purloining freud: dora's letter to posterity€¦ · lacan demonstrates how in the irma dream...

Purloining Freud: Dora's Letter to PosterityPaul, Robert A.

American Imago, Volume 63, Number 2, Summer 2006, pp. 159-182 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/aim.2006.0020

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159Robert A. Paul

American Imago, Vol. 63, No. 2, 159–182. © 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

159

ROBERT A. PAUL

Purloining Freud: Dora’s Letter to Posterity

In his well-known analysis (1954–55, 146–71) of Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection—the “specimen dream” in The In-terpretation of Dreams—Lacan reads Freud’s writing as if it were prophecy, as if “Freud” were the location of an authorial voice through which modern discourse enunciated a revelation, beyond the comprehension even of the man who uttered it, inaugurating a new appreciation of the role of the signifier, the sign, the letter in all its paradoxical Saussurean material-ity and negativity in human being. Lacan demonstrates how in the Irma dream Freud, after decomposing his ego into its many identifications, arrives finally at an image of a chemical formula—an arrangement of pure signifiers whose only mean-ing is the pattern of their repeated tripartition, which in turn points to the triads in Freud’s own circle of important Others while also alluding to the triadic oedipal domain within which the Symbolic dimension and the Law arise.

In this paper I explore some ways in which Freud’s texts, like any other examples of discourse, communicate messages quite different from what might be taken as their literal, sur-face, or manifest meaning. I focus particularly on the form of the letter, a written text that stands at some midpoint between dialogical conversation and abstract impersonal written prose. Letters are not only texts whose surface has a meaning, but also gestures or signs in an exchange relationship between concrete individuals, and as such they are quite literally addressed to someone, with the result that their pragmatic dimension is as important as, if not more important than, their semantic or indexical dimension. As we will see, their arrival, non-arrival, sheer existence, or absence may be as meaningful as whatever they might actually “say.” I will begin with some observations on Freud’s discussion of his Irma dream, and from there I will progress to a consideration of the case of Dora, a case replete with letters, and one that, as I will show, well illustrates the

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point that texts can mean something quite other than what their author seems to have intended.

There is, of course, an actual letter mentioned in Freud’s interpretation of the Irma dream. Associating to the word “dysentery,” Freud recalls a patient with hysterical problems in defecating, whom instead of treating he had sent on a long sea voyage (one wonders why). Some days before the Irma dream, he writes: “I had had a despairing letter from him from Egypt, saying he had had a fresh attack there which a doctor had diagnosed as dysentery” (1900, 114). We know that Freud will highlight in his analysis the theme of medical lapses and incidents of malpractice in his own case, along with self-ex-onerating arguments about apparent hysterias that cannot be cured because they are, in fact, organic illnesses that have been misdiagnosed.

We might speculate about other possible meanings of this letter, recalling for example Freud’s ideas and fantasies about “Egypt”; but a richer vein appears when we relate this letter that turns up in the associations to the appearance of a letter in the dream itself. Very early in the dream report, the following line appears: “I at once took her [Irma] on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘if you still get pains, it’s really only your fault’” (107). But when we get to the analytic section, in which Freud is supposedly going to associate to every word or phrase in the dream, we find the following fragment: “I re-proached Irma for not having accepted my solution; I said: ‘If you still get pains, it’s your own fault’” (108).

The passage has been distorted from one page to the next in several ways, such as by the removal of quotation marks from the word “solution”; but the most striking is that the “letter” of Irma’s that Freud was apparently going to answer in the dream has disappeared. Where is this missing letter? Well, we could say that it is a displaced version of the letter from the patient in Egypt that Freud associates with a later element of the dream, the absurd medical idea that dysentery will somehow purge Irma of her illness (an opinion maliciously attributed to “Dr. M.,” that is, Josef Breuer).

Irma, like the young man in Egypt, might well have actually written to, or at least asked, Freud about whether or not she

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might have an organic illness after all—which would explain why Freud’s treatment had not produced a complete cure. Thus, the “letter” in the dream would represent a rebuke that might appear to damage Freud by accusing him of wrongly diagnosing a real physical illness as hysterical somatization, but one that would at the same time rescue him from the charge that his treatment for hysteria is ineffective. This is indeed one of the main points of Freud’s explicit analysis of the dream in The Interpretation of Dreams: he recognizes that he is willing to concede his own medical delinquency if it will save his beloved theories.

But if we are reading as if we were listening analytically—and why shouldn’t we?—we must ask ourselves why Freud omitted the letter that appeared in the dream transcript when he set about the work of interpretation. What conflictual thought or powerful affect could have interfered, thus making the missing letter itself a slip, a symptom? It is thus to the letter that is not there that our attention is drawn.

We know that while Freud is writing these very passages, he is also himself involved in one of the most bizarre, fruitful, and fateful exchanges of letters in history, namely his corre-spondence with Wilhelm Fliess, a man with whom it would be fair to say Freud was at the time deeply and passionately in love, whether we want to call it “transference” or not. Now we know that Freud dreamed the dream of Irma’s injection on the night of July 23–24, 1895 because in a letter of June 12, 1900 to Fliess he carefully establishes that date and then wonders whether in the future a marble tablet will one day adorn the house where he had the dream announcing that on that night “the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud” (Masson 1985, 417).

