Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria [Dora]

Introduction Summary: Using a playful and idiomatic style, Adam Phillips reflects on the ways Freud's clinical practice interacts with his linguistic and semantic practices, citing psychoanalysis as the reading cure to a perhaps even greater extent than the talking cure.

Wolfman Summary: Freud recounts the temporally complex and recurrent case history of a young man who largely resists, with patient indifference, his psychoanalytic treatment for symptoms of venereal disease, which rests on childish manifestations of anxiety, wolf- and other animal-phobias, urinal and bowel incontinence, and violent behavior, which themselves rested on the elucidation of his viewing his parents having intercourse, his own sexual initiation at the hands of his sister, and a sexual love of his father.

Screen Memory Summary: Freud, through the treatment history of a man who recalled an exaggeratedly vivid childhood memory of dandelions gathering, fighting, and eating country bread, establishes a theory of the screen memory as a partially genuine memory selected for the ability of some its parts, which will be remembered most vividly, to represent to the adult memory dearly-held fantasies, thanks to the relationship obtaining between the content of the memory and other, suppressed content.

Lapses Summary: Freud establishes a theory for the importance of psychoanalyzing the little mistakes of life: misspeaking, mishearing, misremembering, misplacing objects, and the like, for the very significant desires and impulses which can underlie these very faint, seemingly quotidian traces.

Fetishism Summary: Freud hypothesizes that a fetish is established, in men, as a desire for a substitute for the mother's penis, which the fetishist does not want to believe his mother lacks, out of an anxiety for castration, and so transfers his sexual attention to a successor as a means of avoiding this horror.

Family Romances Summary: Freud reflects upon the ways in which the characters of the parents are cast down, raised up, and fought against within the narrative constructs of the neurotic adolescent.

Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad Summary: Freud compares his conceptual model of the human memory system to the “magic notepad”: a novelty writing device consisting of a waxed board overlaid by a sheet of thin waxed paper and a layer of thicker cellulose, on which composite surface one writes with a stylus, and thereby allowing both an always-ready receptive surface, and traces of the recorded material that will last as long as desired.

Dora Summary: Freud relates the truncated treatment of a young girl exhibiting hysterical coughing and aphonia, which through analysis is discovered to rest upon her physical attraction to her married neighbor Herr K., as well as her romantic affection for his wife, Frau K., and the father that she hopes will be able to rescue her from this uncomfortable triangle but ultimately fails to do so.

Passage for close-reading: “Each one of us goes a bit too far, either here or there, in transgressing the boundaries that we have drawn up in our own sexual lives. The perversions are neither bestialities nor degeneracies in the dramatic sense of that word. They are the development of germs that are all contained within the undifferentiated sexual predisposition of the child, the suppression of which, or their application to higher, asexual goals, their sublimation, is destined to supply the forces behind a large number of our cultural achievements.” Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria [Dora](39)

With Dora, much of the intrinsic interest of the text, for me, lay in the details of her particular case history, illness, and partial recovery. The difficulty in choosing a passage for close-reading, then, arose from the desire to pick passages that could reasonably serve as microcosms of the larger aims of the texts, and as such were not so specific to Dora's case as to require lengthy contextualization, while still focusing on the accessible, situational, and narrative aspects of the case which originally attracted my attention. I decided on this passage in favor of its more theoretical and generalizable structure, which I feel allows it to serve as miniature of the larger work, while the personal pronouns prevent a dry or distant sense that might have minimized the personal narrative feel of the case history.

This sentence is located immediately after a passage concerning the importance of one's ability to discuss the “transgressions of the sexual function” (39) reasonably and without indignation, citing as evidence that even the “perversion most repellent to us,” (39) specifically male homosexuality, was of primary use value to the ancient Greek republic, which is characterized as a culture of obvious and universally accepted superiority to our own. Within this classically approved society, the very acts that the detractors of Freud’s book might denounce as perversions serve salutary social functions. The sentence I have at hand then goes about to demonstrate how and to what end these perversions function, while also erasing the cultural and historical distance that obtains between early 20^th century Vienna and ancient Greece, thereby universalizing the role of these very perversions.

