The Skin, Narrative and Word Choice
by Hysteria
Did Dora think: Hey, this is a rapey set up?
Some days I want to rip my skin off.
Sometimes the skin isn’t the culprit, it’s the clothes. I know better.
I reread Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria today. Among many things, this has stuck with me:
Her behaviour obviously went far beyond what would have been appropriate to filial concern. She felt and acted more like a jealous wife–in a way which would have been comprehensible in her mother.
Of the millions of things I’ve picked apart of Freud’s diagnosis of Dora–assigning her a narrative not her own–what particularly bothers me in this passage are the words: obviously, appropriate, acted more like a jealous wife.
Oh, Freud, don’t you know: nothing is obvious. Nothing is plainly evident when you’re telling story that is not your own. FYI: Do not use words like clearly, obviously, apparently and the like in any explanation or argument. This is faulty logic, not to mention lazy writing.
Word choice is key.
By Freud saying her behavior was not appropriate, he denies Dora agency in her own story. Since she does not conform to ideological norms, then she is not normal. She isn’t behaving. Prior and from this point, if Dora acts not normal, then she is deemed as having something “wrong” with her.
I imagine Dora scared, body clenching every nerve, wondering what to say all while sitting on Freud’s creepy couch. Of course she experienced aphonia. I would’ve kept my mouth shut, too.
Caliban and the Witch, a brilliant book everyone must read now, by Silvia Federici, describes the historical process by which women’s body’s became property’s of the state (propelled by the Church) through capitalism. Actions to ensure women becoming the ultimate state commodity there was: endless rapes, witch hunts, not paying women, policing women via midwives or reducing midwives to quacks, and of course the propaganda that women were angry wives, whores, not able to reason, evil, demons, witches, murderers if they didn’t give birth, you name it, it’s there.
These images of what woman is and what woman does are used today as much as when Freud dictated Dora’s narrative. I wonder what Dora thought as she was told to lay down and speak? Did she want to rip her skin off? Did she blame her clothes for not fitting? Did she actually find herself insane because she was being treated as such?
