Sta. Teresa's ecstasies can be understood as reverse hysteria. As the vision of God throws her into a divine swoon, the social/biological world is forgotten. Hysteria's mute language of local deadening spreads to her entire body, whose nullification in the apotheosis of its own repressed desires operates the conversion at the level of totality. It was not until the late 1880s that Freud began to reformulate this repressed dimension through his work on hysteria. In Stuart Schneiderman's formulation, "analysis was taught to Freud by hysterics."[1]

As the medical/mechanistic model of human reality was losing its hegemony over the European mind, strictly mental phenomena increasingly fascinated thinkers and researchers. Charcot's work with hypnosis was a bridge crossed by Freud on his way to formulating a general theory of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious modes.[2] Breuer and Freud, for example, based their early work on strategic differences of position from Binet and Janet, as the following demonstrates:

If it seems to us, as it does to Binet and Janet, that what lies at the centre of hysteria is a splitting off of a portion of psychical activity, it is our duty to be as clear as possible on this subject. It is only too easy to fall into a habit of thought which assumes that every substantive has a substance behind it which gradually comes to regard 'consciousness' as standing for some actual thing; and when we have become accustomed to make use metaphorically of spatial relations, as in the term 'sub- consciousness', we find as time goes on that we have actually formed an idea which has lost its metaphorical nature and which we can manipulate easily as though it was real. Our mythology is then complete. All our thinking tends to be accompanied and aided by spatial ideas, and we talk in spatial metaphors. . . . We shall be safe from the danger of allowing ourselves to be tricked by our own figures of speech if we always remember that after all it is in the same brain, and most probably in the same cerebral cortex, that conscious and unconscious ideas alike have their origin. How this is possible we cannot say. (St. Ed.: 2, pp. 227-28)

Through clinical experience, Breuer and Freud came up against observable phenomena for which medical science with its physicalist models did not provide an explanation. As they focused in tightly on the complex of symptoms known under the rubric "hysteria," the principle of difference emerged with compelling force. Thus, according to Ernst Kris, "Fliess's Aufstellung der Nasalen Reflexneurose rührte an eines der lebhaftesten Interessen Freuds, an das Problem der Differentialdiagnose hysterischer und somatischer Stölrungen, das Freud schon in Paris beschäftigt hatte." ("Fliess's conception of the nasal reflex neurosis touched on one of Freud's keenest interests, the problem of the differential diagnosis of hysterical and somatic disturbances, which Freud had already concerned himself with in Paris." HP; in Sigmund Freud, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse: Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, Abhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren 1887- 1902, London: Imago, 1950, p. 30). Here, Freud and Breuer begin by agreeing that hysteria is characterized by a "splitting off"; then in a dialectical turn, they shift to a linguistic analogy between what syntax dictates about the world of the signified, and how we think this splitting off as an image of the greater division between consciousness and unconsciousness; such a move is viewed in the earlier formulation with derision as "mythology." This then allows them to begin to establish a fresh position, "safe from the danger of allowing ourselves to be tricked by our own figures of speech". To finish the movement, the unavoidable spatial metaphor is indeed invoked; however, it proves unworkable: "How this is possible we cannot say." Indeed, the structural inability of expository syntax to "say" anything about the genesis of hysterical symptoms becomes a central concern at the dawn of psychoanalysis and of early modernism, which can be effectively viewed as coterminous efforts. Even as Freud failed to bring the analysis of Dora to completion, so failure becomes a constituting feature of modernism. [3] Language, then, was implicated almost from the beginning. This was Freud's real break with Charcot; although Charcot was assured "for all time. . . the fame of having been the first to explain hysteria,"[4] Rose aptly points out that Freud rejected Charcot's rigid physicalist-controlled model of hysteria.[5] Freud himself went so far as to see implicit relations between poetic language and schizophrenia. The "mechanism of creative writing is the same as that of hysterical phantasies."[6]