Since we can’t question the dreamer himself for further information or associations, let us turn, in the Freud/Fliess correspondence, to that portentous date to see what we might find there. Let us picture Freud, on the morning of July 24, 1895 having awoken from the dream of Irma’s injection. He has just dreamed a world-historical dream, insofar as he has for the first time in human history equipped himself to understand a dream’s latent content, its underlying wish, and its work of censorship, disguise, and distortion by means of the dreamwork. He is at his desk writing to the beloved companion with whom


he shares everything, most especially his emerging discoveries in his exploration of hysteria and the other neuroses, sexuality, and the unconscious. What does he write? Perhaps, we might expect, he writes a hastily sketched, breathless version of the fa-mous Chapter 2 of The Interpretation of Dreams; or perhaps a more intimate outpouring equivalent to some version of “Eureka!” Before reading the letter of July 24 to see what we actually do find, it will be helpful to quote a few passages from the letters leading up to it, to give a flavor of the tone of this overheated epistolary affair at this point in time.

So, the first line of the letter of April 26, 1895: “Dear Magi-cian, You seem to be angry when you cloak yourself so assidu-ously in silence” (Masson 1985, 126). April 27 (the next day): “Today the letter I expected from you arrived and made me very happy” (127). May 25: “Dearest Wilhelm, Your letter gave me much pleasure and caused me to regret anew what I feel is the great gap in my life—that I cannot reach you in any other way” (128). June 12: “My dear Wilhelm, Your kindheartedness is one of the reasons I love you. Initially it seemed to me that you had broken off contact with me because of my remarks about the mechanism of the symptoms distant from the nose, and I did not deem that improbable. Now you surprise me with a discussion that takes those fantasies seriously!” (131). Excerpts from June 22: “Hail, cherished Wilhelm! So I shall come early in September. How I shall manage to do without you afterward, I do not know. . . . Then I will pay my proper respects to your discovery. You would be the strongest of men, holding in your hands the reins of sexuality, which governs all mankind; you could do anything and prevent anything” (133). July 13, the penultimate sentence of the letter: “Woe unto you if you do not write soon!” (134).

Thus prepared, we can now read from the actual letter Freud wrote to Fliess on the morning after dreaming the dream of Irma’s injection and making what he himself considered the greatest discovery of his extraordinary career. The letter is dated July 24, 1895, and the writer’s address is given as Berggasse 19, probably, so the editor suggests, because Freud brought his town stationery with him to the country house, Bellevue, where he had the dream. There is no formal salutation, rather, only this abrupt and anguished outcry:

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Demon! Why don’t you write? How are you? Don’t you care at all any more about what I’m doing? What is hap-pening with the nose, menstruation, labor pains, neuroses, your dear wife, and the budding little one? . . . Are we friends only in misfortune? . . . Most cordial greetings. Your Sigm. (Masson 1985, 134)

If we can use the letter to reconstruct Freud’s dream thoughts on that fateful night, then surely we have to conclude that the predominating thought and affect on his mind was a profound desire, a heartfelt longing for Fliess; and it is the absent letter from his beloved friend that appears in The Inter-pretation of Dreams as the missing letter, the one that is not in its place, that is, the one that is not mentioned in the supposedly exhaustive analysis of the dream put forward as the illustrative prototype of the method of dream interpretation.

We can amplify our understanding of the impetus behind the dream from another direction. Every analyst knows that often the most interesting and revealing associations to a dream come not in the official attempts at “free associating,” but in some comment that follows on or precedes the dream, but seems to be unrelated to it except through contiguity. Freud concludes his analysis of the Irma dream in Chapter 2 of The Interpretation of Dreams with the italicized claim that “when the work of interpretation is finished, we perceive that a dream is a fulfilment of a wish” (1900, 121). So much for the analysis of the speci-men dream. Case closed; now we move on to Chapter 3. This chapter, devoted to supporting the hypothesis about dreams and wish-fulfilment, begins with these words:

When, after passing through a narrow defile, we suddenly emerge upon a piece of high ground, where the paths divide and the finest prospects open up on every side, we may pause for a moment and consider in which direction we shall first turn our steps. (122)

This may sound like high-minded metaphorical throat-clearing rhetoric, which of course it is, but something catches our attention if we have been reading the book carefully with an analytic eye thus far. Immediately in our thoughts we are


flung back to a passage in Chapter 1, the lengthy review of the literature on dream theory, which is usually skimmed or skipped altogether by the contemporary reader. If we have read that chapter with care, we discover that among the predecessors to whom Freud pays considerable homage is one K. A. Scherner, whose Das Leben des Traumes (The Life of the Dream) was published in Berlin in 1861. It is Scherner, we find, who, long before Freud, proposed the theory that dreams symbolically represent the body and its functions, including its sexual parts. So, for example, according to Freud’s account of Scherner’s theory, a dream stimulated by the male organ may cause the dreamer “to find the top part of a clarinet in the street or the mouthpiece of a tobacco pipe” (86). Most readers today would assume this could only be a bit of classic “Freudian” symbol interpretation, but the idea predates Freud’s dream book by almost forty years. Parenthetically, I might mention that what will interest us about these examples in a moment is that both symbols refer to something that is normally put in one’s mouth, but before we can justify our interest in that feature, we must point to the continuous passage that connects up with the “narrow defile” at the beginning of Chapter 3. Freud is again expounding Scherner’s theory:

In the case of a sexual dream in a woman, the narrow space where the thighs come together may be represented by a narrow courtyard surrounded by houses, while the vagina may be symbolized by a soft, slippery and very narrow footpath leading across the yard, along which the dreamer has to pass, in order, perhaps, to take a gentle-man a letter. (86)

So here once again, suddenly and unexpectedly, we come upon a letter, self-evidently a love-letter to a “gentleman,” delivered by a dreamer who walks along a narrow path or defile repre-senting the vagina—at least according to Scherner, whose ideas Freud has been presenting. Putting all this together rather too quickly, we can take note of the “oral” dimensions of the Irma dream (examining her oral cavity, the strong-smelling bottle of liqueur from Otto); and, recalling that trimethylamin, the for-mula for which Freud pictures in his dream chosen to represent

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wish-fulfilment, is (a) associated with Fliess, who (b) associates it with sexuality, and that (c) it is a component of semen, we arrive at the conclusion that the latent wish underlying the Irma dream—no great surprise to a contemporary analyst—is a wish to play the female role in sexual intercourse with Fliess, and more specifically to perform oral sex with him.

