Sheila Kohler is the author of ten novels, including Cracks and Becoming Jane Eyre, as well as numerous prize-winning short stories. She will be talking at the American Library in Paris on December 10th about her newest novel, the critically acclaimed Dreaming for Freud.
a Paris Writers News interview
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Laurel Zuckerman: What drew you to the story of Dora and Freud?
Sheila Kohler: I read the case history first as a student of psychology in Paris at the Institut Catholique. We were assigned the "Cinq Psychanalyses" by our professor: and I began reading the first one, the Dora case, on an airplane going home to South Africa in the Christmas holidays. As I turned the pages, fascinated by the story and Freud's brilliant analysis, I began to feel ill. Was I , like Dora, hysterical and getting her illness by osmosis, I wondered. When I arrived in Johannesburg my mother greeted me with the words, "You look feverish," and it turned out I had caught the measles! Still, I never forgot the case history, but came back to it many years later and reread in a different frame of mind. I was appalled by Freud's arrogance, his "rage to cure," the way he thrust his interpretations down the poor young girl's throat! I wanted to give her a voice which she does not have in the case, but as I wrote Freud elbowed his way in and I felt sympathy and admiration for this youngish man, starting out his career and trying to prove his dream theory. He had just published his book on dreams and sold very few copies. I came to see them both as two struggling individuals very much like you and me.
How did you research this novel?
I read a great deal, of course: some books were particularly helpful: a wonderful book by Hannah Decker on Dora, Freud, and Vienna 1900; I found Freud's letters to Fliess very helpful, and an interview with Ida Bauer's son was most helpful for the last chapter. I went to Vienna and saw Freud's office and where he lived and walked around the city and sat in the cafes and ate strudel!
Where did you get the idea for the creative dual between Freud and Dora, with Freud reinventing Dora’s story to suit his theories and Dora inventing her dreams to suit Freud?
You are very perceptive! This sort of emerged as I wrote. I have long been interested in the struggle for power ( see Cracks and many of my books) and I know as a writer that a victim does not work well on the page. Besides, I do really believe that Ida Bauer was a formidably intelligent woman, and she had certain advantages over Freud. Freud, of course, was using her to prove his theories as you say, and her dreams were perfect for his purposes, so perfect that I imagined she might have invented them just for him, her gift.
Freud was a brilliant writer. Were all of his case histories a form of fiction? In the struggle between the artist and the scientist, who won?
In the end I think it might be the artist. Indeed, all the case histories are filled with suspense, mystery, and so cleverly constructed. There is great drama in all of them and yet the detail are such that we suspend disbelief at least for the moment.
The brilliant Dora invents diary entrees and dreams, which are immediately believed. But the abuse she suffered, which was real, is dismissed as fictional. How to understand this paradox?
Yes, again you are perceptive here! Freud, in my version certainly believes her dreams which are useful to him, though he never sees her diary. He does also believe her story or at least the fact that Herr K has tried repeatedly to seduce her which her own father denies for his own benefit. The position of women was extremely difficult in 1900 Vienna and perhaps remains so today. Their stories of molestation are so often not believed or not even told. We have numerous examples recently in the news on the American campus and in the world of sports.
Freud is arrogant and selfish in dealing with Dora’s assault, willfully distorting her account to fit his theories, and yet he is also the only person to believe her. Is this specific to Freud or the very nature of psychoanalysis?
I do think Freud was an excellent listener from the start, and it was he, after all who invented psychoanalysis. He learned to listen and observe in part from Charcot and his time at the Salepetriere in Paris. His women patients taught him a lot. Anna von Lieben for example, a wealthy Jewish patient, is supposed to have told him not to keep interrupting her and to ask her so many questions which led him to shut up! At least Freud was willing to admit that women had sexual desires, unlike so many men of the time, who told them to "close their eyes and think of England."
How have psychoanalysts and other professional responded to Dreaming for Freud? Sexual assault survivors?
The psychoanalysts have been kind. There is a review forthcoming in a psychoanalytic journal and I received kind blurbs from Doctor David Joseph and Larry Tancredi, both eminent in their field. I'm doing a grand rounds at Montefiore hospital next week. I haven't heard much from survivors of sexual assault.
86 universities in America are currently being investigated for outrageous mishandling of sexual assault cases. Has there been any progress since Freud’s time – or is this just an illusion?
I'm afraid the progress is slow as I said above. It is inconvenient for people to face these brutal truths. Even Freud revised his theory of sexual assault. He initially said all neurosis was a result of sexual abuse of children or young adults. He altered this to say this abuse was imagined: the Oedipus theory came out of this.
Dreaming for Freud offers fascinating ideas about the influence of Freud’s own sexual needs upon his work. What is known about Freud’s sex life?
We know more and more. We have, as I said, Freud's letters to Fliess whom he called his Other. This seems to have been a most passionate friendship. They argued over who had first discovered bisexuality. There is also the affair with Minna ( his sister in law) which seems to be pretty well-documented. He signed a hotel book as Dr Freud and wife, and they took one room on a stay in Switzerland.
Everyone here is Jewish and the whole kit and caboodle of early Freudian psychoanalysis will be forced to flee or be murdered in a few years, and yet Freud’s focus is on the sexual, not the political. Why?
Yes, indeed. I suppose he preferred to avoid the issue, perhaps closing his eyes on what he did not want to see. He wanted to make his name with new scientific discoveries, and indeed he did discover or certainly put on the map the unconscious mind, the role of childhood sexuality, and also the importance of every gesture, word, or detail as the great writers have always known.
Some of his observations are extremely astute. If you read the case histories closely you are struck by his knowledge of human nature. Of course, he was often wrong, too, and particularly it seems to me about women. He admitted himself that women remained the dark continent for him. I think his own mother was a most powerful woman and he never really analyzed his feelings for her.
The coming Holocaust, in the background of Dreaming for Freud, is the subject of another book you wrote entitled, The Children of Pithiviers. Why this subject? Is there a personal link?
Thank you for noticing this. I am married to a Jewish psychiatrist and my mother once eloped as a young girl in Johannesburg with a Jewish man who worked in the diamond industry with her father. ( I wrote about this in "Love Child.") As she was under age the marriage was annulled. My husband always says this is why I married him. I did also have a country house near Pithiviers and later when I had left discovered the story about the Jewish children kept in the camps there. My own family came from Germany but were protestant carpenters who left for economic reasons in the late 19th century.
Do you keep a diary? Do you, like Dora, write fiction in it?
I no longer keep a diary though I once did as a girl. I kept an imaginary diary which my mother found and read and thought to be real! She was scandalized as I described meeting boys in the dark on the beach etc! I had a hard time proving that I had made it up!
What are you working on now?
A thriller!
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Sheila Kohler is the author of ten novels and three volumes of short fiction. Her most recent novel is “Dreaming for Freud,” (Penguin) based on the Dora case. She has won numerous prizes including the O.Henry twice and been included in Best American Short Stories most recently in 2013. Her work has been published in twelve countries. She teaches this year at Columbia and Princeton.
Her novel, “Cracks” was made into a film with directors Jordan and Ridley Scott with Eva Green playing Miss G.
Dreaming for Freud is available from all fine bookstores and online at Amazon and elsewhere.
