Nonfictional narrative in Freud's 'Dora': history, scripted history, conscripted history - psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud

David W. Lehman

I have formed in my own mind the following reconstruction of the scene.

It is no longer a question of simply saying what was done -- the sexual

act -- and how it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the

thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it, the

images,

desires, modulations, and quality of the pleasure that animated it.

Drawn to the battlefield of dream and desire, readers regularly reprowl the text of Freud's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, attracted both by its history and by its continuing drama. Tracing paths of force and counterforce, forays and retreats, we reflect on how it must have been and how it all still is. Was it on this very site that Freud's army of interpretation conquered Dora's self-wounded ignorance, here that her powers of evasion produced her crafty escape? Was it here that transference and countertransference waged guerilla war, here that mirror moves dazzled and defied?

Dora is at once history, scripted history, conscripted history.

This "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" is, after all, Freud's first case study and still a canonical text for psychoanalytic training (Marcus 56). While for some readers it remains an instruction manual, for others it offers compelling, though perhaps unwitting, representation of the power struggle its methodology encodes and seeks to contain. This paper is indebted to the analyses of recent feminist critics -- particularly many published in the collection In Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane -- who unmask the power agenda inherent in Freud's treatment of Dora. Maria Ramos's discussion of Freud's dominance of Dora during the analysis is insightful. Kahane concentrates on how Freud's voice as narrator organizes dialogue and events to his advantage; Jane Gallop, Suzanne Gearhart, and Jacqueline Rose write suggestive analyses of the transference and counter-transference in the case. And Toril Moi, in particular, demonstrates persuasively how Freud's compulsion to fill the gaps of Dora's history ultimately reveals that the analyst "clings to his dream of complete elucidation" (187) of the Dora case. Freud's methodology, according to Moi, assumes that Dora's fragmentary case can be completed by the work of the author (187) and that "[p]ossession of knowledge means possession of power" (194).

While this paper can add little to the wealth of post-Freudian psychoanalytical reconsideration already produced on the subject of Freud and Dora, it means to explore specifically how Freud implicated himself as a nonfiction writer through his development and adjustment of the case-study style. For it is in that nonfiction contract and its accompanying style that Freud seeks to exert textual power over both Dora and his readers.

I am proposing a model for reading nonfiction that would examine the narrator of a nonfiction text against the grain of what we know of the human limitations of an author or reporter and that would probe those intertwined and differing presences. I call such a task reading for the "implicated author," in the sense that the adjective means "deeply involved, even incriminated," and to play against Wayne Booth's famous notion of the "implied author" outlined in The Rhetoric of Fiction. For Booth, an implied author is suggested by the book's total form "regardless of what party his creator belongs to in real life" (73-74). My reading for an implicated author, however, refuses to ignore the limitations and/or strengths of a "real-life creator," most particularly in the manner by which the author's "real-life" affiliations are revealed by his methodology. Instead, it answers communications scholar John J. Pauly's invitation to examine nonfiction narrative for "the way the reporting process implicates writer, subjects, and readers in relationships beyond the text" (112).

Reading Dora as a text that implicates its author both as a narrative presence in the text and as an author who intends his case history to be consumed as fact reveals a type of truth claim particular to the Freudian case study. In Dora, Freud presents what he claims is actuality within a highly constructed text (not unlike the strategy of a docudrama or nonfiction novel), while at the same moment he exerts all the rights and privileges of a factual contract in which the scientist-psychoanalyst attempts to hold the powers of interpretation and to exclude both his subject and his readers from meaning formation. In that context, this essay will explore in specific terms the relationship between the all-interpreting writer-subject (Freud as author-character) and the progressively effaced written object (Dora) that underlies the case study's narrative style. Freud's rewriting of history as case study finally consumes virtually all traces of Dora's extratextual and intratextual identity until all that remains is his own voice. And because this power relationship is encoded within a document that makes a direct extratextual truth claim, what emerges is a text in which Freud not only dominates Dora as the female "other" but, finally, seeks to dominate his reader as well.

