Why I Hate Women (and a brief section on why I love them)

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Freud’s treatment of Dora began in 1900 and lasted a year; five years later he published “Fragment of Analysis in a Case of Hysteria.” This case proved to be essential in Freud’s development of his concept of transference. He believed that within treatment it was essential that a hysteric transfer her attachment to the original subject (in this case her father (imagine!)) to the therapist analyzing her. She also had developed an attachment to a paternal aunt, whose symptoms Freud concluded Dora identified with and eventually adopted. These symptoms (difficulty breathing, depression, avoidance of contact with others, fainting spells, and loss of voice) were all triggered by sexual advances made on her by a family friend (Herr K), which both Herr K and her father denied as imagined. She was disgusted by these advances which included both kissing her and pressing his erect penis against her. After this, her father commenced an affair with Herr K’s wife. Dora saw herself as bartered off to Herr K in exchange.

This is where the feminist allegations against Freud begin. Freud became convinced that Dora was secretly pleased by his acts, and while acting as babysitter to Herr K’s children displaced her affection for the older man onto his kinder. Another important detail about Dora’s father was the diminishment of his sexual faculties. Freud assumes that Dora made the assumption that her father was being orally stimulated by Frau K (Dora “expressed the violent call of the oral erotic drive when Dora was left alone with Frau K there being no need for him to assume she had seen her father receiving fellatio when everyone knows that cunnilingus is the artifice most commonly adopted by rich men when their powers begin to fail them”). This was the source of her oral symptoms (the site of sexual gratification for the woman was her throat- that’s right Miss Lovelace you were seventy years too late). The story closes with female sexual submission as being interchangeable with the feminine pleasure principle, and Freud as Dora’s therapeutic baby-sitter. Freud concludes that Dora should open up about her erotically charged feelings for her father and shift them onto Herr K as a safe substitute.

As an aside, Haneke’s White Ribbon makes way more sense after reading this case study.

Lacan opens up by stating that “what happens in an analysis is that the subject, strictly speaking, is constituted through a discourse to which the presence of the psychoanalyst, prior to any intervention he may make, brings the dimension of dialogue”. He continues by stating that “truth is the name of the ideal moment that this discourse introduces into reality…psychoanalysis is a dialectical experience, and this notion should prevail when raising the question of the nature of transference”. Drawing on his early statements in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, not only does the patient construct the imaginary form of the analyst (one can see a discussion of the Big Other coming up here), but the analyst too imparts the status of subject onto the patient. This lending of subject-hood occurs prior to intervention, is somehow part and parcel with the symbolic agreement to begin therapy, rather than a result of therapy itself. Lacan imparts an interesting aside later in this section to discuss a “new type of alienation of man” that “will come into being as much through the efforts of a collective belief as through the activity of selecting techniques with all the formative scope of ritual”. This part is both extremely interesting, and almost entirely unintelligible. What I believe he means is that the particular power invested into therapists, allows for a potential scope of damage they are capable of committing due to the patients reliance on them in the discursive process that constitutes therapy.

Lacan states that he chose the case of Dora to focus on transference because it represented “the first case in which Freud recognized that the analyst plays a part”. Then Lacan does something wonderful. He clearly organizes his seminar in a series of dialectical reversals. I will replicate this structure for you, here.

First Development: Dora tests Freud to see if he is as hypocritical as her father. She then reveals that she feels that by her father initiating an affair with Herr K’s wife he is in effect giving her up to Herr K. Dora then tells Freud “All of this is factual, being based on reality and not on my own will. What’s to be done about it”.

A first dialectical reversal:

Freud says, “Look at your own involvement,” he tells her, “in this mess you complain of”. Lacan compares this Hegel’s critique of the beautiful soul. Here someone might accuse Lacan of the same misogyny that is evident in Freud.  However, I believe he should be analyzed more tolerantly. Lacan even distances himself from Freud’s allegations of Dora’s love for Herr K, implicating Freud’s homosexual counter transference (!).  He is not stating that the actions that occurred were her fault. He is stating that she got some measure of enjoyment from it, but that is not stating that what Herr K did was ethical. Instead, he gave her what she really wanted and in that he performed an unethical act.  For Dora, as for all women, “the problem of her condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as a man’s object of desire”. What he is saying is that there was an aspect of her character that repressed the information from her father. This silence does not indicate acquiescence, nor does it simply indicate shame. She was in some way acting to preserve her father’s affair and Herr K’s reputation until a mysterious instigating moment when she finally reported what had happened, was then reprimanded by her father for it, and subsequently begun to develop symptoms.

