For Wednesday 4/14, finish DORA.
What is dream interpretation? Are we reading this book in this class because it is literature? Because it is philosophy? Or because it is, as Freud would claim, science? Your task is to consider the content, style, and genre of Dora in order to determine the most accurate lenses for our reading experience. Listed below are four possible readings—they are certainly not mutually exclusive.
Please read the below and begin to consider how you view this book. On Wednesday, the class will be divided into two groups with the goal of discussing which of the perspectives below (or any additional ones) apply to Dora. Hopefully each group will attain its own independent semi-consensus. The two groups will then reconvene and share their findings.
FOR TONIGHT: Please chose one of the interpretive stances below that strikes you as more primary and post a few sentences describing one piece of textual evidence which supports that position. A complete argument is certainly not necessary; we just want to establish some interesting points of evidence with which to start discussion. Alternatively, you may propose a different position than the four below.
-Jack und Ana
- The dream interpreter as scientist and doctor. Freud claims psychoanalysis is a science and that his hypotheses are reinforced by his knowledge of many different cases. His obligations toward his patient are strictly those of a normal physician and his obligations toward medicine are the same. His “treatment” is analogous to any other medical treatment.
Does dream interpretation merely reveal what already exists in the subconscious mind?
Consider: Freud’s objectivity, his direct statements on genre, the plausibility of his claims, the dynamic between Freud and Dora (is it just a doctor-patient relation?)
- The interpreter as personal mythmaker, meaning-giver, guru-confessor, faith creator, medicine man. If we hypothesize that Freud’s hypotheses have no actual basis in Dora’s mind, can chancing upon some powerful metaphorical meaning (literature) provide a therapeutic experience to the “patient”? Does what he says have to be initially true for it to become true on some level? Can the literary activity of finding references, allusions, correspondences, and meanings in the tangled web of real actions cure illnesses? Or could some of Freud’s conclusions—for example that Dora loves Herr. K—be reached without the extensive analysis and still prove true, real, and beneficial in their discovery?
Does dream interpretation create an individual’s self-understanding?
Consider: whether the interpretative process relies more on Freud’s or Dora’s initiative, Freud’s hints about transference and his own role in Dora’s subconscious, the purported medical effects of psychoanalysis, Freud’s literary style (scientific, poetic, mythic, soap opera-esque?)
- The interpreter as author, as novelist, and—as authors so often are—protagonist of the story. Who knows what effect he had on Dora; he has the comfortable excuse that patients will show improvements several weeks after treatment has ended, though not during treatment. But is Freud’s analysis of Dora powerful, meaningful, or beneficial to us, the readers, regardless of its effect on Dora? He claims to publish exclusively for medical journals and to not be writing a roman à clef. Yet he engages in some literary conventions, such as citing poets. His narrative does not tell Dora’s story chronologically; it tells Freud’s story chronologically: Freud is in many respects the protagonist, the detective story hero. He employs some novelistic effects in describing the sequence of their conversations, the tone of their conversations, characterizing Dora. And how about the speculation that Dora has transferred her desire to kiss Herr. K to a desire to kiss him, based on their shared fondness for smoking? Can we really read “Freud the narrator” purely as “Freud the doctor”?
Does dream interpretation become an authorial activity of the interpreter independent of the dreamer? Are these interpretations meaningful to us, whether or not they are accurate in Dora’s case?
Consider: statements on genre, literary style, Freud’s role in the narrative, personal resonance of Freudian theories.
- The dream teller as communicator, rhetorician, emoter—in varying degrees of histrionics, in varying degrees of honesty. The Calvino interpretation of dream interpretation: Fern-flower essentially makes up her dreams in order to express certain emotions to Qfwfq; note especially her angry “dream.” What if Dora is making everything up? (It should be remembered that both her father and Freud were initially inclined to think that the encounter with Herr. K by the lake was a “phantasy.”) Fern-flower is apparently sincerely (if bitterly) trying to convey her emotions and resolve them; can dreams be merely the conscious rhetoric of Dora? Or are they random juvenile wanderings which Freud seizes in excitement to try out his interpretative prowess? Or are they more symptoms of the disease?—Dora knows something about dream interpretation, tries to be an amateur Freud, and makes up crazy explanations for actual typical spoiled girl hypochondria (a condition which Freud claims to be fairly expert on.)
