Freud’s An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria has long attracted attention from psychoanalysts, since it deals with various interesting subjects such as representations of hysteria, the unconscious mind, the (counter-) transference phenomenon, and the castration complex. What is interesting in Freud’s case study is that Freud has chosen persons, places, and circumstances like a creative writer of fiction. Freud, as a middle-aged novelist, creates a young, beautiful, and intelligent female adolescent character named Dora in his writing of a case study of hysteria. However, it should be critically pointed out that Dora serves as the sexual Other for Freud during and after the treatment sessions, and Dora’s hysterical narrative, like a detective story, or more precisely, a cold case that remains unsolved, remains fragmentary and incomplete, forever a mystery to Freud, because of his unconscious sexism. Given this aspect, in this paper, I will examine in what ways Dora is fictionalized or characterized by Freud, and also discuss how Freud uses Dora and her hysterical narrative as fetish objects to spur his death drive. In other words, I will show that Freud’s treatments of Dora and her hysterical narrative belie Freud’s masculine desire for mastery over the feminine Other.
1. Introduction
2. Dora as the Sexual Object
3. Hysterical Narrative and Death Drive
4. Conclusion