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IT IS NO NEWS TO TELL YOU that Freud was a superb story-teller, a master of rhetoric with a Jamesian command of the narrative voice. Each of his case histories shows a classical combination of irony, dogmatism, understatement, and dazzling interpretation, and the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts. The Dora
Case, after all, was a clinical failure of the worst kind: the treatment was abruptly broken off and the critical symptoms remained unchanged. Nevertheless, as Marcus and others have made clear, Freud was able to turn a clinical failure into a literary success. The Dora Case, at the present time, is one of our most-studied texts and continues to fuel a continuing series of rebuttals and rereadings.
The appeal of the Dora Case and its undoubted standing as a literary masterpiece make us aware of the enormous influence of Freud's rhetorical craft and the subtle power of the clinical narrative. Not only does a well-crafted story make us feel that all the facts are understood—when many are not—but in addition, the power of the clinical narrative is such that it can easily swallow up the occasional unexplained event or mistaken interpretation and prevent us from seeing that certain things have not been explained at all. Once we have put ourselves in the hands of a master storyteller, we have given away our claim to be the skeptical listener; we willingly give way to argument by authority (at which Freud was a master), and the more overarching the narrative account, the more willingly we suspend disbelief and assign him the right to do no wrong.
I want to remind you of one of Freud's more arresting analogies—that between the delusions of the psychotic and the interpretations of the analyst. He writes, in one of his last papers:
The delusions of patients appe