It is, I would contend, Freud’s recognition and analysis of his homoerotic sexual attraction to Fliess and of his strong femi-nine identification, as well as of his defensive repudiation and repression of and flight from these wishes, that, in my opinion (which is also that of Lacan), forms a unifying thematic thread underlying much of Freud’s subsequent psychoanalytic writing. Freud discovers Fliess’s theory of “bisexuality” exemplified in himself, precisely in relation to Fliess, and sends him this dream as part of a love-letter to fill in the lonely void in which he pines for the distant lover. We are the beneficiaries, since what lends Freud’s writing its irresistible charm, I think, is precisely that it is addressed to someone, someone who is passionately loved. Part of the secret of his great authorial genius is to address all readers, and all posterity, with that same intensity, which makes the reader feel recognized, called upon, spoken to in the most intimate and yet cordial and tactful manner. In just the right and appropriate tone Freud’s voice finds us there where, in us all, remains unuttered the great unanswered cry, “Demon! Don’t you care about me at all?”—a pure example, if there ever was one, of the Lacanian dictum that our desire is the desire of the Other.

As the Freud-Fliess correspondence winds to a close, in the years 1900 through 1902, the patient known as Dora begins to play a role, first as case, then as a written case history referred to as “Dreams and Hysteria” in the Fliess letters. When it is fin-ished, Freud writes to Fliess that “it is the subtlest thing I have written so far and will put people off even more than usual. Still, one does one’s duty and does not write for the day alone” (Masson 1985, 433). Here again Freud is prophetic. The Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), begun just after Dora slammed the door on Freud’s study on December 31, 1900, and finished by the end of January 1901, is one of the first books to be composed entirely in the twentieth century, and certainly one of the greatest and most important. It is surely not written


for the day alone: like a time bomb, it has ticked throughout that century, and in the end poor neurotic Dora has come off as one of the most influential women in history, far overshad-owing her once more famous brother, whose lifelong devotion to high-minded socialist party politics only brought him an ignominious death at the hands of fascist thugs and subsequent oblivion, while her three months at Berggasse 19 have played a major role in challenging and overturning the patriarchal values of a system of sexual norms that had dominated much of the Western world for most of its history. This book is, as I intend now to explore, Freud’s letter to posterity; but like any deep piece of writing, it far exceeds the conscious control of even this most inspired and insightful of writers, and speaks to us, like the unconscious wherever it manifests itself, through the discourse of an Other, whose identity and message it will be my task here to uncover.

Every one of us knows, I have no doubt, that one of the things that propelled Dora into analysis with Freud was a letter she had written:

One day her parents were thrown into a state of great alarm by finding on the girl’s writing desk, or inside it, a letter in which she took leave of them because, as she said, she could no longer endure her life. (1905, 23)

She appears to have made no attempt on her own life, as the letter suggests she might, but it is the fact that her parents find the letter that helps convince her father that his daughter is in need of treatment. “How on earth,” she asks Freud, “did they find the letter? It was shut up in my desk” (23n). Of course, Freud thinks he knows the answer: “since she knew that her parents had read this draft of a farewell letter, I conclude that she had herself arranged for it to fall into their hands” (23n). Well and good; but if she did arrange matters in this way, must we not assume further that she did so not only with the purpose of being found out, but indeed with the further intention of being dragged, apparently against her will, to consult with the interesting doctor who had cured her father of the question-able ailments he had accumulated during his wild youth, and whom Dora herself had been taken to see once before, when

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she was sixteen—that is, right after the famous episode by the lake when she rejected the offer of—whatever it was—put for-ward by the unlucky Mr. K.?

When dealing with patients with what we now call “histri-onic personality disorder,” how often do we not feel that we are being led through an intricate maze of the patient’s own devising, urged forward by tantalizing clues thrown out in the course of the patient’s so-called “free associations”? In these cases, it is a useful rule of thumb—not an iron law, but a valu-able guide to our thinking—that, when we examine the outcome of an action, we can deduce that that outcome was indeed the purpose for which the previous action had been performed, even despite the apparent ignorance or denials of the patient. It is by the application of this very rule that Freud concludes that Dora must have intended that her parents should find her letter, since that is what did in fact happen. Thus, by the same token, if Dora’s “suicide note” got her taken to see Doc-tor Freud, well then, that was why she wrote it. This rule is by no means foolproof, but following it often leads to interesting results, as we shall see.

So, if we follow on our hypothesis, we must next ask our-selves why Dora, finding herself trapped in the convoluted sexual family situation we know her to have been in in the fall of 1900, when she was eighteen years old and possessed of a common or garden variety of the then-prevalent malaise known as “hysteria,” would have wanted to be taken to Dr. Freud, and in such a way as it would seem that it was her powerful father, not herself, who had taken this step. Perhaps, knowing him by personal acquaintance and repute to be a gifted reader of the subtle signs of human suffering, she hoped he would discover her dilemma and stand up on her behalf before her prepos-sessing father, a man so used to having his own way? Perhaps she thought he was probably a good healer, and just wanted to be rid of the neurosis that was tormenting her? But why then the charade of the suicide note and the subsequent fainting fit that frightened her father into taking action? Why not just get in a cab to Berggasse 19?

