Response to Bell

I make my living as a clinical psychoanalyst. When I read Freud from that perspective, I read his case reports as records of analytic treatments, as part of the project of being better informed about the history of psychoanalytic theory and technique, of being a better clinician. The same point of view takes the lead when I teach Freud to candidates and other students in the context of an analytic institute. The clinical project is at the heart of my professional life. And the distinguished Silvia Bell offers many pertinent and sensitive ideas regarding Freud's Hans paper as a case study. In the particular essay under discussion, however, I attempt a different project—with a different methodology, different way of thinking, different results. Because Bell does not take this difference into proper account, her criticisms of my paper mostly miss the mark.

Bell complains that I “make no mention of the paper's…function…as a report of the analytic treatment of a child.” She calls this a “flagrant omission given the title Freud gave to his text—‘An Analysis of a Phobia…”’ (p. 868). In fact, my “omission” is an intentional methodological bracketing of the official function of Freud's paper as a case report, in order to explore it from another point of view, as a text. My intent is to add to an understanding of the complexity of Freud's paper by showing that it serves functions in addition to (not instead of) the ones that were at the front of his mind. My exploration is of the way that, beneath Freud's professional (and thoroughly appropriate) purposes—to record a treatment, to study child development, to focus theoretically on the centrality of the tragic oedipus complex—a different theoretical notion of the complex is at play. To put it another way, exploring papers as texts opens us to the ways they differ from their official functions.

Similarly, Bell complains that I disregard evidence “that the form [of Freud's paper], which involves the reconstructed dialogue, is dict