You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Freud and Dora: The Artful Dream is yet one more addition to the already bulging file of the Dora case. However, in contrast to some of its predecessors, the book is valuable, interesting, and clearly written. It is a more or less dispassionate investigation of Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.
Phillip McCaffrey, who teaches in the English Department at Loyola College, focuses his attention on the second of Dora's two dreams. He proceeds from two hypotheses, which he propounds in his introduction: 1. That which Freud called the manifest dream is “an internally coherent psychic construction.” 2. The “mode of [its] coherence is aesthetic” (p. 9), that is, parts of the dream are related to one another and can be analyzed much as one would analyze a work of literature. The dream, McCaffrey contends, is coherent, but not necessarily intelligible, just as a short story written in a language the reader does not understand is unintelligible until it is translated or the reader learns the language. But McCaffrey is not content to stop here; he suggests that if he is correct in his views of the dream as an aesthetic object whose manifest content can be analyzed and interpreted as such, then Freud's theory of the incoherence of the manifest