With the hindsight Freud could not have had, we can sur-mise that Dora was already in the grip of a powerful transference to Freud when she first arrived at his office in October of 1900,


which doubtless affected the way she presented herself to him. At this early point in the development of his method, Freud tells us with what now strikes us as disarming naiveté that “that portion of the technical work which is the most difficult never came into question with the patient: for the factor of ‘transfer-ence’. . . did not come up for discussion during the short treat-ment” (13). Let us forgive Freud his blindness—recalling, on the contrary, that it was he who, in this very paper, bequeathed to us the idea of the transference and its vast importance for technique that we can now, in hindsight, turn so easily upon him—and just recall the facts of the case. Freud had treated Dora’s father when Dora was about twelve, that is, six years before the present treatment, or in other words, in 1894. No doubt it was owing to his successful treatment of Father’s ill-ness resulting from an earlier bout of venereal disease, as Freud writes, “that four years later he brought his daughter, who had meanwhile grown unmistakably neurotic, and introduced her to me, and that after another two years he handed her over to me for psychotherapeutic treatment [mir . . . zur psychotherapeu-tischen Behandlung übergab]” (19).

The phrase “he handed her over to me” cannot fail to ring a bell for us attentive readers of the case in Strachey’s English; and indeed we will see the same (English) phrase used a few pages later in a different but very telling and hardly negligible context:

When [Dora] was feeling embittered she used to be over-come by the idea that she had been handed over to Herr K. [Herrn K. ausgeliefert worden sei] as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and his wife. (34)

Strachey’s translation reflects the identity of the two situations despite the different wording in the German original. In hand-ing over, or “delivering up,” Dora to Freud, we may assume that, as Freud perhaps senses and Strachey seems clearly to recognize, Father is doing the same thing over again: trying to palm his meddlesome daughter off on another man so she will stop interfering in his otherwise gratifying arrangement with Mrs. K. But Dora too is reenacting that scene: she knows Freud as the man to whom she has been taken after the incident in which Mr. K. made his proposal to her at the lake; and she ar-

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ranges to be taken to him again and handed over to him, just as she had originally been “handed over” to Mr. K. Depending on how we want to think about the matter, we could formulate it either by saying that she is forced, by the repetition com-pulsion, to reenact her trauma, first experienced with Mr. K., with a man associated with him in her mind, that is Dr. Freud; or else, somewhat more richly and plausibly I think, that she transferred her powerful, mainly unconscious, and deeply con-flicted sexual excitement about Mr. K. onto Freud, and asked to be taken to his office where she could lie alone with him on his couch and make the scene come out her way this time. If that was indeed her wish—and by the principle I adduced earlier, that the consequence reveals what the original purpose must have been, it was—then it would not be surprising that she could not act on it directly, because of unconscious guilt, but would instead arrange to have someone else do it to her in the guise of a punishment or cure. This is the very common tactic we recognize as one that could be called “don’t throw me in the briar patch,” whereby patients preserve a façade of innocence in getting their prohibited, disavowed, or conflicted wishes fulfilled by having others take the responsibility for them by enacting them.

The year following the scene at the lake, which occurred in 1898, when Dora was sixteen, Dora stayed in Vienna for the winter with an uncle and cousins, after the death of her favorite aunt, the uncle’s wife. Of this woman Freud writes, in another context: “I had in the meantime also made the acquaintance in Vienna of a sister of his [Dora’s father], who was a little older than himself” (19). We thus learn, not only that Freud knew Dora’s favorite aunt in Vienna, but also—what is more impor-tant—that Dora, living in Vienna, probably knew Freud, not only because she had seen him briefly at sixteen, but also through her deceased aunt’s connection, whatever it may have been, to Freud. I mention this only to emphasize that Dora came to Freud not simply with the generalized, all-purpose transference that patients bring to treatment of any kind, but also with some very concrete and specific ideas about Freud and who he was. I will return to and amplify this theme later on.

But for now let us ask ourselves this question: with what end in view would Dora offer herself, or rather arrange to have


herself offered, to Sigmund Freud as a case study in hysteria? We certainly have no difficulty perceiving the initial transference fantasy: the first thing she tells him about, as soon as Father has left the picture and they are alone in the consulting room, is an episode in which an older man, Mr. K., under the guise of friendship, lures her into his office alone and kisses her. This same man has, after his failed proposition a couple of years later, appeared next to her bed in the room where she is sleeping, and she recreates this scene with Freud in his office. Ergo, Freud is a new version of Mr. K., and she is going to do to him what we may presume she did to Mr. K.—lead Freud on and then reject him in revenge for his betrayal or inadequate appreciation of the value of her love.

But before we discover why she is going to do this, and what motive—beyond the thirst for revenge on Mr. K. (and behind him on Father) to which Freud rightly points in his case history—activates her, we must pause for a while and think more deeply about the nature of letters. It may well be that e-mail is reintroducing us into an epistolary world, but we have not lived in one since the advent of the telephone and are still finding our way about in it. Freud, on the other hand, lived at the climax of a great historical period of letter-writing, and we know that among his other claims to our attention he was an incredibly prolific, fluent, and eloquent letter-writer. The let-ters to Fliess have by now become a part of the canon of the twentieth century, as has the correspondence with Jung and a host of other figures.