A narrator who purports to analyze within the text the "exact words" of a character who, inexplicably and against all evidence, speaks just like him has raised, in fact, the sorts of questions about his methodology that implicate him, that cut against the grain of his voiced intent and reveal his ideology. At stake are many of the properties and powers we routinely grant to a narrator in fiction: an ability to read minds, to foretell the future, to be omnipresent, to reproduce speech verbatim, and the like. These conventions of fiction are purchased at great price in nonfiction and must be socially negotiated because the characters and events of nonfiction cast a shadow outside the narrative as well. We may ultimately grant a nonfiction author extended powers, for as Hayden White has shown in The Content of the Form, all historical narratives are inevitably contrived (21), but a reader alive to nonfiction's social construction will not grant those powers unexamined. A reading for the implicated author, then, opens to scrutiny the author's methodology and style not only (or even primarily) to determine the "truth" of the text, but to uncover the author's communication rituals.(1) We would explore not only what the author acknowledges (the intentional communication), but also what the author reveals and thus communicates through style and practice. In her study of Victorian autobiography, Regenia Gagnier calls such methodology an "unwavering attention to nuanced codes and contexts" (6), and I extend it here to include the sort of close readings that will pay attention to the author's word use and scene construction, to her tone and theme: in other words, to her "style."

1

Although Freudian case studies rarely are discussed in the context of nonfiction theory, their threshold contract is their claim to tell truth; otherwise, they collapse into entertainment and are insufficient to meet Freud's stated production goal of "intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case history" (32). Recent studies that explore Dora as a fictional text (Marcus 64; Sprengnether 272n) certainly demonstrate its moments of artificiality and constructedness but ultimately miss the implications of Freud's contract with his readers. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault exposes the terms of the case study. He found that "scientific" discourses, particularly those of the nineteenth century, gained control over deviance by fixing the identity of others within the norms of "objective" research and constituting individuals as "describable and analyzable" objects (190). In a way that observation seems distinctly true for nonfiction, where presumably actual subjects are the sources of written records:

[T]he child, the patient, the madman, the prisoner, were to become ... the

object of

individual descriptions and biographical accounts. This turning of real lives

into writing is

no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of

objectification and

subjection.

Philip Rieff's introduction to the Collier paperback edition of Dora endorses just that sort of "objectification and subjection" formation in his enthusiastic tribute to Freud's methodology. Rieff salutes a project that seems to be nothing less than the rewriting of a woman's life in Freud's own terms:

By any practical test, Freud's insight was superior to Dora's. Hers had not

helped her win

more than pyrrhic victories over life, while Freud's, engaged as he was in

the therapeutic

re-creation of her life, demonstrated its capacity to make Dora superior to

some of the

symptomatic expressions of her rejection of life. Her own understanding of

life had in no

way given her any power to change it; precisely that power to change life was

Freud's test

of truth. His truth, therefore, was superior to Dora's.

Freud's overtaking of Dora's story reveals the stakes of his project and its intimate connection to nonfictional discourse; there is no correlative in traditional fiction, no fictional contract that presents a writer with so much control over an extratextual life. It is difficult to imagine a statement like Rieff's about, say, the relationship of George Eliot to Dorothea Brooke, by a critic who would claim that Eliot's writing of Dorothea's life "demonstrated its capacity to make [some real-life Dorothea] superior to some of [her] symptomatic expressions."(2)

This crucial distinction may be illuminated by a reconsideration of Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's "typology of prose styles," which builds on a system of classification first posed by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism to distinguish between "in-referential" and "out-referential" truth claims (55). While Dora and Middlemarch can in differing senses both claim "true" representation for their female characters, Freud's claim is that the "truth" of the Dora text has an external configuration, some sense of an external "Dora" by which readers must arbitrate the written Dora. Analyses that insist on reading fiction and nonfiction only as similarly constructed texts will miss Freud's deep implication in Dora's history and the ramifications of his purpose in constructing Dora's life as a written text. In fact, if the extratextual Dora herself were to read Dora, Freud says, "she will learn nothing from it that she does not already know" (23). By this he means not so much that Dora accepts his analysis, but that he explicitly claims that he has presented accurately the facts of her life and of the analytical sessions.

