Synopses & Reviews
This anthology of twelve stimulating articles place Dora's case at the center of the contemporary debate about the role of sexual difference in interpretation. The essays raise such controversial issues in psychoanalysis as the relative importance of the oedipal father and the preoedipal mother, the function of transference and countertransference, and the Lacanian emphasis on the psychic analysis of linguistic structure. More broadly, they suggest a critique not only of Freud's assumptions about the nature of femininity and female desire but also of still-pervasive culutural expectations regarding the relation of gender to power. Finally, many of the essays analyze the particularly literary qualities of Freud's writing, showing, for example, how his brilliant use of modernist narrative strategies threatens to undermine the scientific status of his inquiry and to subject his text to his own diagnosis of hysteria. Full of intricate twists and turns, Dora exposes Freud as revealing more than he knows and thus becoming a central character in this drama that escapes his control.
About the Author
Charles Bernheimer is Professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of
Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France and
Flaubert and Kafka: Studies on Psychopoetic Structure.
Claire Kahane is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo and co-editor of a volume of feminist psychoanalytic essays, The M[O]ther Tongue.