The first effort, then, was characterized by a rethinking of the relationship between soma and psyche with relation to the hysterical symptom (in our analysis, forms of spontaneous anaesthesia, or the conversion symptoms' body discourse unable to "say" anything sensible). On January 11, 1893, Freud addressed a meeting of the Vienna Medical Club, taking his position: ". . . dass die n&eum;chsten Gr&aum;de f&uaum;r die Entstehung hysterisicher Symptome auf dem Gebiete des psychischen Lebens zu suchen sind." (". . . that the immediate reasons for the development of hysterical symptoms are to be looked for in the sphere of the psychical life." St. Ed.: 3, p. 27). Breuer's experiences with Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim, a friend of Martha Bernays, Freud's wife[7]) had provided him with all the fuel he felt he needed to launch his attack on the unknown, in its manifestations in the damaged and buried psyche. [8] As a medical scientist, Freud felt compelled by his training to view the situation as a problem to be solved: "es war sozusagen der erste durchsichtig gemachte Fall von Hysterie [Anna O.]" ("we may say that it was the first case of hysteria [Anna O.] to be made intelligible." St. Ed.: 3, p. 30). I would like to place the emphasis here on sozusagen (we may say, so to say) and durchsichtig (intelligible, transparent). Whereas the clarity and resolution which Freud sought are felt in the language itself, descriptors being invoked to further this process, the impossibility of this course is sensed: sozusagen. One cannot say it directly, only approximately, through use of connotation, figures of speech, and the like. Thus, according to Michel de Certeau, "Freud opened up this perspective as early as the Studies on Hysteria (1895), with a gesture which joined the discovery of psychoanalysis with the necessity of betraying scientific discourse and of moving into the camp of the 'novelists' and 'poets'." [9]

Writing in 1900 (revisions thereafter) and basing himself on the one case of Dora (Freud wrote only five case histories), whose singularity he goes to great lengths to justify, Freud then advances his next observation, the connection of the symptom with an affect-laden experience: "hinter den meisten, wenn nicht hinter allen Phänomenen der Hysterie ein mit Affekt betontes Erlebnis steckt. . ." ("there is an affectively coloured experience behind most, if not all, phenomena of hysteria. . ." St. Ed.: 3, p. 30). This experience or series of experiences reveals itself during the analysis, the function of which it becomes to bring the patient into an awareness of these experiences so as to be able to unlock their hold. Freud goes on to say that "Es besteht eine volle Analogie zwischen der traumatischen Lähmung und der gemeinen, nicht traumatischen Hysterie." ("There is a complete analogy between traumatic paralysis and common, non-traumatic hysteria." St. Ed.: 3, pp. 30-31). The formulation is thereby broadened. Note, however, how Freud resorts to "Analogie" in his attempts to put into syntax an antithetical dimension. In an analogy, one detects a correspondence between things which are in other respects dissimilar. That is, analogy functions on a constituting basis of partial difference. An inference is drawn. Clearly the use of verbal language becomes all important both from the viewpoint of the clinician "working up" his data and from that of the analyst digging into the psyche. "Es besteht gleichsam eine Absicht, den psychischen Zustand durch einen körperlichen auszudrücken, und der Sprachgebrauch bietet hierfr die Brücke." ("It is as though there were an intention to express the mental state by means of a physical one, and linguistic usage affords a bridge by which this can be effected." St. Ed.: 3, p. 34). The body becomes site of the (sometimes a-syntactical) "sentences" (utterances) of the unconscious; at the same time, verbal language provides the means whereby the analyst can gain access to this unconscious: ". . . der Sprachgebrauch bietet hierfër die Bräcke." (". . . linguistic usage affords a bridge. . ."). However, even at this point Freud must make use of a metaphor.