Freud thus asserts a direct one-to-one correlation between the truth of his text and its external configuration. By contrast, Dorothea Brooke's life is in-referential. The reader assumes that her identity (even if it is based on Eliot's notion of some sort of external life) is, in Zavarzadeh's terms, "mapped out within the book" (55). If that were not so, we might have to give serious attention to articles written by people who would claim to have met later the "real" Dorothea Brooke and who would bring that professed knowledge to bear on Eliot's representation. We can, in fact, read such an article about "Dora" by Felix Deutsch. He claims to have met Ida Bauer (the real name of the subject that Freud named "Dora" in the case history) and reports that the encounter was enough to convince him of the essential correctness of Freud's original analysis. Moreover, Deutsch reports, the Ida Bauer who had broken off Freud's analysis turned out to be a "repulsive hysteric" (43).

This paper's insistence on the threshold importance of the nonfiction contract that Freud's narrative poses with Dora, of course, places it partly at odds with Steven Marcus, the Freudian scholar whose landmark essay "Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History" makes a compelling case for reading Dora as modernist fiction.(3) Marcus finds a Proustian enterprise in the narrative in which Freud plays the auteur sifting the fragmentary nature of modern experience to build a compelling, though ultimately failed, fictional coherence to Dora. There is much to recommend Marcus's reading, but ultimately it never confronts the specific power formation encoded by Freud's claim to write nonfiction. Despite the brilliance of his argument that "what Freud has written bears certain suggestive resemblances to a modem novel," Marcus finally returns to a point very similar to that made by Deutsch and Rieff. While insisting that he reads Dora as fiction, Marcus relies on the irreducibly out-referential nature of the Dora text to grant Freud's superior interpretation of a person in history: "She refused to be a character in the story that Freud was composing for her, and wanted to finish it for herself As we now know, the ending she wrote was very bad indeed" (88).

Zavarzadeh's analysis in The Mythopoeic Reality -- beyond illuminating the essential difference between in-referential and out-referential narrative in a way we can explicitly apply to Dora - surpasses Frye's in its recognition that both in-referential and out-referential narratives, while moving in opposite directions, share a monoreferential contract that evidences the author's desire to construct a singular meaning in the text. While such power might be inevitable in fictional texts, monoreferentiality assumes political and ideological dimensions when it is applied to factual or out-referential narrative.

Intriguingly, Freud short-circuits any sense of bireferentiality (the possibility that reality could impinge on the text at the same time that the text organizes reality) by making Dora both "real" (an extratextual truth claim) and anonymous. While he, perhaps, is partly motivated by compassion for her privacy (which seems, after all, not to have worked [Deutsch 38]), his subject's anonymity ensures that Freud's interpretation of her history is the operational one. In his postscript to Dora, Freud admits that his methodology "brings with it the disadvantage of the reader being given no opportunity of testing the correctness of my procedure" (134) but declares that "the material for my hypotheses was collected by the most extensive and laborious series of observations" (134). This "truthful," but unverifiable, strategy seems to be an enduring quality of the case-study narrative form because it precisely inscribes the power relationship that underlies its monoreferential intentions. As Foucault similarly demonstrates by his analysis of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, the sideways glance is prohibited within this narrative strategy. No reader -- at least as revealed by Freud's stated intentions -- can approach Dora except through Freud.(4) The subject of analysis is thereby repositioned as object. Centralized power is the only power, at least until it is breached by someone who "discovers" the extratextual Ida Bauer at the heart of Dora's representation.

Freud explicitly asserts his right as psychoanalyst and writer to construct all textual power at the formation and consumption levels. Moreover, he asserts both his and other professionals' rights over the dissemination and reception of the representation: "Needless to say, I have allowed no name to stand which could put a non-medical reader upon the scent; and the publication of the case in a purely scientific and technical periodical should, further, afford a guarantee against unauthorized readers of this sort" (23).

