Marx and Freud in Latin America by Bruno Bosteels

Author:Bruno Bosteels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

8

BETWEEN FREUD AND

A NAKED WOMAN

Setting the Stage

So please, therapists and analysts, since she is not castrated, even though she may be unsure of her rights and abilities, don’t you castrate her.

Marie Langer, From Vienna to Managua: Journey of a Psychoanalyst

In January of 2001, theater-goers in Mexico City were treated to a “scene” worthy of Charcot’s notorious seances with hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris: On the stage, a young woman called “Dora” is lying naked on an operating table, flanked by two characters called Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, both of them fully dressed—when the latter announces in an aside to the audience that the doctor has decided to perform “major surgery” and is preparing his symbolical scalpel to “castrate” his patient: “If the illness of the independent woman is an imaginary phallus, we must cut off the phallus.”1 The scene, in which Freud struggles with a woman still boldly talking back at him, even though she now finds herself exposed in the utmost vulnerability of her naked body, comes toward the end of Feliz nuevo siglo doktor Freud (Happy New Century, Doctor Freud), itself a dramatic rewriting of the famous case of Freud’s Dora by the Mexican playwright, journalist, producer, and psychologist by training, Sabina Berman. Directed by Sandra Félix, with superb stage design by Philippe Amand, the play at the time of its opening featured Ricardo Blume in the role of Sigmund Freud, Marina de Tavira as Dora (as well as both Anna Freud and Gloria, described in the stage directions as a 1970s-type feminist, dressed in black and with short hair—I will return to this combination of roles in a single actor, which is the exact opposite of the reduplication of actors for one character that happens in the case of Freud), Juan Carlos Beyer as Freud 2 (also Herr K. and Otto Rank), Enrique Singer as Freud 3 (also Herr F., a railway worker, and Carl Gustav Jung), and Lisa Owen as Lou Andreas Salomé (also Frau K., Martha Freud, Frau F., Dora as adult, and Ernest Jones).

Berman thus proposes to enter the twenty-first century with a salute to the founder of psychoanalysis. “Feliz nuevo siglo, doktor Freud” is a phrase that in the play is attributed to Dora, at the crucial moment when she abruptly breaks off her treatment with Freud (historically speaking this would have been in December 1900, but once the phrase becomes the title of the play, it can obviously be interpreted as coming from Sabina Berman as well, one hundred years later), just as Freud himself had entered the twentieth century still carrying with him his unpublished “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” Dora’s clinical case history was not officially published until 1905, even though for the most part it was completed in January 1901, and Freud himself describes it as a “continuation” of the 1900 text The Interpretation of Dreams—to this day, perhaps, still the single most important founding document for the larger clinical and theoretical project in the history of psychoanalysis.

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