The next move introduces the important theme of memory. ". . . so kommt eine Reihe von Erinnerungen über ihn." (". . . he will produce a series of memories" St. Ed.: 3, p. 35). These memories of course are unconscious patterns of energies which produce affective or neurological conflicts throughout the patient's body. Freud works backwards to the notion that the hysteric suffers from traumatic experiences which have not been "abreacted." He proceeds to detail how the initial experiences conceal earlier ones, whose origins are sexual in nature: ". . . kein hysterisches Symptom aus einem realen Erlebnis allein hervorgehen kann, sondern dass alle Male die assoziative geweckte Erinnerung an frühere Erlebnisse zur Verursachung des Symptoms mitwirkt" (". . . no hysterical symptom can arise from a real experience alone, but that in every case the memory of earlier experiences awakened in association to it plays a part in causing the symptom." St. Ed.: 3, p. 197), and ". . . endlich gelangt man unfehlbar auf das Gebiet des sexuellen Erlebens" (". . . in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience." St. Ed.: 3, p. 199), specifically triggered during puberty. [10] Freud repeats that the symptoms are intimately bound up with memory: ". . . hysterische Symptome immer nur unter der Mitwirkung von Erinnerungen entstehen. . ." (". . . hysterical symptoms can only arise with the co-operation of memories" St. Ed.: 3, p. 197). These complexes are further explored in Freud's writing; out of them came the rudiments of the psychoanalytic technique, since "Der Moment, in welchem der Arzt erfährt, bei welcher Gelegenheit ein Symptom zum ersten Male aufgetreten ist und wodurch es bedingt war, ist auch derjenige, in dem dieses Symptom verschwindet." ("The moment at which the physician finds out the occasion when the symptom first appeared and the reason for its appearance is also the moment at which the symptom vanishes." St. Ed.: 3, p. 35). This of course presumes that that same moment is shared by the patient, assuming a coterminous coming to awareness with the expression in language of the experience. The full power and workings of transference are not yet grasped, possibly accounting for Freud's failure with Dora, a failure of seemingly endless interest for scholars interested in debunking Freud's supposed sexism.[11] In this connection, on men theorizing about hysteria, note the following: "Men, Mark Kann points out, tend to detach themselves from woman's violence and 'hysteria,' especially when it is directed against male rationality and domination. Men know (that is, can theorize envision, overlook, oversee) what feminine 'hysteria' is about. They believe it is an untheorized practice, an unconscious rage that has not been elevated to theoretical consciousness and thereby controlled. . . Male theoretical detachment in the face of feminine 'hysteria' is, like all theory that succeeds always in balancing all the equations, simply a less evident form of hysteria and violence. And 'female' hysteria might be a 'rational,' therapeutic, and potentially revolutionary form of violence." [12]

I have attempted to trace some high points of Freud's early meditations on hysteria as he was working out the techniques of psychoanalysis and its foundation in a conception of the relation of the conscious and unconscious modes. Of perhaps greater interest, however, is the parallel, embedded tale which Freud's structures of expression tell. Some of these I have pointed out above, that is, his reliance upon figures of speech and qualifiers such as sozusagen. As well, implicit in Freud's thinking is the audience to whom his address was directed, the Vienna Medical Club. "Meine Herren" he frequently repeats, establishing the proper sociolinguistic relationship between address and adressee. This is a man speaking to men, and what about? About women, specifically women with mysterious symptoms of local deadening, vomiting, anorexia, convulsions, and so on, which it has become the business of the project to track down to their presumed single (monolingual) source. A linguistic model, then, hypostatizes the presence of a speaker, implying an underlying identity or subjectivity which it becomes the goal of an analysis to bring into functionality. This, however, cannot be, as the paradox is structurally built into psychoanalysis. Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory and subsequent formulation of the Oedipus complex stemmed from his realization that "fantasy" and "reality" are dialectically related, ruling out an originary position for one or the other.[13] The form which the discourse then assumes, as I have indicated, is that of the empirical science of Freud's day: a drive for understanding, reason, and clarity, for a world in which everything makes sense, even the senseless or unthinkable relations between being and nonbeing receiving their grid-point within this grander scheme of things.

That this was a doomed ambition was even then implicit in Freud's address, as his reliance upon figurative language indicates. There can be no logically necessary and hierarchically related connections between such language and that of syntax and control. Other evidence is readily at hand. In the trajectory traced by the "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905 [1901]), we see Freud moving further away from the sterilized, idealized discourse of the master model in which he had been so well trained by Brentano, Meynert, and Brücke.[14] As if by way of introduction to the "tale" itself, Freud offers a long defense for the necessity of secrecy, or "the duty of medical discretion." (St. Ed.: 7, p. 8). Again, the audience is made up of men, the moral sensitivities of whose wives and daughters Freud is implicitly and elaborately pretending to protect through this excursus. Now secrecy is the domain of the unconscious itself. Freud will even filter the experience further, he assures his audience, through publication in a "streng wissenschaftlichen Fachjournal. . ." ("purely scientific and technical periodical. . ." St. Ed.: 7, p. 8). This flatters the listeners, suggesting that their professional code cannot be deciphered by a lay audience; it also suggests access to a greater degree of truth. The unstated masculine bond upon which patriarchal scientific culture is based is thereby reaffirmed. In terms of plot motivation, these and other references function to build suspense; what will this shocking revelation be? Freud goes on to use the term "Schlüsselroman" ("Roman a clef" St. Ed.: 7, p. 9); by implication, his tale will be difficult for the lay reader to unlock[15] because he is going to such lengths to disguise the main character's social identity, a curiously revealing ruse given that the goal of the analysis was to establish this identity. Thus he finds himself resorting to aesthetic and other non-scientific categories. As a final defense for his approach, he says, "Die Niederschrift ist demnach nicht absolut phonographisch getreu, aber sie darf auf einen hohen Grad von Verlässlichkeit Anspruch machen." ("the record is not absolutely phonographically exact, but it can claim to possess a high degree of trustworthiness" St. Ed.: 7, p. 10). After all, Freud did not have a tape recorder during the sessions; to a certain degree, he may therefore have been fashioning the parts to make the story develop smoothly. Still, it is, he assures us, highly reliable.