By contrast, some nonfictional texts deliberately air out this closed discourse system by revealing sources and naming names, thereby subjecting truth claims to external verification and ongoing negotiation. When Tom Wolfe, for example, writes about novelist Ken Kesey's drug-induced paranoia in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (a nonfictional text that in some senses is also a document of both historical and hysterical experience), Kesey's experience is presented bireferentially and is open to a complex negotiation in which Wolfe, Kesey, Wolfe's writings, Kesey's writings (both those inside and outside Wolfe's text), supporting written documents, taped messages and film, recalled and recreated fantasies, verbatim testimony, memory, and so on -- all are at least theoretically open to reader scrutiny. Zavarzadeh argues that bireferential nonfictional narratives tend to present facts phenomenalistically, "post-mimetic, non-verisimilar, anti-symbolic," while monoreferential nonfictional narratives tend to present facts "comprehensionally ... to discover the significance [always under direct authorial control] behind the random facts" (63).

Freud not only routinely treats the facts of Dora's body and history "comprehensionally," but he explicitly organizes their "comprehensional" significance so as to lay the very foundation of case-study narrative methodology. The relationships stack up this way:

sign [right arrow] signification

Dora [right arrow] Freud's reading of Dora

case study [right arrow] psychoanalytical generalization

The initial relationship between Dora and Freud may be demonstrated by Freud's oft-quoted passage in Dora whereby he reserves for the psychoanalytically trained observer the final power to read the significance of human signs:

There is a great deal of symbolism of this kind [Dora's fingering of her

reticule as a symbol

of masturbation desire] in life, but as a rule we pass by it without

heeding it. When I set

myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden

within them, not by the

compelling power of hypnosis, but by observing what they say and what

they show, I thought

the task was a harder one than it really is. He that has eyes to see

and ears to hear may

convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent,

he chatters with his

finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task

of making conscious

the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible

to accomplish.

At the level of case study leading to psychoanalytical generalization, Freud's formation of significance from sign is demonstrated by the unstated argument of Freud's narrative contract, which assumes that Dora's experience, particularly her dreams, is significant only to the extent that they prove the theories that he is exploring. Everything pales before that task; Freud tells us that he will not burden us with messy details or technical explanations if they get in the way of the streamlined equation between sign and significance that illuminates the neurotic disorder:

I have as a rule not reproduced the process of interpretation to which the

patient's associations

and communications had to be subjected, but only the results of that process.

Apart

from the dreams, therefore, the technique of the analytic work has been

revealed in only a

very few places. My object in this case history was to demonstrate the

intimate structure of

a neurotic disorder and the determination of its symptoms; and it would

have led to nothing

but hopeless confusion if I had tried to complete the other task at the

same time.

Not only, then, is the sideways glance precluded by Dora's anonymity; not only is her ability to read the significance of her own actions precluded by privileged, centralized power; but Freud informs the reader that the case study will efface its "analytic work" or power apparatus so as to avoid "hopeless confusion." His refusal to reveal that apparatus -- although it has been breached in contemporary readings -- virtually precludes his readers' ability to construct a different interpretation from that of the master's of the raw data, which is just the sort of "unauthorized reading" (23) that Freud seems anxious to deny by making Dora anonymous. Therefore, we are presented with a unique nonfiction style -- the case study -- tailored to undergird Freud's psychoanalytic theory. It emerges as the central surveillance tower with no backlighting, its power visible, but unilluminated, unexplained, and therefore unverifiable. As Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish: "Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked on at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so"

If the overall narrative strategy of the case study, as we have shown, is to objectify its subject in the scientific project, we might expect to find that strategy revealed in the writer's style, particularly in the voice he constructs for the narrative's central character. What a close reading of Dora reveals is that Freud never quotes Dora directly unless her speech supports his psychoanalytic assertions. Because Freud took no notes at the time of the conversations (24), any direct quotes are suspect, so the writer's decision to quote directly may be regarded as more than the ordinary desire to take advantage of what a direct quote can inscribe in any narrative: immediacy, credibility, interest, the creation of voice, the ability to relate opinion without its specifically being seen as the writer's own opinion.