In the form of the letter, a piece of writing personally di-rected to a specific other, any reader, putting himself or herself in the place of that other, can grasp with great clarity the way in which a subjectivity arises from a mere arrangement of signifiers. Picking up a letter of Freud’s, we feel addressed by someone, a living being, who is in fact not there, nor was ever personally known to us. Yet he seems to live in his letter’s addressing—we might want to say its interpellation—of us. In his hailing of us and speaking to us in the second person, he arises as a subjec-tivity in our act of reading his letter, which now seems to be written to us. As I have said, all of Freud’s oeuvre strikes me as having this quality, and most particularly the Dora case, which after all probably was written, in Freud’s mind, as a letter to

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Fliess. (I might interject here an observation about the often almost giddy and omnipotent self-assurance with which Freud notoriously announces his interpretations and conclusions in the Dora case. Many contemporary critics cite this as evidence of his bullying or domineering engagement with the young female patient herself. I am inclined to think, on the contrary, that it is a demonstration of bravado staged for the beloved friend who is rapidly growing skeptical of Freud’s claims and theories, and over whom Freud must seem to triumph before discarding him as a false betrayer, in a process parallel to Dora’s own.)

Now, a suicide note is a particularly telling if uncanny ex-ample of what I mean about the ambiguity of subjectivity that arises in the reading of a letter. Suppose that Dora, instead of carefully concealing her “suicide note” in her desk in such a way that her nosy mother would be sure to find it and then going about her merry way, had actually killed herself. Her parents would then be in the position of being addressed by the thoughts, the intentions, the feelings, the subjectivity of someone who had just stopped being alive and thus ceased to be a subject altogether. The deferral implicit in signification, its alienation from the living being who conveys it, could not be clearer, then, than in the form itself of the letter to someone, whether it is written to us, or read by us as interlopers or “Nosy Parkers,” as it were, in another’s correspondence.

Think, for example, of the case of Lucy R., the English governess in the Studies on Hysteria (1895) who suffers from a hallucinated smell of burnt pudding in her nose. Freud asks her to recall when the symptom dates from, and she promptly replies with a memory that lies near the surface:

“Oh yes, I know exactly. . . . I was playing with the chil-dren in the schoolroom and playing at cooking with them” (they were two little girls). “A letter was brought in that had just been left by the postman. I saw from the postmark and the handwriting that it was from my mother in Glasgow and wanted to open it and read it; but the children rushed at me, tore the letter out of my hands and cried: ‘No, you shan’t read it now! It must be for your birthday; we’ll keep it for you!’” (114)


On further investigation by Freud, it emerges that Lucy has just given notice to her employer, the children’s father, referred to in the text as “the Director,” because she feels poorly treated by the rest of the help. The letter from her mother reminds her of her intention to go home to Britain, but it also arouses feelings of guilt about abandoning her little charges since her own mother was a relative of the deceased wife of the Direc-tor, and Lucy had promised her on her deathbed that she, Lucy, would look after the children. The conflict between her wish to stay and keep her promise, and her decision to leave for home, provided what Freud, at least in 1895, considered an appropriate etiology for repression and the development of a somatized hysterical symptom, such as the smell of burnt pudding. This symptom memorialized the fact that while the children were teasing Lucy about the letter from her mother, the direct cause of the aroused conflict, the pudding they were making, actually did burn.

Of course, it will turn out there is much more to the story than this: the smell of burnt pudding stands in for and covers over another smell, that of cigars, which refers back to earlier incidents that had dashed Lucy’s secret hopes of taking the children’s mother’s place by actually marrying the Director. If we were to think of psychoanalytic listening on the model of listening to Wagner’s operas and recognizing recurring leitmo-tifs, we would of course file features of this little episode under headings such as “Cigars, Freud’s inveterate smoking of,” and “Fliess’s crazy ideas about the nose, Freud’s uncritical acceptance of,” and tuck them away for future cross-referencing. But for now we will return to the role of the letter in this story.

Lucy experiences an intolerable conflict, one she is forced to repress and somatize, at the moment the letter from Glasgow is in her hand. It is important that she does not in fact get to read the letter, and Freud never reports either that she did read it or what was in it. All we know is that Lucy could tell from the handwriting that it was from her mother, and very probably was meant to arrive in time for her birthday, judging by the timing. It might have just said “Happy Birthday,” or it might have contained news, queries, replies to earlier queries from Lucy, or who knows what else: “The cat died”; “We’re having unseasonably warm weather”; “Old Mrs. McGillicuddy

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asked about you the other day”—or whatever. Not only do we not know, we don’t care. The importance of the letter lies not in any discursive message it may contain, but in the sheer fact of its existence as a call, an evocation from the absent mother, one that conjures up in Lucy two very different subjectivities of that internalized other in her own mind. One is a mother who says, “You must leave Vienna and come home (because your situation in the Director’s house has become untenable)”; the other is one who says, “You must keep your promise to the Director’s dead wife and stay in Vienna for the sake of the children and for my sake.”

Of course, a somewhat later Freud would realize that what lends this little conflict so much power are its unconscious oedi-pal roots: it revives Lucy’s infantile wish to replace her mother with her father, and also her self-punitive guilt for having the wish to do so—perhaps even with a thought to the effect that she would “burn” in hell for her sinful impulse, which in fantasy might appear to have actually killed the Director’s wife, her rival for his affection.

Be that as it may, we have here a striking parallel to Lacan’s point in his seminar (1956) on Poe’s story “The Purloined Let-ter” to the effect that the letter is itself an enigmatic signifier that circulates with a certain definable circuit, creating differ-ent subject positions as it travels from the bedchamber of an exalted royal personage—let us follow Lacan in calling her the Queen—into the hands of the Minister D___, and finally into the clutches of the amateur detective Dupin. The point of the purloined letter in Poe’s story is that it represents an illicit pact between the Queen and the Duke of S___, whose seal it bears, one whose discovery would conflict with the Queen’s official vows to her husband. In the same way, Lucy’s mother’s letter brings to consciousness a potential forbidden pact between Lucy and the Director, one that comes close to but ultimately conflicts with the official pact formed by the deathbed promise to “take their mother’s place with the children”—a chaste and presentable vow, undone by its coinciding with a wish to “take the mother’s place with the Director” that must be repudiated by consciousness if the acceptable vow is to be preserved.