After these rather amazing provisos, Freud's analysis takes an even more astounding turn. "Nehmen Sie an, ein reisender Forscher käme in eine wenig bekannte Gegend." ("Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region." St. Ed.: 3, p. 192). Here he drops all pretense to scientific objectivity and frankly uses structures heretofore reserved for literary purposes.[16] This sounds almost like the opening of the Divine Comedy. We are introduced to an extended metaphor, and running throughout the essay is the notion of the journey over difficult terrain in search of the origin of hysterical symptoms.[17] Freud, however, will guide us, and indeed the whole demonstration has something of the staged quality of Bernini's revelation of the Piazza Navona monument to the Pope, as if the narrator were withholding the denouemment until its proper (i.e., most dramatically astounding) moment; how one comes on the "truth," therefore, is as important as the truth itself. Performance implicates the observer (Freud or the reader), in this important example of the method which Freud learned from Brentano, namely, granting a role to psychic contents through performing the experiment on himself (cf. "On Coca"). ". . . der Weg von den Symptomen der Hysterie zu deren Ätiologie is langwieriger und führt über andere Verbindungen, als man sich vorgestellt hätte." (". . . the path from the symptoms of hysteria to its aetiology is more laborious and leads through other connections than one would have imagined" St. Ed.: 3, p. 193). Place the emphasis here on vorgestellt ("imagined"). But fear not, as the goal will be reached, if we can but entrust ourselves to the guide (who is pretending to defer to the "facts"). "Sie erraten es wohl, meine Herren, dass ich jenen letzten Gedankengang nicht so weit ausgesponnen hätte, wenn ich Sie nicht darauf vorbereiten wollte, dass er allein es ist, der uns nach so vielen Verzögerungen zum Ziele führen wird." ("You will no doubt have guessed, Gentlemen, that I should not have carried this last line of thought so far if I had not wanted to prepare you for the idea that it is this line alone which, after so many delays, will lead us to our goal." St. Ed.: 3, p. 202). This quite remarkably identifies the coming upon the goal with the spinning of the tale. In spite of the bravado with which Freud pulls all this off, as matters were to develop the analysis was abruptly terminated by Dora on December 31, 1900; that is, the aesthetic resolution which occurs when matter and manner succcessfully blend in the voice of the first-person narrator is damaged when the analysis is broken off (when "reality" asserts itself). This act on Dora's part may have been one of vengeance against the analyst for his tacit complicity with her father, Herr K., and Frau K.[18] However, since the case is being written up after its interruption, and since its fragmentary nature has been made structural, the discrepancy between signifier (Ida Bauer's inner life as revealed through her words to her analyst) and signified (the tale constructed of these words) does not prove a difficulty; what we have, what we are being provided with, is only the story, or as de Certeau puts it, "His manner of treating hysteria transforms his manner of writing. It is a metamorphosis of discourse."[19]

I have tried to show how Freud's early thinking/expression moved rather quickly from the hypothetically transparent syntax of scientific discourse to a denser, figure-laden language in which we are brought from the failed Enlightenment enterprise back down into the dimension of history, specifically the flawed time of hysterical suffering in which figure and ground are intertextually related. This is precisely, I would argue, what constituted the precipitation of psychoanalysis between 1890 and 1905. Through this discipline (and specifically through its genesis out of hysteria), western thinking was returned to the repressed experiences (including the repression of the Mother) which had permitted it to constitute itself in the first place. It is only in this sense, then, that hysteria can be said to be a "period" illness, as Jameson on Lacan indicates: "'hysteria puts us, so to speak (cf. Freud's sozusagen above!), on the track of a certain original sin of psychoanalysis,' by which he evidently means the relationship of this 'science' to its historical situation. . . Hysteria in this sense may be understood as a historically new feature of the more general phenomenon of reification."[20] True, but such an observation may be made about any of the classical mental aberrations. The "original sin" of psychoanalysis was not its fascination with hysteria (we only "see" the symptoms) but with the causes, which lead Freud out of safe science and into the dangerous forest.