In this context, we can look first at how Freud's quoting addresses the moment of conflict between his and Dora's interpretation of a significant event: his analysis of Herr K.'s kiss in the office. Freud believes that the pressure of Herr K.'s erection (Freud's own supposition) is displaced by Dora into repressed oral desire, which in turn becomes the hysterical cough and proves that her sublimated memory of the kiss (sexual desire) contradicts her conscious memory (powerlessness and disgust). Many writers have examined the weaknesses and strengths of this diagnosis, but none has examined how Freud's nonfiction style reveals itself when he disagrees with his patient. Freud registers Dora's disagreement in oblique, evasive terms: "I did not find it easy, however, to direct the patient's attention to her relations with Herr K. She declared that she had done with him" (47; emphasis added).(5) In the German, Freud chooses the infinitive "zu lenken" to show that he needed to "turn" the patient's attention in the direction of his analysis. Moreover, her response, indirectly quoted, is framed by the subjunctive case, "sie behauptete," which indicates that she insists on an interpretation that to Freud is not necessarily true: "Sie behauptete, mit dieser Person abgeschlossen zu haben" (190).

Freud has already shown the careful reader that he will not hesitate to quote a long conversation directly even when he has no written record of it. So why would he deny Dora a direct voice on this most pivotal point? Even the indirect quote itself is not permitted to be more than reactive. The analyst's movement ("zu lenken" or "direct the patient's attention") is privileged and controlling; Dora's responding declaration can only try to deflect its directive force. Because Dora's supposed repression of her love for Herr K. is central to the entire case study, one would expect more immediacy if Freud's project truly was meant to create a fiction-like style rather than a monoreferential inevitability to his own interpretation of Dora's history. What is more, Freud's decision not to give Dora a voice contrasts vividly to the immediately preceding, 216-word direct quote of Herr K., which is filled with just the sort of idiomatic expressions-"ubrigens" (184) ("by the by" [41]) and "nicht zu versichern" (184) ("need scarcely assure you" [41]) -- that establish both immediacy and a sure sense of voice, a status explicitly denied to Dora. That this quotation also contains the "I get nothing out of my wife" (42) line, which Dora is supposed to have recalled from her second encounter with Herr K., not only underscores Freud's underlying control of the case study, as Marcus points out (81), but questions its credibility. If Freud wants to invest so much meaning in Dora's "slips" of speech, in her exact words, it might be more convincing were more of those "exact words" presented. Instead, until the discussion of the first dream, Dora's voice is limited to such interjections as "'[t]hree to six weeks, too,' she was obliged to admit" (55), whose force does nothing more than inscribe Freud's authority. The second-hand comment of an unnamed seven-year-old companion of Dora's ("You can't think how I hate that person...and when she's dead I shall marry papa" [74]) is the longest sentence to pass Dora's lips during the first two-thirds of a narrative that constructs her own life, and even then she is not permitted to impart her own words. During the dream discussions, Freud introduces a colloquy form that does provide Dora with a directly quoted voice. But is it her own? What is remarkable here is how much the eighteen-year-old girl resembles her therapist in word choice and sentence formation. When recalling the moment she challenged Herr K.'s unauthorized presence in her bedroom, she says: "By way of reply he said he was not going to be prevented from coming into his own bedroom when he wanted" (84).

