Artificial Stratification

Sigmund Freud still commands a strong audience despite the dated nature of his analyses. His case study, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, particularly embodies this problem in the divergent fashions he dealt with Dora’s illness. The main consists of finding a huge number of potential symbolic connections he spun around her behavior and dreams. Only his technique shines through to assist the frail, yet challenging woman under his care. His therapy fails to capture Dora because his brush with therapy is almost always subsumed by his interpretive indentification of problems.

Freud brooks no facts in his all-consuming quest for relating Dora’s dreams and memories to his paradigm. Dora relays she saw a painting of nymphs the day before Herr K’s fateful proposal. Freud gives so much significance to the recollection of nymphs in conjunction with her second recurring dream that Freud ‘discovers’ a new sin that Dora has no memory of:

“ ‘Nymphae’ as is known to physicians but not to laymen (and even by the former the term is not very commonly used), is the name given to the labia minora […]. But anyone who employed such technical terms as ‘vestibulum’ and ‘nymphae,’ must have derived his knowledge from […] an encyclopedia – the common refuge of youth when it is devoured by sexual curiosity. […] [One of her symptoms] must have been inflicted as a result of a process of displacement, after another occasion of more guilty reading had become associated with this one; and the guilty occasion must lie concealed in her memory behind the contemporaneous innocent one.” (91, 94).

Freud commits a plethora of fallacies in the above passage. The translator notes that the german word for nymph and the anatomical term he prefers are the same. Rather than rely on a word association supplied by Dora, Freud uses his ‘not very common’ knowledge to supply the preferred meaning. Nymphs populate many paintings depicting woods because the Greeks considered them wood spirits. Very likely, the artist titled the painting and included the term Nymphs. Instead, Freud commits his most common error: projecting his interpretation onto Dora. The exclusive term implies, to him, that she browsed an encyclopedia for names of the genitals and other sexual topics. Strangely, this trounces his earlier discovery that Dora’s governess and Frau K spoke candidly on sexual topics. Their influence was no small import in earlier interpretations and Freud even made a game of testing how much she knew. In light of his turn of phrase, the likely vocal communication might have supplied the hypothetical connection. But, Dora denies having read the encyclopedia for more than learning about appendicitis. Freud considers this no obstacle because the memory is repressed, unconscious. Manufacturing an event based on his interpretation of a word exposes a deep hypocracy in Freud’s method. He regards his interpretation as the only possible one of the word and its source, necessitating the repression. Another interpretation exists – wood nymphs – and makes his conclusion less likely by half. The patient’s testimony oftentimes serves as little more than grist for relating their lives to his paradigm about the tripartite self.

Freud succeeds primarily when he subsumes his wish fulfillment to the gritty task of therapy. One fashion this occurs is in his reliance on the Socratic method. Very often, Freud led the session by asking Dora to relate her thoughts on particular feelings or dreams. Before he received the recurring dreams, he generally treated her relationships with her family and the K family. Eventually, this inspires her to take on the task of understanding herself outside his paradigm. “For some time Dora herself had been raising a number of questions about the connection between some of her actions and the motives that presumably underlie them.” (86). Of course, she is more interested in conventional motivations rather than infantile prototypes for her symptoms. She weighs the different motives behind waiting and then revealing Herr K’s proposal. Freud, in contrast, complains of lingering surprise at her “having felt so deeply injured” (87). On the face, these mark the difference between the behavioralist and psychoanalytic schools of psychology. Her focus concerns how her conscious – yet contemporarily inattentive – thoughts propelled her various decisions. Freud insists that all important factors reside in the unconscious. Her id’s unquestionable acceptance is buried underneath three or four unconscious resorts to sensory transference, the reinvigoration of her Electra complex, and so on. Nevertheless, these tangential objections have evidently expanded her self-awareness. Her perception of the complex relationships around her show intelligence, but she failed to turn the searchlight upon herself. At Freud’s insistence, Dora admits that her own illness may have been learned through imitating her father and cousin’s illness and finding the technique effective. There is no question that a great portion of our personalities come from the earliest experiences. Freud argues most effectively when he strays from finding parallels to his own thought in favor of values Dora actually holds.

Much as Freud deviates from expectations, his approach in this and other therapies show a marked improvement over his peer’s approach to understanding neurological disorders. Despite centuries of classifying hysteria as a female exclusive disease, Freud stood with his mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot, in recognizing cases of male hysteria. In this fashion, both considered a disease as a collection of symptoms independent of any particular victim. He erred, however, by substituting an inherited paradigm for another inferred from unrepresentative cases. While studying people to understand general human behavior makes sense, Freud’s enduring theories came from strikingly idiosyncratic sufferers. This ironic inclination to distance himself from the (less afflicted) patients actually under his care explains why Freud’s greatest satisfaction came during the penultimate session. Then, he stood agape that Dora completely missed the significance of his connection of her infant foot dragging and an expectation that she should be pregnant. In contrast, the final session moved her as he showed her how she likely identified herself with the scorned maid that her father abused. Freud could only have resolved Dora’s problems by resisting the desire to flaunt his ideology and concentrating on her problems.