My own reading of the Poe story so obviously connected with my present theme moves off in another direction from the


one initiated by Lacan. It is obvious that the contents of the actual letter in “The Purloined Letter” are never revealed in the story, which indeed retains its interest by virtue of that fact. Had we been shown the letter itself in all its naked and mundane inanity—“meet me tomorrow at such and such a spot”; “Mr. B___ is an accomplice in our plot”; “the password is such and such”; “I long to kiss your ruby lips”—its secret, once revealed, would join the circulation of all the other inane signifiers in the big world and cease to have any mystery or fascination for us. Hence the architecture of the story requires that the letter remain unread or the circuits of desire that sustain it, and its relationship with its readers, would collapse.

I am directed, however, toward another interpretation al-together of the letter’s contents by a passage early in the story. The mise en scène is this: the narrator, evidently an American of arcane literary tastes and a romantic, melancholy disposi-tion, is sitting in the library of the home of his French friend, C. Auguste Dupin, with whom he is living, and whose refined and somewhat decadent interests and tastes he shares. The inspector of police arrives, asking Dupin to help him solve a new mystery, just as he has solved the mysteries in the previous two stories in the “Dupin Trilogy,” namely, the “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” The Prefect has been charged by the Queen to find a letter that was sitting on her dressing table when it was filched by the crafty Minister D____ under her very nose. She was unable to call attention to the theft because this would have alerted the attention of the King, who was also in the room, to the existence of the letter, which, for some unstated reason, could not be made public without dire consequences. (We, of course, can draw our own conclusions about what must have been in the letter to render it so very dangerous, and to expose the Queen to the ever-pres-ent threat of blackmail from the unscrupulous Minister D____.) When Dupin first asks the police chief what is the matter at hand, the latter replies:

“I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position I now hold, were it known that I confided it to anyone.” (Poe 1844, 7–8)

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He then goes on to sketch the circumstances of the theft of the letter, and ends by producing a memorandum book, from which he “read aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially the external appearance of the missing document” (13).

Now, at this point we may recall Lacan’s wry comment that if the document was such a great secret, it was probably not the best idea in the world to hand over a description of its internal as well as its external features to a bunch of cops. But let us carry this thought one step further. We can certainly un-derstand why the Prefect, in desperation, unable to locate the missing letter by the usual police measures, and under pressure to produce it at once, would turn in secret to the master-sleuth Dupin, offering to pay him to help him out of the jam he is in. But why on earth would he also tell it to Dupin’s American friend, about whom we know that, as Poe’s stand-in in the text, he has already written several police stories for publication? The answer is obvious once we refer back to the interpretive principle I introduced earlier, namely, the hypothesis that the consequence reveals in retrospect the intention of the act: it can only be the case that the intention that animates Poe’s story is not to keep a secret, but rather to blab it to the entire world. And that is after all the real effect. Thanks to the dy-namic circulation of Poe’s story itself, across the generations, and through the hands of millions of readers, vast numbers of people are now well aware that something was rotten in the state of France: that there was some sort of hanky-panky, sexual, political, or both, that would have been revealed by the titular letter of “The Purloined Letter.”

Twice in The Intepretation of Dreams (1900, 245–6, 288) Freud tells us that the dream image of a crowd of strangers stands for secrecy. If that is true, then perhaps secrecy could also mean a crowd of strangers. And in this case, the pretense of keeping a secret turns out to be in fact just exactly a way of conveying a piece of gossip about the royal couple to a vast crowd of strang-ers, that is, the entire readership of Poe’s stories. And if the story bearing the title “The Purloined Letter” is symbolically equivalent to the purloined letter itself, then it does not stop its circulation once it arrives in Dupin’s possession. On the contrary, it is handed on by Dupin, via the narrator, to us, the readers, who now are implicated in its scandal and its intrigue, and compelled thereby to think about it and to pass it on to


others, by teaching it, or assigning it, or talking or writing about it as I am doing right now with you.

Why would Poe want so badly to shout this secret to the world? We can answer rather glibly in a formulaic way: he is utilizing the universal, or nearly universal, symbolism of the primal scene, pointing, like the outraged oedipal child, to the incredible fact of parental sex—the parents always being, of course, in Freudian symbolism, the referent of the “Royal Couple.” Whether or not we believe this, or accept that this ac-counts for the broad psychological appeal of the story, we can make some intriguing observations about why the story might have touched off a response in Lacan that induced him to give one of his best and most lucid seminars based on it.

For Lacan really was implicated with a royal couple, a scan-dal in whose house would have been of enormous transferential interest to him. I refer to the real “exalted royal personage,” the Queen, or rather Princess, who played such a major role in Lacan’s life, Marie Bonaparte. She was, of course, genuine royalty. A direct descendent of Napoleon’s brother, and mar-ried to Prince George of Greece and Denmark, she was also the most prominent person in the French psychoanalytic world of Lacan’s early days, having been analyzed by Freud. To make a long story short, she had a marriage of convenience with the Prince, and she took as her lover the refugee analyst Rudolf Loewenstein who was, in turn, Lacan’s analyst. Marie Bonaparte wrote a huge psychoanalytic study of Poe, and so Lacan’s ges-ture in his seminar is vastly overdetermined. He is telling us of the scandalous goings-on in the royal personage’s bedroom, where she has been unfaithful to the other royal personage. Like Hamlet, he burns to tell us that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark—or rather, of Greece and Denmark.