First, can we trust Dora’s honesty, with Freud and with herself? If not, what is her motivation for invention: conscious expression, pseudo-scientific fervor, the unconscious but active formulation of her desires, juvenile stupidity?
Consider: the characterization of Dora, the focalization of Dora’s narrative (Dora is essentially the only narrator, when they get to speak Herr K and her father disagree with her), the commonness and applicability of Fern-flower-esque invention.
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KA
To take the view right off the bat that Freud and his ilk were naive -at best- or hucksters -at worst- seems to me profoundly misguided. That psychoanalytic work has been disregarded for focusing as much on talk and interpretation as biology and is thus a polluted, thus an invalidated non-discipline, soft-science, amounts to exactly the reactive, and for some fearful, gesture that Freud would be forced to deal with his entire life when justifying his work.
No, Freud and the psychoanalysts didn't examine germ cultures, create the light bulb, or dissect cadavers. Neither did they set broken arms or prescribe laudnum for coughs (they had other ways of dealing with 'coughs'...) But do you guys really wanna go back to the days of 'the four humours'? What Freud and the psychoanalysts did at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century that was so important was to posit an inclusive theory of change and stasis, crisis and recovery that brought out of their circuitous isolation the disillusioned discourses of evolutionary biology, culture, and subjectivity that had become deadlocked by the inability (unwillingness?) of any 'scientific' theory to reconcile the world of the inner subject, the ideal and the real (material) products of those subjects. Unifying spiritualisms sat comfortably alongside bloody-minded Vitalist politics. Culture, having been set a-swirl amidst the emptiness of space then brought back to red-in-tooth-and-claw Nature was saddled with a so-called Romantic art movement that, ostensibly, cried out for Some Big Unifying Reason For Being.
Enter psychoanalysis. The setting: ladies' drawing rooms. Science was able and permitted to account for mechanical processes but not agency; philosophy as able to account for Will and History but not for a practice that would *practically* manifest itself among the base transactions of day-to-day life on Earth (this was religion's marked territory); and culture, its great Art, was unable to do what was really desired behind and beyond its party line of 'representing the world, dutifully': to represent the representations. What was needed and what was found in psychoanalysis was a method of re-presenting our --culturally, personally, scientifically-- given representations. The method was no longer "Patient lay prostrate while we examine you" or "Mind turn inward, examine yourself and report back (to whom?)" Coursing through the banter of society as well as the deepest thrust of dreams was an arch-narrative that folded the individual and society onto one another on the plane of quotidian living. Therapeutic before psychoanalysis meant applying leeches and moving to a warmer climate with all your anxieties in tow. With the introduction of this new neutral third party - the psychoanalyst - a reciprocity emerged between those who were examined and those who examined; those who interpreted and those who were interpreted; (to use the English verb of my copy of Descarte's translator) those who 'discerned' and those who were 'discerned'.
It was that reciprocity which managed to breech the unbreachable, namely, subjectivity, nature, and desire. If it did not 'cure' coughs or lesions (which it might have), it made them readable without abandoning the older paradigms; if it did not manage to write itself scientifically enough it refrained from enforcing a taboo silence re indigestion, ejaculation, and the like- and more importantly, their representation. And if it all seemed too hokey, all this dreamtalk therapy- too literary and unscientific, even medieval with its symbology of mutated signs- psychoanalysis reproduced a lesson laying at its almost unspoken core: people consider -and act upon- other people as if they were multi-purpose objects. And though to a psychoanalyst people were also objects transmuted into symbols and back out into real-world objects again, to speak like this at all outside of a nominally biological (i.e. Darwinian, animalistic) discipline was to produce a certain new truth.
From Civilization and its Discontents, last chapter, first footnote:
'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all...'
That the education of young people at the present day conceals from them the part which sexuality will play in their lives is not the only
reproach we are obliged to make against it. Its other sin is that it does not prepare them for the aggressiveness of which they are destined to
become the objects. In sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to
equip people starting on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian Lakes. In this it becomes evident that a certain misuse
is being made of ethical demands. The strictness of those demands would not do so much harm if education were to say: 'This is how men ought to be,
in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that.' Instead of this the young are made to believe
that everyone else fulfils those ethical demands-that is, that everyone else is virtuous. It is on this that the demand is based that the young,
too, shall become virtuous. (Freud, 81, trans. Strachey)
Comments (4)
jenneke_olson@berkeley.edu said
at 8:00 am on Apr 14, 2010
"...Then I came into a house where I lived, went to my room, and found a letter from Mother lying there. She wrote saying that as I had left home without my parents' knowledge she had not wished to write to me to say that Father was ill. 'Now he is dead and if you like you can come.""
