father and from men altogether.  After this first great reverse she forswore her womanhood and sought another goal for her libido. (Freud 1920, 157)

According to Freud, the analysand of “Psychogenesis” repudiates men and “womanhood,” her homosexuality is a reaction to disappointment, and her libido, which was naturally tendentious toward heterosexual goals, was redirected toward alternative, homosexual goals.  Though Freud argued that a “person’s final sexual attitude is not decided until after puberty” (1905b, 146n), this post-pubescent process of libido redirection seems to be inconsistent with his theory of sexual development, one that focuses almost exclusively on infantile and oedipal developmental dynamics.  Would not her libido’s aim and object choice be to a large degree set at sixteen, the age Freud gives for her libido redirection?  Would not the kind of disappointment referred to above be more likely to lead to sadness or neurosis than to a redirection of her libido?  Moreover, why does Freud go to such lengths to construct the origins of her homosexuality if these origins, according to his beliefs stated elsewhere, could logically stem from an essential bisexuality?

Freud’s difficulty with theorizing bisexuality would continue late into his career.  His ambivalence regarding homosexuality is represented by his concomitant belief in the “universal bisexuality of human beings” and his use of the term “inversion” for homosexuality, citations found in the same sentence in “Psychogenesis” (1920, 157).  His categorizing of inversion and bisexuality under the heading of “The Sexual Aberrations” in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality  could be explained by couching the term “Aberrations” in a cultural context rather than a biological one, but then why would he consider treatment of a homosexual “girl” necessary or even appropriate if “the girl was not in any way ill” (150)?  Why does he write of “her disorder” or “bringing [her] back to a normal state of mind” (148)?  What is the context of “normal” for this “biologist of the mind” (Sulloway)?  Success for Freud in these types of cases “essentially consisted in making access to the opposite sex (which had hitherto been barred) possible to a person restricted to homosexuality, thus restoring his full bisexual functions” (151).  Would Freud consider using his techniques for making access to the same sex possible for those restricted to heterosexuality, thus restoring their full bisexual functions?  If not, why not?  Freud puts the word “cure” in quotes when he discusses this healthy woman’s analysis, but concludes the case study by considering the violent option of removing her “probably hermaphroditic ovaries” and grafting on heterosexual ones as a “treatment of female homosexuality” (172).  One wonders if our illustrious physician would consider swapping his own testes for more heterosexual ones as a treatment for the homosexuality he was so adamant about convincing Sándor Ferenczi he had “overcome” after his break with Fliess (Masson 1985, 2-4n).

For Freud, there exists a pervasive confusion with respect to his conception of the biological essentialism of sexuality, and how that essentialism influences the construction of gender identity and object choice.  While he theorizes essential bisexuality—e.g., the negative Oedipus complex (1923, 33)—he assumes in practice an essential heterosexuality, almost exclusively employing the positive, simple, and heterosexual Oedipus complex as the fundament of his psychoanalytic work.  His coupling of “negative” with homosexuality and “positive” with heterosexuality within the complex version of the Oedipus complex is indicative of this confusion, of his privileging of heterosexuality despite his positing of an essential bisexuality, and despite his sometimes revolutionary approach to the construction of sex and sexuality.  Did Freud really believe in an essential bisexuality?  In constructed gender and sexuality?  “In spite of his simultaneous belief in an innate bisexual disposition,” Claire Kahane writes in In Dora’s Case, “Freud assumed a natural heterosexual attraction and saw his task as the liberation into consciousness of that natural desire, which, when repressed, resulted in hysterical symptoms” (Bernheimer and Kahane 22).  Freud theorized that “the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women [i.e., heterosexuality, according to Freud’s androcentric terms] is also a problem that needs elucidating” (1905b, 146n), but, in practice, he consistently considered homosexuality to be a much more problematic “sexual attitude” than heterosexuality, especially with respect to female analysands.  Ironically, Freudian theory, a collection of theories that foreground sexuality, are founded on an unstable and often contradictory theory of sexuality.