Would a moment with such clear emotional impact for Dora likely to have been recounted in such a formal, dispassionate manner? Whose words are "by way of reply" ("Er gab zur Antwort" [228])? Freud's or Dora's? The reader obviously cannot know for sure, but the qualifying introductory clause sounds more like the style of Freud the writer than that of a teenager recalling the moment when she awoke to find an adult man standing by her bed. The narrative strategy that Freud has chosen here seems to be more concerned with monoreferential control than with the fiction-like artistry that Marcus celebrates. M. M. Bakhtin examines the difference in The Dialogic Imagination. A writer, Bakhtin says,

may, of course, create an artistic work that compositionally and

thematically will be similar

to a novel, will be "made" exactly as a novel is made, but he will not

thereby have created a

novel. The style will always give him away. We will recognize the naively

self-confident or

obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced language (perhaps

accompanied by

a primitive, artificial, worked-up double-voicedness). We quickly sense that

such an author

finds it easy to purge his work of speech diversity: he simply does not

listen to the

fundamental heteroglossia inherent in actual language.

Although Freud tells us that he wrote Dora's account of the dreams immediately after the sessions (24), he does not say that he attempted to create a word-for-word transcription of the conversation during the sessions and, in fact, admits it is "not absolutely -- phonographically -- exact" though "it can claim to possess a high degree of trustworthiness" (24). What, then, is the careful reader to make of this:

[Dora:] He says it will not do: something might happen in the night

so that it might be

necessary to leave the room....

[Freud:] Now, I should like you to pay close attention to the exact

words you used. We may

have to make use of them. You said that "something might happen

in the night so that it

might be necessary to leave the room."

While it might seem reasonable that the careful scientist would want to pay close attention to Dora's exact words, the exactness of her words is anything but certain. Thus, the movement from "exact words you used" to the "we may have to make use of them," from "irhr eigenen Ausdrucke" to "Wir werden sie vielleicht brauchen" (226) seems to reveal the manner in which Freud's entire case-study narration displaces the voice of his subject and implicates his motivations in the project. And, because the case-study convention maintains Dora's anonymity, no reader could check her recollection of this conversation. Her voice is effaced both within the text and by the underlying theory that has produced Dora as a nonfictional narrative.

What is clear in the case study Dora is that Freud uses the conversational mode only so long as the constructed conversation makes his point. He interrupts it to demonstrate the correlation between the case study and psychoanalytic generalization and terminates it when Dora's interpretation differs from his own:

[Freud:] In short, these efforts prove once more how deeply you loved

him.... [Dora:

silence] [Commentary:l Naturally Dora would not follow me in this part of

the interpretation.

I, myself, however, had been able to arrive at a further step....

Throughout, Freud's commentary is laced with a rhetorical style that appears to give his conclusions inevitable scientific force: "naturlich" ("naturally"), "unentbehrlich schien" (232) ("seemed to me indispensable") even if they sometimes spring from circular reasoning:

I could not help supposing [mu[Beta]te Ich (218)] in the first instance that

what was suppressed

was her love of Herr K. I could not avoid the assumption

[Ich mu[Beta]te annehmen (218)] that

she was still in love with him.... In this way I gained an insight

[bekam ich auch Einsicht

(218)] into a conflict which was well calculated to unhinge the girl's mind.

Ultimately, Freud's voice consumes Dora's. Dreams are first told in Dora's voice, but as the force of Freud's interpretation builds, the narrative shifts the "I" of her voice to the "she" locked within his point of view until the text, at last, relates the dream addenda unlocked by, and inseparable from, his analysis:

I informed Dora of the conclusions I had reached. The impression made upon

her mind must

have been forcible, for there immediately appeared a piece of the dream

which had been

forgotten: "she went calmly to her room, and began reading a big book

that lay on her

writing table."

she herself helped me along it by producing her last addendum to the dream:

"she saw

herself particularly distinctly going up the stairs."

Why did James Strachey use both direct quotes and the third-person pronoun in the standard English translation? Perhaps because Freud's own use of quotation marks in the German text is unusual and reveals that voices are blurred and contested in the case study. Freud chooses in his colloquy with Dora on the dreams to enclose only Dora's speech in quotation marks while he reserves for himself the opportunity to speak (unencumbered by the apparatus of direct quotes) variously as a character, as a narrator, or as a commentator.

For example, when Dora recalls the first night she dreamed about the house fire, Freud's standard German text introduces a conversation between Dora and Freud. Freud encloses in quotes Dora's speech:

"Der Papa will nicht, da[Beta] der Bruder bei Nacht so abgesperrt sein soll.

