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Freud deliberately set the cat among the pigeons when he confessed that his case histories ‘read like short stories’ and appear to ‘lack the serious stamp of science’ (Breuer & Freud, 1893-5, p. 160). But the German does not say ‘science’ (Wissenschaft) as translated in the Standard Edition; it says ‘scientificity’ or ‘characteristics of science’ (Wissenschaftlichkeit). Freud was not only speaking of science as such, he was speaking of its style. This was his challenge to readers: you must learn new ways of reading.
Anat Tzur Mahalel has taken up the challenge, at one degree removed, of applying such new readings to the writings of six of Freud's patients about their analysis - Joseph Wortis, Smiley Blanton, Abram Kardiner, John M. Dorsey, The Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff) and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Biographically, this is a medley of styles and voices, and Tzur Mahalel sets out to discover if they have anything else apart from Freud in common.
A previous study of some of these patients, Unorthodox Freud by Lohser and Newton (1996), uses their accounts to document Freud's deviations from a dubious notion of orthodox analysis. By contrast, Tzur Mahalel wants us to read them, not as witnesses for the prosecution, but democratically, in their own right and from their respective viewpoints. Her readings are concerned with authority: she reminds us that in writing their accounts the patients are reclaiming ownership of their experience and thus redressing an age-old imbalance of power between therapist and patient.
Freud himself recorded only one of these cases, the Wolf Man. But though his version is not there to distract us, a conflict of interests persists: how to restore these satellite figures to autonomy, and prevent them being sucked into the black hole of Freud biography.
That looks like an exorbitant demand. In writing their memoirs, the patients have, by their own volition, written their short stories into Freud's long story. On their behalf, Tzur Mahalel invokes De