Given his phallocentric construction of feminine desire and his problems with theorizing homosexuality, it is surprising that the only extended case studies of women Freud wrote after The Interpretation of Dreams were concerned with two women he believed had strong homosexual desires: “Psychogenesis,” where the analysand’s homosexual desires were supposedly manifest, and the Dora case, where these desires supposedly remained latent.  Female homosexuality does not fit into Freudian theories in which sexuality and gender are centered on the presence or absence of a penis: two locked doors with no key.  According to Judith Roof, “Freud’s de-centering of [female homosexuality] implies that he could not place it at all in the family romance he constructs, nor can he make it fit into the gendered oedipal patterns of either the family or psychoanalytic transference” (183).  I would add that he was also unable to fit it into the heterosexist analytic romance he consistently (re)constructed, and that it forced him to cope with the discomfort of what he called maternal transferences.

Though Dora’s alleged homosexuality is highly suspect for reasons mentioned above, there are many other remarkable parallels between these two cases.  Both were three-month fragments of analyses of attractive and clever eighteen-year-olds: the first terminated by the analysand, and the second terminated by Freud.  Revenge, naming, and dismissal are common themes in both.  According to Moi, the dominance that accompanies renaming are exercised by Freud as revenge against Ida Bauer for dismissing Freud as if he were a servant when she gave him two-weeks notice that she would abandon the analysis.  Ironically, Freud was a servant since he was paid to serve Ida Bauer therapeutically.  If Freud were analyzing the parallels between the cases, he would have treated the repetition of the three month duration of the analyses as meaningful.  Freud’s dismissal of the nameless “girl” of “Psychogenesis” after three months could be understood as an acting out of an unacknolwedged desire to have dismissed Dora before she had dismissed him.  Revenge, in the form of not naming (does her “aberrant” sexuality deprive her of subjectivity for Freud?) and dismissal, could have been an issue for Freud even after nineteen years as these two attractive eighteen-year-old females rejected Freud’s key.  Though Freud most likely did the woman of “Psychogenesis” a favor by dismissing her from his “care,” it should be noted that, for Freud, this would constitute a form of revenge against her, as it did regarding Irma in the specimen dream. 

Conclusion

    Freud’s world of meanings around the time of the Dora case seems to interweave themes of recalcitrant patients who won’t accept his (re)constructions, supposedly one-way transferences where his patient’s want a kiss from him, insecurity regarding feminine desire, overdetermined anxiety regarding bisexuality, repressed and disavowed erect members, uncertainty regarding medical ethics and professionalism, impotence, castration, and revenge, among others.  When Freud offers Dora his “erect member” as a symbol of her repressed desire, she rejects it.  Because she resisted Freud’s advances, Ida Bauer’s “analysis” became a repetition of Herr K.’s assault on her (Moi 189).  Freud’s manhood, professionalism, and scientific aspirations seem to have been at stake for him here, and he belatedly categorized her as having stronger homosexual feelings than heterosexual ones, thus attaining revenge and warding off figurative threats of castration in one fell swoop.  Her disgust seems to have manifested by leaving Freud’s “care” and by giving him, like she gave Herr K., two weeks.  It seems that she was unwilling to be the governess or nurse, the traditional sexual play toy of the master, to either Freud or Herr K.  And she would turn the tables on both, reminding them of their inferior social status: Freud as direct medical servant, Herr K. as the husband of her father’s nurse.

Dora’s reactions to Freud during the analysis hardly seem transferential since Freud was acting just like the other adults in Dora’s narrative: like the father, he saw things in a light that pleases him and drove her into the arms of Herr K. for his own sex-related reasons (Sprengnether 266); like Herr K., he forced sexuality on her inappropriately (Moi 189); and later, like Frau K., he betrayed the trust they developed as they privately discussed sexual matters by going public.