Here the story takes another involuted turn, for it was Marie Bonaparte who was able to obtain Fliess’s collection of letters from Freud, which his widow had decided to sell, and who, ignoring Freud’s wish that the letters be destroyed, ar-ranged for them to be spirited across the English Channel to preserve them during World War II. Meanwhile, it was in crucial measure thanks to his access to these hitherto unknown letters, among which were a number of scientific writings including the Project for A Scientific Psychology, that Lacan was able to develop

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his highly original and idiosyncratic “return to Freud” during the 1950s. For Lacan, then, the letters of Freud to Fliess were, like the letter in Poe’s story, “purloined,” from the guarded secrecy of Freud’s intimate relationship with Fliess, first by Mrs. Fliess, then by a Berlin bookseller, then by Marie Bonaparte. They provided information about a secret relationship outside of Freud’s known and legitimate ones, and possession of the letters, especially in their unexpurgated form, has continued to wreak havoc even afterwards, as the Jeffrey Masson/Kurt Eissler/Janet Malcolm affair of the 1980s demonstrates.

We can also, to push matters yet further, wonder about Freud’s own intentions in writing the letters in the first place. We know that early in his life Freud destroyed his papers, in order, so he said, to frustrate future biographers, an act that, if interpreted through the theory of negation, seems parallel with the wish he attributed to Dora concerning her own “suicide” letter. “How on earth,” we can just hear him expostulating, “did they manage to get their hands on those letters, when I did everything in my power to keep them secret!” I leave the rest of this thought to each of you to unravel in private.

Be that as it may, let us return to Dora herself. References to letters abound in this case history. There is not only the “suicide note” to which I have referred. There are as well the postcards from Mr. K. that determine Dora’s aphonia: when he is away, writing is more valuable than speaking. There is the letter from Mrs. K. inviting Dora’s family to the lake for their ill-starred vacation trip, a phrase of which shows up in Dora’s second dream. There are the postcards from the young engineer who is studying abroad and writes to remind Dora of his existence. And there is the letter from the parents of the governess of the K.s’ children, who fell victim to Mr. K.’s sexual predation.

I want to focus, however, on a letter that appears as Freud is following the trail of memories and symptoms disclosing the features of Dora’s childhood masturbation. He has interpreted her playing with her reticule as displaced fingering of her geni-tals, as well as her “catarrh” and its relation to bedwetting; and finally, in the tactless manner of his early analytic technique, he has flatly informed her that she used to masturbate, which she heatedly denies. Now comes the key session in the analysis, for it will be the one in which Dora recounts her dream of the


burning house and the jewel box: the centerpiece of Freud’s own analytic gem collection. But let us notice how that session starts:

Dora’s symptomatic act with the reticule did not imme-diately precede the dream. She started the session which brought us the narrative of the dream with another symptomatic act. As I came into the room in which she was waiting she hurriedly concealed a letter which she was reading. (1905, 78)

Freud asks her what the letter is about, and Dora is at first coy, then reveals that it is nothing more than a letter from her grandmother begging Dora to write more often. (“Demon! Why don’t you write? Don’t you care about me any more?” as we are perhaps by this time bound to think.) Freud’s idea is that Dora wants to play at “secrets” because she is about to reveal her secret regarding masturbation by way of the dream—which, as it turns out, has been constructed perfectly so that Freud can perform his interpretive wizardry on it. Now let us follow the associations. Next paragraph:

I had begun to suspect masturbation when she had told me of her cousin’s gastric pains. . . . It is well known that gastric pains occur especially often in those who mastur-bate. According to a personal communication made to me by W. Fliess, it is precisely gastralgias of this character which can be interpreted by an application of cocaine to the “gastric spot” discovered by him in the nose [the nasal “G spot”?] and which can be cured by cauterization of the same spot. (78)

Here is evidence, if we needed it, that Freud’s insistence that bisexuality is at the root of all cases of hysteria, including Dora’s, is, in fact, a reference to his own homoerotic love for Fliess that he can’t let go of: this reference to Fliess is retained in the published version of the case, which didn’t appear until 1905, a year after Freud’s last letter to Fliess.

Another letter appears explicitly in the manifest content of Dora’s second dream, in which she is walking about in a foreign and unknown town:

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Then I came to 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’ knowl-edge 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.” (94; in italics in the original)

Freud recognizes that this letter refers by a reversal to her own “suicide note”: in her fantasy of revenge, it was Father, not she, who has died. We further recognize that the episode of hid-ing the letter in Freud’s waiting room before the first dream is also a reference to the suicide note, since it involves arranging to have a concealed letter actually get revealed (like the Fliess letters themselves). Freud goes on to show that if Father is dead, this explains a final segment of the dream, added after the first telling of it, in which “she went calmly to her room, and began reading a big book that lay on her writing-table.” As we know, Dora liked to read forbidden books that contained information about sex, such as Mantegazza, anatomical textbooks, and ency-clopedias. If Father was dead, then she could read such books calmly without worrying about interruption, just as she could love whom she pleased. (Freud writes elsewhere in the case his-tory that one need not assume that someone with “perverse” sexual predilections, such as the taste for fellatio he attributes to Dora—but which, as I have indicated, also springs from his own fantasies about Fliess that are the major operative libidi-nal subtext in his mind—has gotten these ideas in his or her head from reading von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. May we deduce from this denial that Dora had in fact read Krafft-Ebing?—or at least that Freud had once done so himself with something more than purely academic interest?)

Bearing all that I have remarked upon in mind, I now want to put forward the following suggestion, which has probably al-ready occurred to many of you already. This has to do with the identity of the forbidden books that play such a role in Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s dream. We know from the dream of the botanical monograph in The Interpretation of Dreams of Freud’s own boyhood escapade of tearing up big books, of his love for monographs, and of the importance of encyclopedias as sources of taboo sexual knowledge in those bygone days. Again it feels more as if we are in Freud’s fantasy world than in Dora’s. But


now a suspicion begins to dawn on us: maybe Freud’s fantasy world is Dora’s fantasy world also. The two are so closely inter-woven that it becomes hard to tease them apart. Dora seems to know Freud’s mind and vice versa.

