The Ending to Dora's Story: Deutsch's Footnote as Narrative

One of the points made by Steven Marcus (1974) in his analysis of the case of Dora as a modernist narrative is that Freud, rather than Dora, becomes the central character in the narrative: “We begin to sense that it is his story and not hers that is being retold. Instead of letting Dora appropriate her own story, Freud became the appropriator of it. The case history belongs progressively less to her than it does to him” (p. 85). Marcus goes on to say: “she refused to be a character in the story that Freud was composing for her, and wanted to finish it herself. As we now know, the ending she wrote was a very bad one indeed” (p. 88).

The ending to which Marcus refers is that published by Felix Deutsch in 1957 under the title “A Footnote to Freud's ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.’” In this publication