The answer to the great question concerning Freud’s prepsychoanalytic researches into the “feminine soul”—what did Freud want?—has the potential to subvert the foundation of all Freudian theory.  If Freud’s sexual desires, and his desires to found a science of neurosis based on sexuality, influenced his prepsychoanalytic analyses—if these desires influenced his perception of his analysand’s so-called transferential behavior and his (re)constructions of repressed material, if they are (counter)transferential—then psychoanalysis is not grounded on the unconscious phantasies of Freud’s analysands, but the unconscious phantasies of the original analyst.  Freud’s turn away from memory and toward phantasy as his caput Nili for hysteria and other neuroses laid the foundation for psychoanalysis.  If the original narratives of the prepsychoanalytic phase are Freud’s constructions, the products of his own phantasies, then the narratives of “seduction” would be neither the analysand’s repressed memories nor phantasies, and psychoanalysis would be more a product of its founder’s phantasmatic imagination than previously understood.  It is not hard to imagine why a theory—which placed the desire for “seduction” in all women and children, which was the perfect counterpart to the fin-de-siècle’s aggressive male sexuality—became popular among the medical men of Vienna and later with most of the patriarchal Western intelligentsia.  The issue for me is not as much why this theory was so influential, but how to account for the welcoming of Freudian theory into theoretical discourses that would seem fundamentally antithetical to it, such as feminism.

Jane Gallop’s project in The Daughter’s Seduction seems to work in the opposite direction to my argument here.  In her introduction, she writes, 

The seduction that has taken place has been rather complex.  Feminism (the daughter) has been seduced out of her resistance to psychoanalysis (the father).  The father has been seduced out of his impassive self-mastery and into showing his desire.  (1982, xv).

I find Freud’s “self-mastery” to be a sham and hardly “impassive.”  Indeed, I have tried to show that his theory and practice was full of unconscious desire.  I have interpreted this desire as “seduction” in order to expose and stop the “seduction” Gallop encouraged in 1982.  Psychoanalysis and feminism, thirteen years later, are intertwined; the “seduction” Gallop encouraged has progressed to the reproduction of psychoanalytic theories of desire, sexual development, and subjectivity.  Now, in their present form, these theories enjoy the moral authority of feminism.

In a psychoanalytic context, however, “seduction” seems to be a euphemism for rape.  The “seduction” of feminism by psychoanalysis seems to be against the will of feminism, if that will is defined as its fundamental desires.  Problematic as this essentialist construction of feminisms is, this will could be defined negatively: it is not defining females as incomplete males, it is not defining female sexuality or desire in terms of the presence or absence of a penis or phallus, it is not patrocentric, it is not reductive regarding sexuality, and it is not positing innate feminine masochism and phantasies of rape by a father figure.  Gallop argues that psychoanalysis can “unsettle feminism’s tendency to accept a traditional, unified, rational, puritanical self—a self supposedly free from the violence of desire” (xii).  Is desire necessarily violent?  Do feminists need to accept psychoanalytic definitions of desire in order to posit feminine subjectivity or agency, unified or not?  The Freudian feminist seems to be saying, “Yes, we may have rape phantasies, but we are deemed desiring subjects by the authority of psychoanalysis!”

Ultimately, the authority of psychoanalysis is dependent on Freud’s authority, which I have tried to show is highly suspect of being tainted by his desire to “seduce.”  Psychoanalytic theorists would have us believe that questioning the legitimacy of psychoanalysis is a defense of a puritanical and unified (read simplistic, traditional, oppressive) self.  I have no desire to defend such a conception of self, but I also believe that desire is not synonymous with psychoanalytic conceptions of sexuality, and that agency or subjectivity or identity for females can be theorized without the “seduction” of feminism by psychoanalysis.  Why attempt to reinvigorate Freudian theory and its successors when it based on such a noxious foundation?  Why encourage the seduction of feminism by psychoanalysis?  What is needed now, after the trauma of this “seduction,” is a type of “theory” therapy, one that is not motivated by the desire to “seduce” but by the desire to alleviate suffering.

NOTES

I am indebted to Carey Snyder, Ronald Broglio, and Melanie Almeder for their thoughtful criticisms of this essay, to Professor John P. Leavey for his insightful comments, and to Professor Peter Rudnytsky for his assistance in sharpening my argument during the early stages of this project. 

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