But how could that be? By suggestion? Thought transfer-ence? Universal archetypes of the collective unconscious? A much more likely explanation seems to me to present itself. If Dora had seen Freud at sixteen, and then come to live with the family of an aunt who knew Freud in Vienna; if, furthermore, she was a girl of lively intelligence who liked to read and attend lectures and occupy her mind as far as was possible within the strictures placed on young women in that time; if, finally, she was particularly eager to read about sexual matters; then what is more likely than that foremost among the “forbidden books about sex” that play such a prominent role in the case history are, in fact, none other than Freud’s own then newly minted works Studies on Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams, which Dora would very likely have known about (through either her aunt or her father, or both), obtained, been told not to read, and read anyway? She might then have woven these works and their provocative contents into an elaborate transference fan-tasy—or I would rather prefer to say “plan,” since in the event she succeeded in carrying it out—with which she arrived at Berggasse 19.

If that were so, then her plan of getting herself dragged to Freud’s office by Father, after planting a suicide note and stag-ing a fainting fit, would seem all that much more likely. But we still have to solve the mystery of what her intention would have been. Why would Dora want to present herself to the author of these controversial, brilliant, taboo, and (for the period) trans-gressively erotic works on hysteria and neurosis as a patient? It seems clear, of course, upon reflection, that if she were to go to Freud as a patient on a regular basis she would have to have her father’s approval as well as his financial support. Therefore, it would make sense to frighten him into taking her instead of seeking out Freud herself. But we still must discover why she wants to go to him so badly.

The answer to this question is supplied by the interpretive rule of thumb I have cited according to which the motives for an action are revealed by its consequences. So we must ask

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ourselves, what have been the actual consequences of Dora’s getting her father to bring her to the psychoanalyst/author Sigmund Freud? The answer is easily given: everyone in the educated world now not only knows who Dora is, but also knows this: that her mother was a neurotic and humorless Hausfrau; that her father was an exploitative, unprincipled narcissist; that Mr. K. was a child molester and despicable lout; and that Mrs. K. was an unscrupulous, though nonetheless attractive and lovable, seductress. Not only that, since the mid-seventies, the mainstream intellectual world has known, or at least thought it has known, that Sigmund Freud was a domineering, insensi-tive patriarchal tyrant masquerading as an empathic therapist, driven by his own sexual agenda and out to impose his perfervid fantasies on whatever unsuspecting innocents wandered into his consulting room. What is more, everyone now certainly knows that the vagina is not, as Freud thought, the only appropriate site of female sexual pleasure, but that the clitoris, the mouth, and plenty besides will do just fine in that regard; and that the idea of penis envy is just a denial of males’ anxiety (including Freud’s own) about their own feminine identifications. Every-body now knows, or takes it for granted, that psychoanalysis is not all it’s cracked up to be; and everybody knows that in a general way it has been and remains true of social life in our world that men dominate, use, and abuse women, who must resort to symptoms, guile, and ruses to survive in a masculine world. Everyone knows all this and much more. We know exactly who Dora was, who her father was, who her brother was, who Mr. and Mrs. K. were. And we definitely know that something was very rotten in the state of Austria-Hungary.

It is with this message that Dora hijacked the case history written by her doctor, and long after her lifetime spoke to a generation of people who found in her a model for a new way of conceiving of relations between men and women, and of thinking about whether sex is only a matter of heterosexual reproductive coupling. Freud’s letter to posterity, the Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, is at the same time more ac-curately Dora’s letter to posterity, in which she ventriloquizes Freud and makes him say to us something entirely other than what he intended, so that his discourse is truly the discourse of his Other.


Dora, I suggest, knew Freud as a talented writer who would listen to and understand her, and broadcast to the world her desperate message: “My parents are hypocrites! Mr. and Mrs. K. are unprincipled lechers! Yes, I have sexual thoughts and feelings, but so do they, and while I only fantasize about mine, they act on their impulses without scruples!” And indeed, this is what our patients want us to know, and what they would like us to tell the world, in the frequent fantasy that they will be written up as a classic case in the literature, just like Dora. But Dora really was written up. She is no longer her physical, his-torical self—she has become “Dora.” She sought out someone who would transcribe her story, her ostensible secret, and, like Edgar Allan Poe, blab it to the world at large, as indeed he did in the most exquisite, candid, persuasive, and ingenious prose it is possible to write. Through Freud, Dora attained the status of a deathless literary figure, an unmistakable and unavoidable part of our mental and cultural landscape today, the focus for the fury of outraged critics who continue to pour out their wrath at poor old Freud for having treated little Dora so badly. But if I am right then he didn’t treat her badly at all. He did exactly what she wanted him to do—he allowed her to speak through him to our generation. We, in our turn, have listened, and have been moved, for better or worse, and the world is a vastly different social space now because we have done so.

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ReferencesBreuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. 1895. Studies on Hysteria. S.E., vol. 2.Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. S.E., vols. 4 & 5.———. 1905. Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. S.E., 7:7–122.Lacan, Jacques. 1954–55. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory

and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Ed., Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Sylvia Toma-selli. New York:Norton. 1991.

———. 1956. Seminar on “The Purloined Letter.” Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. In Muller and Richardson, 1988, pp. 28–54.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, ed. and trans. 1985. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Muller, John P., and William J. Richardson, eds. 1988. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1844. The Purloined Letter. In Muller and Richardson, 1988, pp. 6–27.

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