Freud is very clear in noting that he approaches Dora’s story on the basis of the theory of hysteria that he previously elaborated with Breuer and according to which hysteria is the result of three factors: “a psychic trauma, a conflict of affects, and—an additional factor which I brought forward in later publications—a disturbance in the sphere of sexuality.” 16 The incident with Herr K seems to provide the psychic trauma. But this does not take us very far. The trauma itself would not have occurred were it not for other events that had transpired earlier in Dora’s childhood.
In the course of tracking these prior conditions Dora had told Freud of an incident with Herr K that had occurred when she was fourteen. On that occasion Herr K had arranged to meet Dora alone in his offices and when she appeared had kissed her passionately on the mouth.
This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached. But Dora had at that moment a violent feeling of disgust, tore herself free from the man, and hurried past him to the staircase and from there to the street door. She nevertheless continued to meet Herr K. Neither of them ever mentioned the little scene; and according to her account Dora kept it a secret till her confession during the treatment.
In this scene—second in order of mention, but first in order of time—the behavior of this child of fourteen was already entirely hysterical. I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable; and I should do so whether or not the person were capable of producing somatic symptoms. The elucidation of the mechanism of the reversal of affect is one of the most important and at the same time of the most difficult problems in the psychology of neurosis . 17
But not only does Dora suffer a reversal of affect; she also undergoes a displacement of sensation. For instead of experiencing “the genital sensation which would certainly have been felt by a healthy girl in such circumstances” Dora was overcome by disgust.
On the basis of these speculations “in accordance with certain rules ot symptom formation I have come to know,” 18 and given Dora’s recurring experience of a “sensory hallucination” in which she could still feel Herr K’s embrace upon the upper part of her body, and of a desire to avoid men in animated conversation with women, Freud develops the follow
ing reconstruction of the scene: During the embrace Dora felt Herr K s erection pressing against her. The experience was revolting and was repressed, replaced by the “innocent” sensation in her thorax, which was unusually intense due to its repressed source. In short, we have three transformations of an originally repressed erotic experience: the disgust which was a symptom of repression in the “erotogenic oral zone which had been overindulged in Dora’s childhood: the displacement of her own clitoral excitement to the sensation in her thorax; and the phobia in regard to men, which is a defense mechanism designed to ward off the repressed experience.
Once we have assimilated the unique combination of Freud’s ingenuity and fancy, we are next struck by the introduction of the mechanical paradigm—the separability of idea and affect, the transformation of this sexual energy from one state to another, reversed, displaced, and converted into bodily form. Freucl follows the line of analysis he set down as early as 1904 where he first suggested three possible avenues for repressed sexual energy: discharge into the body—conversion; continuation in the psychic sphere with resulting obsessions; or, if the affect attaches to other ideas, phobic reaction. 19
The point becomes even clearer if we pursue the derivation of disgust in more detail. In Freud’s reconstruction such feelings are originally a reaction to the smell and sight of excrement, which becomes connected with the genital which are reminders of these functions, particularly the penis, which is an organ of micturation—in fact, originally known only as such—as well as sexual function. Now if we put aside our skepticism as to precisely how, in Freud’s account, the originally pleasant excremental function is actually transformed into disgust without social factors playing the critical role, or how we can reconcile Freud’s insistence on the micturational function of the penis with its important sexual function in penis envy, etc., we are struck by the fact that the basis of the whole procedure appears to be the utilization of a simple associationist principle that carries us along a route of reversed, displaced, and converted associations from what Freud posits as the original experience to its present manifestations. But Freud notes that a “knowledge of the paths does not render less necessary a knowledge of the forces which actually travel along them.” 20 Concentrating on either paths or forces is likely to blind us to an important consideration, however,—that the only reason Freud invokes this notion in the first instance is his contention that “I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly unpleasurable.”
There are two points to be made about this suggestion: First, it is preposterous, totally ignoring any of the social circumstances to which Freud previously alluded as crucial to an understanding of Dora s situa
tion. And second, it is an instance of a dimension of Freud’s analysis that Fits neither the model of mechanical forces nor of intentional meanings. It is simply an example of Freud’s social convictions about human nature and a revealing gauge of their ideological status. The reductionism that leads Freud to interpret Dora’s disgust with Herr K as a refusal to acknowledge her sexual attraction is based on a prior view that reduces complex social experiences like the avoidance by an adolescent girl of the socially inappropriate sexual advances of a friend of her f ather to simple alterations of individual experience. In other words, between the mechanical force and the meaningful symptom stands a body of readily accepted social assumption, which not only mediates between these forces and meanings but establishes the necessity of their mediation and the condition that constitute the issue to be resolved.