Zizek states that Freud’s view on rape is that, “it has such a traumatic impact not simply because it is a case of brutal external violence, but also because it touches on something disavowed in the victim”. He quotes Freud as stating “if what the subject longs for most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality they none the less flea from it”. This is because “the core of our fantasy is unbearable to us”. Within the subject there are unwanted wants that if brought to the attention of the subject by another result in a breakdown in the constitution of the subject, the silencing of the subject, and with that silencing comes the emergence of the symptom. If the unconscious is the other’s language, than the symptom is our other language. Not to perform a rhetorical trick that minimizes the destruction wreaked by sexual abuse, but the therapist can learn something from this that extends beyond the travails of rape victims to those of other patients. If a therapist exposes the patient too quickly to the real of their desires, they will not only deny them but they are also at risk for another more dangerous breakdown. Lacan contends that it is the therapist’s role to stand in place of the big other, but also to always evade the patient. The analyst participates by questioning and not by mandates. The ultimate goal of analysis is to show the patient that the big other does not exist, and allow them to discover their own authentic desire removed from the super-ego command. This is where the dangers of therapy lie. A therapist who simply commands the patient to act a certain way does not allow the patient to realize their own desires, but instead adopt those of the analyst. If an analyst simply pushes normative behavior the patient will adopt that behavior but remain alienated from their desire. Their behavior after therapy will be seen by them as a farce or drag and their psychological problems will be dangerously pushed farther under the surface to reemerge as symptoms more evocative and more damaging than those that landed them on the analyst couch.

That is why the hysteric is a perfect patient. The hysteric knows that the subject is split, that their desires are another’s, their rapid vacillation between opposing points of a view show desire at its starkest, their fundamental alienation from power and their inability to truly embody their beliefs is a specific condition that emulates the human one. Hysteria is a woman’s disease, but it is also a feminine position that cuts through the posturing of masculine self-assurance. We are all castrated, and it is the woman who knows it. Women see themselves only as reflected in the eyes of the other. It is the greatest joke of psychology that men do as well yet, for the most part remain ignorant of it. I think, for me at least, that is why the Mona Lisa smiles.

A Second Development of Truth:

Dora’s silence and complicity reveals her own work in perpetuating the affair between her and Herr K. This reveals the fact that “she is caught up in a subtle circulation of precious gifts which serves to make up for a deficiency in sexual services”. Dora is attracted to her father and in some way once to preserve his relationship with the K family (especially Frau K). She doesn’t see his impotence, as a detriment; instead she associates it with his wealth.  Dora turns against her father’s affair suddenly. (remember that in the beginning she liked Frau K). Then Freud,

Second Dialectical Reversal

Freud shows that she’s jealous because she is attracted to her father.

A Third Development of Truth

Dora associates femininity with a passive oral drive and adopts symptoms mimicking this. Lacan concludes by stating that the nexus of treatment is Dora’s identification with Frau K and her conception of femininity, rather than Freud’s emphasis on her attraction to Herr K.

Lacan concludes with the thesis that “transference is nothing real in the subject if not the appearance, at a moment of stagnation in the analytic dialectic, of the permanent modes according to which she constitutes her objects”. Transference is precisely the resistance of the psychoanalytic process that arises from the disparity of the subject’s constitution of the object from that of the therapist’s.  The only analytic neutrality one can hope for is derived from “the position of the pure dialectician, who, knowing that all that is real is rational knows that all that exists including the evil against which he struggles, is and shall always be equivalent to the level of its particularity, and that the subject only progress through the integration he arrive at of his position into the universal: technically speaking, through the projection of his past into a discourse in the process of becoming”.

	Lauren is a mortuary science student, an optimist (she'd have to be), a post-traumatic Marxist, and a recalcitrant Jew, who most regularly can be found at her local Starbucks checking her online dating profile. If lattes make her a monster, she'll order a veinte.

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1. ‘Kant with Sade’: The Law with Desire
2. Beyond the Reality Principle
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