Hello lovely people of cyber space! I have not blogged since before the break, so I am very excited to be posting some jumbled thoughts on the case study, ‘Dora’. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what to make of it, and I can’t figure out exactly why we are reading it this week, but it does stir up many feelings and thoughts as I read it.
Firstly, Freud deals with some pretty taboo subjects in his era that most people had avoided up until this point. For this reason, my respect level for Freud goes up a few notches. On the subject of taboos, It flabbergasts me that certain assumptions are made of poor Dora through the case study. For one, what kind of person assumes that teenage Dora wants anything to do with Herr K, a middle aged, nasty, married dude. It is pretty grotesque, in my opinion, to assume that Dora wants anything to do with him, let alone have consensual sex. To me, this is a huge red flag that leads to an answer for her hysteria. I see her as a rape victim. Not only a rape victim, but also betrayed by her father by him allowing these things to go on. Gross.
Okay, also, it just seems like everyone is so checked out of her life: her mother is lost in her own OCD house cleaning world, her father is off gallivanting with a married woman, and Dora is being harassed by that woman’s husband. If I were her, I would feel pretty manic too.
So these are my first impressions of this book, I’m sure more will be explained and connected in lecture, and I look forward to ‘psychoanalyzing’ Freud a bit more too.
Good point about him dealing with taboo subjects. Definitely. Not only the obvious ones, but also even just the idea that children aren’t born with a destiny to become masculine or feminine, but that this is a process that occurs in part due to one’s experiences in childhood. And the idea that hysteria and other neuroses might be caused by repressed feelings, desires, fantasies or memories was entirely new too.
Why are we reading it this week? The short answer is that it’s starting a new remake/remodel cycle in that several of the authors we’re reading later take Freud’s views and either revise them, put them into new contexts, or question them directly. It’s not that he really fits with what has gone previously, at least not directly, but rather that later texts fit with this one!