This forest, it has been suggested, was the transference effect which Freud was unaware of soon enough for him to be able to account for its workings in his treatment of Ida Bauer. Once transference and countertransference are recognized, goes the argument, then the analysis can proceed with greater certainty of success. However, my interest is not in the course of therapy but in Freud's happening on a dimension of experience which is antithetical to how discourse categorizes. In order for the discussion to proceed, then, a new "turn" is necessary, namely, the dialectical- process relationship which Lacan has formulated. "For 'truth' is the name of that ideal movement which discourse introduces into reality. Briefly, psychoanalysis is a dialectical experience" ("Intervention of Transference," in Bernheimer, p. 93). Out of this new constitution, a lopsided tension drags the hysteric back from a fuller engagement with life. Lacan pushes hysteria as a category beyond the predominantly therapeutic uses which Freud made of it.[21] The former's interest, building on the bipartite structure of transference as a locus of the unknown and the unknowable, finally coheres with Freud's preoccupations in that it attempts to comprehend hysteria through redefining it. The terms of the redefinition, of course, build on those of Freud. "But it can happen that women too are soulful in love [amour-euses], that is to say, that they soul for the soul. What on earth could this be other than this soul for which they soul in their partner, who is none the less homo right up to the hilt, from which they cannot escape? This can only bring them to the ultimate point (ultimate not used gratuitously here) of hysteria, as it is called in Greek, or of acting the man, as I call it, thereby becoming, they hoot, hommosexual or outsidesex."[22] Lacan's rejection of a position outside sex, even (especially) for the hysteric, must be read in the above context as an ironic retelling of Freud's tale.[23] Metaphor[24] and figuration open the gap, effect the cut,[25] so that Lacan can go on in a characteristically self-implicating move to involve himself directly in the formulations: "The truth, he said, was that he was a perfect hysteric; he added that a perfect hysteric is one without symptoms," and "the only way to talk about a perfect hysteric is theatrically."[26]

This reintroduces Bernini's stagey baroque effects as seen in the iconography of Sta. Teresa's hysterically mute statements in marble of the death of identity, sexual and social. When Debord speaks of the spectacle, we know we are finally lost in the dream-like driftings of modernism: "The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time," and "The historical time which invades art expressed itself first of all in the sphere of art itself, starting with the baroque. Baroque is the art of a world which has lost its center: the last mythical order, in the cosmos and in terrestrial government, accepted by the Middle Ages the unity of Christianity and the phantom of an Empire has fallen."[27] Hysteria as a period disease of reminiscences, then, leads from the late nineteenth-century crumbling ruins of reason's grand structures in idealist and analytic philosophy as well as the bankrupt "foundations" of the so-called hard sciences out of such discourse altogether. The story changes: Word becomes image directly.

Notes

1 Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 58.

2 "Freud's stay in Paris and his contact with Charcot had the effect of focusing his professional interest on hysteria, and this subject provided an ideal vehicle for exploring further that border area Brentano had pointed to between the physical and psychological sides of mental life." William J. McGrath, Freud's Discovery of Hysteria: The Politics of Hysteria. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 151.

3 ". . . it ["Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905 [1901])] is about a kind of failure". Steven Marcus, "Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History," in Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds. In Dora's Case: Freud Hysteria Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 57.

4 Freud, in McGrath, p. 159.

5 "Perhaps we should remember here that Freud's work on hysteria started precisely with a rejection of any simple mapping of the symptom onto the body (Charcot's hysterogenic zones). By so doing he made of hysteria a language (made it speak) but one whose relation to the body was decentered, since if the body spoke it was precisely because there was something called the unconscious that could not." Jacqueline Rose, "Dora: Fragment of an Analysis," in Bernheimer and Kahane, p. 138.

6 "And since such figuration, as Freud noted in 1897, has much in common with hysterical fantasies ("The mechanism of poetry [creative writing] is the same as that of hysterical phantasies" St. Ed: II: p. 256), one might argue that Freud's ambivalence about the literary aspect of his work reflects his uneasy awareness of his own hysterical potential." Charles Bernheimer, "Introduction Part One", in Bernheimer, p. 11. Note also, "It is no coincidence that at this stage it is schizophrenia that is invoked as frequently as hysteria, since the relation between schizophrenia and poetic discourse is a recognized and accredited one within psychoanalysis." Rose, in Bernheimer, p. 137.