Er hat gesagt, das

ginge nicht; es konnte doch bei Nacht etwas passieren, da[Beta] man hinaus mu[Beta]."

"Father does not want my brother to be locked in like that at night. He says

it will not do:

something might happen in the night so that it might be necessary to

leave the room."

However, he does not use quotation marks for his direct response: "Das haben sie nun aug Feuersgefahr bezogen?" (226) ("And that made you think of the risk of fire?" [82]).

As Dora continues to speak (her voice always circumscribed by quotation marks), Freud's responses drift in and out of direct speech. Sometimes, as in the example above, he speaks directly to Dora. Other times he summarizes the drift of their conversation: "Dora hat nun aber die Verbindung zwischen dem rezenten und den damaligen Anlassen fur den Traum gefunden" (226) ("But Dora had now discovered the connecting link between the recent exciting cause of the dream and the original one" [82]). At still other times, he reveals his scientific agenda: "Es light mir nun daran, die Verbindung zwischen den Ereignissen in L. und den demaligen gleichlautenden Traumen zu ergrunden" (227) ("What I now had to do was to establish the relation between the events at L -- and the recurrent dreams which she had had there" [83]). Throughout these interjections, Freud continues to present Dora in directly quoted speech as if the two are having a conversation.

James Strachey's translation attempts to rectify this quoting practice (which is also nonstandard in German) by enclosing Freud's obvious remarks to Dora in quotation marks and eliminating quotation marks from Freud's comments as an after-the-fact first-person narrator or as an analyst. But because Freud's own German makes no such distinction, his methodology reveals that he wished to fix Dora as a character bound in the history of verbatim speech and constructed scene while at the same time he would be free either to speak to her within that scene or to turn directly to his audience and command the stage while she remains suspended in the moment.(6)

This blurring suggests less the emotional force of an intense psychoanalytic session than it does a narrative strategy and style that has entirely consumed its subject. Ultimately, at the end of the last visit, the force of Freud's voice reduces the Dora of the narrative to silence and acceptance:

Dora had listened to me without any of her usual contradictions. She seemed

to be moved;

she said good-bye to me very warmly, with the hardiest wishes for the

New Year, and -- came

no more.

Sie hatte zugehort, ohne wie sonst zu widersprechen. Sie schien ergriffen,

nahm auf die

liebenswurdigste Weise mit warmen Wunschen zum Jahreswechsel Abschied und

-- kam

nicht wieder. (272)

If the "came no more" ("kam nicht wieder") clause encodes Dora's final resistance in a surprise ending, Freud, of course, again and again will reserve the last word for himself, writing an epilogue, revisions, footnotes, and commentaries on the text. He declines to treat the actual "Dora" again, insisting,

I have always avoided acting a part, and have contented myself with

practicing the humbler

arts of psychology. In spite of every theoretical interest and of every

endeavor to be of

assistance as a physician, I keep the fact in mind that there must be some

limits set to the

extent to which psychological influence may be used, and I respect as one of

these limits the

patient's own will and understanding. (131)

And so, it seems, Freud forges his special brand of truth claim, the case study, so that he can transgress those patient limits of "will and understanding" in prose if not in life: truth claim without the possibility of verification, the perfect patient who never talks back.

Reading nonfictional narrative for the manner by which it cuts across the limits of history, by contrast, will reopen that dialogue between the author and subject. It will examine the narrator of the text (the unseen listener-teller-organizer of dialogue and events) against what we know of the limitations and possibilities of a nonfiction author (the Sigmund Freud who meant to "silence" Dora by the methodology of his case study as well as by the apparatus of his analysis). Far from consigning nonfiction to some sort of inferior plane in the scale of reading experiences, as critics since Aristotle have assumed, such methods open up nonfiction to dynamic, resisting readings. The intent of these readings is not to transfer a narrative into the category of "fiction" as soon as discrepancies are found, but to examine it for what it reveals of its ritual of communication and of the cultural relationship between author, subject, and reader. How does the author position himself against his subject? What does he reveal of his methodology? Does he seek to dominate his subjects and readers, or does he open the process so that subjects and readers more readily can join the author in a complex process of negotiation?