I felt like this entire novel (story? book? case study?) was written on the basis of this one eighteen year old girl, who may or may not have made the entire thing up. I felt like I was reading this with the dream teller as the communicator, and I honestly believe she made parts of it up, if not all of it. For example, in the quote I chose, where Dora is recounting a dream, she is able to recount what a letter said in her dream, maybe not word for word, and not only that, but recalls the entire dream without gaps and it is taken as a whole at face value. I think you would find in the population as a whole that they cannot remember their dreams that well, let alone a letter then read in one. I was a skeptic while reading, I apologize.
Ana Corral said
at 8:20 am on Apr 14, 2010
Even before reading Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, I didn’t consider Freud much of a scientist or doctor, and after reading it, I feel that I can say with certainty that this “book” isn’t scientific. I feel that while Freud tried his best to be as objective and scientific as he could, he failed. I agree with Jack’s description when he says that Freud is the protagonist; Dora’s problems, her dreams and hysteria only serve to forward Freud’s beliefs and his story about how Dora’s case affected him.
“But I was deaf to this first note of warnings, thinking I had ample time before me, since no further stages of transference developed and the material for the analysis had not yet run dry. In this way the transference took me unawares, and, because of the unknown quantity in me which reminded Dora of Herr K., she too her revenge on me as she wanted to take her revenge on him, and deserted me…” [pp. 109]
Although there are doubtless more examples of Freud as an author and not as a scientist, I picked this quote because even though Freud is describing how and why he thinks Dora left, he is describing it in a way and only in terms that relate to him. This quote is good example of how Freud, despite his attempts to objective, calm, rational and scientific, got overly excited and used everything about Dora’s experiences and symptoms to further his own cause and beliefs.
Sara Sol said
at 9:06 am on Apr 14, 2010
I am somewhere between premise one and two, with freud as a self-proclamed hero, and a sara-proclamed poet. "No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhibit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed" here stand Freud the poet, Freud the embellisher. This, along with the many other justifications he weaves into the psychoanalysis, makes me wonder what Freud's own unconscious hopes are. Why does he comply with his poetic tendencies within a scientific paper? Is it, as Jack and Ana asked, the method by which he cures the patient. His creations are at times so absolutely intricate and complex, that it seems impossible for every aspect of his diagnosis to be accurate, he himself admits to often "filling in the gaps". I don't really know what my argument is, but i think the quote above, and a number of other poetic emergences, play a huge part in the unraveling of the story, and in the unraveling of Freud's own purpose, which seems overall to defend his theories, and perhaps in that way, he is not as accurate as he would like to be. Here he makes the distinction btw writer and psychoanalyst, but i dont think his supression of the poet is as strong as he declares it to be "i must now turn to consider a further complication, to which I should certainly give no space if I were a man of letters engaged upon the creation of a mental state like this for a short story, instead of being a medical man engaged upon its dissection" (52) He even makes sure to defend himself against those who would claim his poetic tendencies to have won over. The question is, how do you separate a poet from a poet, can he not be a poet when he so obviously is?
Michael Pruess said
at 9:26 am on Apr 14, 2010
It seems to me that what Freud is doing is very similar to what English and Rhetoric majors do when analyzing a piece of writing. He's developing a close reading of each dream, grasping for additional meanings, and piecing things together into a coherent thesis. I can't call this a science, nor can I call it a medicine (unless 'medicine' applies to any and all conversation with positive benefits to interlocutors); I feel Freud may be the protagonist of his own story, but not of the dreams themselves, and thus I can't agree with the third stance—
I like the last stance listed, as I too was impressed with Dora's attempts at dream interpretation. The fluctuation in honesty was also interesting. I don't have any particular passages to quote at the moment, but I do remember one moment in the interpretation of the first dream where she attempts to provide her own explanations of some elements of her dream.
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