7 Freud, Letters, p. 41. Incidentally, although it predated Freud's experiences with Dora, this spectacularly failed case resembles the latter in that neither was brought to conclusion at least in part because of a lack of understanding of the powerful effects of transference and negative countertransference (see note 18 below).

8 "It was the experience inaugurated with this hysterical patient that led them to the discovery of the pathogenic event known as the traumatic experience." Jacques Lacan, Speech and Psychoanalysis, Baltimore: Johns Hopkin University Press, 1968, p. 16.

9 Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press, 1986, p. 51.

10 Freud of course went on to generalize this discovery: "Den entscheidenden Fund, dass der Mechanismus der Angstneurose 'in der Ablenkung der somatischen Sexualerregung vom Psychischen und einer dadurch verursachten abnormen Verwendung dieser Erregung' bestehe, kleidete Freud in die Formel 'Der Neurotische Angst ist umgesetzte sexuelle Libido'." ("The deciding discovery, that the mechanism of the anxiety neuroses 'consists of the linking of the physical sexual excitation to the psychic and thereby causing abnormal expenditure of this excitement,' Freud formulated as 'Neurotic anxiety is transmuted sexual libido.'" HP). Kris, pp. 30-31.

11 See Maria Ramas, "Freud's Dora, Dora's Hysteria," in Judith L. Newton, et al., Sex and Class in Women's History, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983; Hèléne Cixous, Portrait de Dora, Paris, 1976; Toril Moi, "Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud's Dora," Feminist Review, 9(1981), 60-73; Jacqueline Rose, "Dora: Fragment of an Analysis," m/f, 2(1978), 5-21; Hannah Decker, "Freud and Dora: Constraints on Medical Progress," Journal of Social History, 14(1981); Ann Kaplan, "Feminist Approaches to History, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, in Sigmund Freud's Dora," Millenium Film Journal, (November, 1980).

12 Michael Hopkins, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, p. 121.

13 "Hysteria thus is implicated in psychoanalysis in the sense that the science enfolds the disease within it and is constituted simultaneously with this pathological interiority. Yet psychoanalysis contests this originary implication, insisting on its scientific authority and asserting mastery over hysteria as the illness of the other typically of the feminine other." Bernheimer, p. 1.

14 McGrath, pp. 135 ff.

15 On the metaphor of locks and keys, see Jane Gallop, "Keys to Dora," in her The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

16 For an interesting if somewhat narrowly focused early analysis of this case history as a literary text, see Steven Marcus, "Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History," Partisan Review (Winter 1974).

17 Wilden notes the frequency of the journey motif in Lacan and Hegel: ". . . constant references to the journey of consciousness in the face and company of what is other in the Hegelian Phenomenology . . ." Anthony Wilden, "Translator's Introduction," in Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, p. xii.

18 Maria Ramas, "Freud's Dora, Dora's Hysteria," in Bernheimer and Kahane, pp. 173-74. Also, Freud confessed, "I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time." St. Ed.: 7, p., 118.

19 p. 19.

20 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, p. 62.

21 "It would appear that Lacan's crime was to have been unfaithful to hysteria, to have tried to move the psychoanalytic enterprise in a different direction." Schneiderman, p. 59.

22 Feminine Sexuality, ed. by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, New York: Norton, 1985, p. 156. Schneiderman phrases this as "The hysteric's question is: Am I a man or a woman?" (p. 59).

23 None of this makes any sense, needless to say, if removed from the context of Lacan's orders of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, as well as his notion of the distinction between the phallus/law and the biological sex organ. "Lacan's writings abound with the promotion of what he calls the Imaginary order (perception, hallucination, and their derivatives) and its distinction from what he calls the Symbolic order (the order of discursive and symbolic action) and the Real. This distinction is derived from the phase of childhood which Lacan calls the stade du miroire: the primary alienation of the infans from "himself" and his subsequent discovery of his Self." Wilden, in Lacan, Speech and Psychoanalysis, pp. xii-xiii.

24 ". . . metaphor. . . the synonym for the symbolic displacement brought into play in the symptom." Ibid., p. 22.

25 Lacan, "Sign, Symbol, Imaginary," in Marshall Blonsky, ed. On Signs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, p. 203. In this same essay Lacan makes the crucial assertion that "the unconscious is the condition of linguistics" (p. 205), conceivably a reversible proposition.

26 Schneiderman, p. 16.

27 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983, np.