The subject of this sentence is a compound noun phrase, “each one of us” which functions as a singularity amid a universality. This construction, semantically akin to “everyone,” incorporates all readers of the book into those who can be said to “go a bit too far.” The word “one” indicates specificity: not only could anyone fit this categorization, but I specifically do, as does each individual. Separating this “one” from its more common usage as the often exaggeratedly metaphoric, “everyone” serves to underline the individual volition buried under the universal theme. The final pronoun of the phrase, “us” serves to include the writer of the sentence as equally subject to the transgression as each of his readers. If the sentence I chose to analyze in the last post has a scholarly, professorial tone that seems to situate the speaker on a podium above his speakers where he can both instruct them and ironically judge them, this sentence, in part through the sociable, universalizing power of the “us” establishes a more casual, neighborly, almost quotidian tone. This tone is furthered through the inexact, conversational nature of terms like “bit” and “either here or there” which serve as terms of measurement and qualification but do so in only the loosest sense, giving the reader a greater sphere for imagining the scope of this transgression, while simultaneously asserting, unavoidably, on its existence.

If each one of us “goes a bit too far” in exceeding our own sexual boundaries, then everyone in effect becomes, at least potentially, Dora. Specifically, every reader is subject to identifying through their transgressions. The use of the word transgressing in this sentence has criminal overtones, which, for example “exceeding” would not possess. These overtones serve to encapsulate while disproving the view of homosexuality which Freud is refuting in the sentence above, but this criminality, this transgression of external rules, appropriately, is undermined by the phrase “drawn up.” This construction implies a degree of arbitrariness, and furthermore a personal of arbitrariness constructed by the very reader who consciously believes these sexual boundaries to be lawfully impermeable barriers.

In the next sentence, the perversions that are formed when one transgresses these personal boundaries are given pride of place as the subject of the sentence. The expected negative connotations of “perversions” are balanced against the immediately following stronger negativities of “bestialities” and “degeneracies,” both of which, by being weighted after the adverb “neither” seem to deserve the connotations this structure gives them. “Perversions,” safely before this negativizing adverb, are made to seem milder, more medical as opposed to criminal, and overall normal and expected. The negation of similitude between perversions and degeneracies is particularly meaningful. Degeneracy refers to a slippery downward slope, or an irreversible dissolution, while perversion, especially taken in company with its linguistic relatives “subversion” and “inversion,” embeds within it notions of perspective and orientation, and particularly a shift in orientation which is the practical opposite of degeneracy's single, unequivocal trajectory.

In the final clause of the sentence, the word “dramatic” seems to be used in a disparaging sense against those with overheated imaginations, thereby furthering this establishment of the perversion as a notion of perspective. In its most expected usage, within the confines of a theater, “dramatic” can refer to a production of emotions caused by a constructed experience. This then relates back to the self-constructed nature of sexual boundaries, suggesting that each of us is also, unless carefully attending to our own perspectives, likely to construct an imagined situation of unnecessary drama wherein we view perversions as bestialities or degeneracies, when really they are nothing but modifications of perspective or position.

If the first sentence announces the universality of perversions, and the second what they are not, the third completes the microcosm by delineating what, exactly a perversion is. Specifically, the “development of a germ” with its suggestions both of a wheat germ and the germ of an idea, the perversion is here granted a quasi-botanical structure. This structure, like the development of a plant or an embryo (another kind of germ) implies a directed and proper course of growth, which can be interrupted or prevented and as such mold the germ as it develops out of being one, into an unnatural and unhealthful shape. Freud hereby suggests that the self-drawn boundaries made around appropriate sexual behaviors, if taken too seriously, can do this work of closing off healthy avenues or shutting down the appropriate growth, leading to adults who maintain, past the allotted time, the sexual lives of children.