Dreaming for Freud (18 page)

A
N
I
NTRODUCTION
TO
D
REAMING
FOR
F
REUD

“Now he will pin her down with his pen like a butterfly on the page for posterity”
.

In October 1900, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl begins therapy with Dr. Sigmund Freud. Formerly healthy and robust, she is now hobbled by unexplained physical ailments. At forty-four, the ambitious doctor has already achieved some modest recognition for his studies into the human mind, albeit less than he desires. Their sessions last only three months, but both Freud and the girl—whom he calls “Dora” when he publishes his case study—will be forever changed by their brief time together.

At first, the young girl dismisses Freud as another member of Vienna’s well-to-do Jewish bourgeoisie.
“How could such a boring, middle-aged man, with his silly pinstriped pants . . . understand the strange story she has to tell?”
. Moreover, other doctors have subjected her to painful and humiliating treatments and she isn’t eager for more. Freud’s interest in her is twofold. His recent book on dream interpretation was not the success he expected, and
“His critics have accused him of not giving verifiable examples to back up his theories. Perhaps this patient . . . will provide some”
. Freud, with a large family to support and a dwindling clientele, desperately needs the money her wealthy father will pay him.

For his part, her father seeks more than his daughter’s return to health from her sessions with Freud. She has accused a family friend of forcing unwanted attentions upon her and, in turn, accused her father of attempting to trade her favors to this man so that her father can continue his own affair with the man’s wife. Her father insists that she is lying and wants Freud to convince her to recant. The girl knows that her father has already told Freud that she is untrustworthy and influenced by unsuitable literature. But Freud reassures her, saying,
“I need you to simply tell me freely and frankly what comes to your mind without censoring your thoughts. . . . I would like to hear your side of the story”
. Unlike her other doctors, Freud seems to want only to listen.

“I am an ordinary girl, except for my recent illness”
, she obligingly begins. But as her story unspools, it is clear that the girl, in fact, considers herself wild, clever, and perhaps even a budding genius. Yet she does more than talk. She observes her observer.
“She wonders whether the doctor has so many art objects in his cluttered consulting rooms because he is afraid of emptiness, of space, of silence”
. She reads his book on dreams and offers to share her own. And in return, she allows Freud to see himself in ways that are both liberating and deeply unsettling. Years after she abruptly leaves his care, Freud’s
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
immortalizes her.

Novelist Sheila Kohler is internationally acclaimed for her spare storytelling style and probing psychological insights. In
Dreaming for Freud
, she builds upon the known facts of Freud’s and Dora’s lives to brilliantly reimagine the story behind one of psychology’s most famous and controversial works.

A
BOUT
THE
A
UTHOR

Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She lived in Paris before moving to the United States in 1981 to earn her MFA in writing from Columbia University. She studied psychology in France at the Institut Catholique and worked at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where Freud studied with Charcot. Sheila currently teaches at Princeton University.
Dreaming for Freud
is her thirteenth work of fiction. She lives in New York City.

A C
ONVERSATION
WITH
S
HEILA
K
OHLER

What inspired you to write about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Dora, the young woman who was arguably his most
famous patient?

I earned a degree in psychology in France and actually worked in the hospital where Freud worked with Charcot for a year. I read the five great case histories by Freud and was fascinated by his brilliance and understanding. They made a lasting impression on me: I even imagined that I was becoming hysterical as Freud believed Dora was, when I felt ill on a plane going out to South Africa. When I arrived I saw a doctor who told me I had contracted the measles from one of my children!

Years later I reread the Dora case and saw it through a rather different lens, and like many was shocked at some of the things the young doctor told this very young and vulnerable girl.

In the novel, you write that Freud
“has read a great deal of fiction in many languages and knows how to tell a story . . . so as to pique the interest of the reader and catch him in his net”
. Is there any chance that
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
is as much fiction as fact?

Certainly it can be read as fiction and makes a fascinating story. It is impossible for us to know how close to the truth this case history is. Did Dora tell Freud the truth? Were Freud’s interpretations correct? These were some of the questions I asked myself. Freud is most persuasive and writes so clearly and so well. He received the Goethe prize but never the Nobel for his scientific discoveries.

Would you say that all novelists are—in some sense—students of psychology?

Writers need surely to be acute and perceptive observers of human nature. Reading the great writers one is always struck at their comprehension: How could he/she possibly have known that?

How much of your version of Dora’s life is based upon that of the real Dora, Ida Bauer? Do you suspect that Dora’s dreams were too similar to those in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams to actually be real?

I have tried in the book not to falsify what has been documented, but as always in historical fiction there is so much we do not know. How do we know that the dreams Dora tells Freud she dreamed had not been made up? Some of Freud’s patients definitely made up dreams for him in order to please him, and Dora’s dreams with their jewel boxes and train stations do sound, at least to our modern ears, perfectly Freudian!

In your novel, Freud’s sessions with Dora lead him to an epiphany about his relationship with his friend and colleague, Wilhelm Fliess. Did Freud ever write anything about this? If not, what first led you to this conclusion?