Some discrepancies revealed by this sort of close stylistic analysis, for certain, might be so large as to cause us to shut the book or to read it as fiction. But more often a reading of nonfiction that is alive to the way it implicates its author will bring a wider understanding of, and possibly even a deeper appreciation for, the style of the text and for its history.

Notes

(1) The method for which I am arguing, of course, is also a construction and is one that I gained from my experience as a journalist. As a writer of nonfiction and a very occasional writer of fiction, I learned that the signal difference was the way my nonfiction was implicated by the shadows it casts outside the work. If a character in a nonfiction narrative disagreed with my representation, she might always sue me or at least call me and protest, but the characters in my fictions never responded exactly that way. "The writer of fiction is entitled to more privilege," says Janet Malcolm. "He is the master of his own house and may do what he likes in it; he may even tear it down if he is so inclined. But the writer of nonfiction is only the renter, who must abide by the conditions of his lease" (153). Or as James Agee learned: "The one deeply exciting thing to me about Gudger is that he is actual, he is living, at this instant. He is not some artist's or journalist's or propagandist's invention; he is a human being: and to what degree I am able it is my business to reproduce him as the human being he is; not just to amalgamate him into some invented literary imitation of a human being" (240).

(2) Postmodern novelists, of course, regularly play with this division between real and fictional worlds: John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman wonders if his hero is real and if an author can control a character's life; Italo Calvino creates his reader as a character in If on a winter's night a traveler; Joan Didion and Paul Auster present, even "discover," themselves as characters in Democracy and City of Glass, and so on. I am not arguing a strict genre approach in this study. While a traditional genre scholar might want to build a division in his bookshelf, I want to look at a text along the row and describe something of how the text works and how our very difficulty in building a division affects us as readers.

(3) I am strongly indebted to Marcus's argument, particularly his recognition of "Freud's own unsettled and ambiguous role in the case" (67) and his argument that "in the cause of psychoanalytic treatment, nothing less than reality' itself is made, constructed or reconstructed" (71). Where I break with Marcus is on his insistence that the case study is a "story or a fiction" because it has been rendered in language (71). Certainly it is a story, but this essay means to explore the special consequences of regarding it as a narrative that Freud meant to be read, however much it resembles a modem novella, specifically as nonfiction. It is with that mixture of admiration and adjustment that I play the title of this essay against Marcus's "Story, History, Case History." (4) Many readers, of course, including the authors of the present study and of many of those published in the Bernheimer and Kahane collection, rebel from direct authorial control to approach Dora outside the spell of Freud's intent. But the development and practice of reader-reception theory does not alter the author's intent that I am outlining in this essay. And Freud's case-study methodology does circumscribe some of the evidence that we can bring to those readings, most particularly in his denial of a voice and historical identity to the subject of his case study.

(5) As the essay turns toward a close reading of Freud's style, I shall refer, on most occasions, both to Freud's original German text as well as to the standard translation by James Strachey, which Freud, by 1923, had personally corrected and which he termed the work of "my excellent English translators" (Dora 28n). Throughout this essay, quoted citations in English are from the Collier edition and those in German are from "Bruchstuck Einer Hysterie-Analyse" in volume 5 of the Gesammelte Werke, published by Imago.

(6) Rosette C. Lamont has shown that Helene Cixous's play, Portrait of Dora, fashions a response to Freud's text by placing the character of Dora on center stage and relegating Freud to the margins. The stage representation constructs a "present-tense" body for Dora that allows her to escape Freud's narrative sublimation. "Dora occupies center stage," Lamont writes, "while Freud is off to the side, superseded by events he is unable to control. Sitting with his back to the audience, he recounts what we are about to witness. The plot, however, will not be structured by the account" (88).

Works Cited

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Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976.

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