We have Freud’s many interesting letters to Fliess, whom he calls his “other.” Some of these letters were initially suppressed but are now accessible in their entirety. It was during the three months that Freud was seeing Dora that Fliess distances himself from Freud, who had come to count on him in so many different ways and particularly as a reader and critic of his work.

What is your opinion of the man who is both hailed as the father of psychoanalysis and vilified as a phallocentric male who was deluded about female sexuality?

I think we tend today to see Freud in extremes: we are blinded by his stature and the attraction or repulsion of his theories. I have tried in this book to see him rather as a human being, albeit a genius, with the failings and insecurities and longings of all human beings, a young doctor at the start of his career with the need to support a large family. I’ve tried to enter his mind and see him more as a creature of his time and place, Vienna 1900, with its growing anti-Semitism and the dangers of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, but at the same time an enchanting great city with all the excitement of new scientific discoveries, art, and music.

You have written some novels with wholly fictional protagonists and some based upon historical figures, including Charlotte Brontë, Marguerite Duras, and, now, Sigmund Freud. Which do you find more enjoyable to write?

I enjoy the process of writing whether it is straight fiction or historical fiction. I feel very privileged to be able to do something I love. Of course, it is always difficult, and historical fiction has many pitfalls. As Henry James said, how does one reproduce the speech of another age? Indeed, dialogue is one of the most difficult parts, but the research required for historical fiction is fascinating to me. I am endlessly curious about how things happened and why, both in the present and in the past. The process of writing fiction is for me simply an attempt to answer that question. What happened during those three months that Ida Bauer spent going daily (except Sundays) to see Sigmund Freud, and why did she refuse to go after that? What happened to her after that? What happened in the dark room as Charlotte Brontë sat by her father’s bedside and wrote
Jane Eyre
?

You often depict characters who are disempowered and trapped in a relationship with a domineering personality, but in Dreaming for Freud, Dora and Freud appear to be evenly matched. Did you realize this when you set out, or did it become apparent as you were writing the novel?

Yes, I think both Freud and Dora struggled valiantly from the start and I was not at all sure who would win or if anyone did. They both had considerable ammunition and in my version of the story they used it.

Do you prefer reading fiction or nonfiction? Who are some contemporary writers that you admire?

I love fiction and I read voraciously. I try to keep up with the new books appearing, and continue to go back to the classics. I am a great admirer of J. M. Coetzee and loved his new novel,
The Childhood of Jesus
. I recently read
The Silent Wife
by A. S. A. Harrison, which I thought very well written and tense, as well as a book by Juan Gabriel Vásquez,
The Sound of Things Falling
, which I admired.

Your novels are always very slender and written in the exquisitely spare prose for which you are so often praised. Could you ever imagine publishing a five-hundred or even a thousand-page novel? How much of what you initially write ends up in the novel’s final edit?

No, I cannot imagine writing something that long. I do a lot of revision and often discard a great many unnecessary words! I am aware, however, that the long novel seems to be in vogue.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a novel, which is somewhat longer than usual, about a child who disappears on a beach in Brittany. The tentative title is
To Bear My Soul Away
.

S
UGGESTED
Q
UESTIONS
FOR
D
ISCUSSION

1. When Dora arrives at Freud’s office, she suffers from uncontrollable fits of coughing, constipation, and mysterious pains. Do you believe they are contrived or caused by her mental and emotional distress?

2. Is Dora’s father genuinely concerned for her welfare, or—as she suspects—does he want her to give herself to Herr Z. so that he can continue his affair with Frau Z.?

3. To what do you attribute Freud’s passion for artifacts and antiquities?

4. Why does Dora take such care to dress well for her visits to Freud?

5. In telling Freud about her brother, Otto, Dora laments,
“In the beginning, I could keep up with my brother, as he shared many of the books he read at the
Gymnasium
, but now, since he has continued with his studies at the university, where I am not allowed to go, he has passed me by”
. To what degree might Dora’s maladies stem from the limited opportunities available to women of her era?

6. Although most of their romantic relationships are heterosexual, both Dora and Freud experience a strong attraction to someone of the same sex. Do you agree with Freud’s view that all humans are innately bisexual?

7.
“[A]s [Freud] writes up the case he is increasingly aware that he has failed this girl”
. Do you agree? Why or why not?

8. Did Freud simply use Dora to further his own career? What leads you to your conclusion?

9. Throughout the novel, Kohler strongly foreshadows the coming Holocaust and its consequences for both Freud and Dora. How does this affect the way you read their stories?

10. Freud waits five years to publish his book about Dora. He thinks that once she is married,
“his time with her will no longer have the same importance it did initially. This son will replace the other men in her life”
. Does having a child somehow neuter Dora’s memories of Freud?

11. Discuss the relationship between literature and psychology. How has Freud influenced the way we think about and discuss literature?

12. How well do you believe Kohler captures the nature of Freud and Dora’s relationship? Have you read Freud’s
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
(Available from Penguin in
The Psychology of Love
by Sigmund Freud)? Does
Dreaming for Freud
make you want to read or revisit it?

To access Penguin Readers Guides online, visit the Penguin Group (USA) Web site at www.penguin.com.