Pink Herrings: Fantasy, Object Choice, and Sexuation (The Lines of the Symbolic Series) by Damien W. Riggs

Author:Damien W. Riggs [Riggs, Damien W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 2015-11-05T23:00:00+00:00

It seems that it is important to specify the underlying fantasy because it concerns Dora's sexual position; that is, she takes up a masculine position if she identifies with her father, a feminine one if she identities with Frau K. But is this the case? Once Dora identifies with one, does she not also identify with the other? For fantasy is laid out in scenarios and the subject can take up now one position, now another in the scenario. (p. 13)

Adams, however, focuses specifically on whether Dora was “active” or “passive” in her fantasy, thus making an argument entirely different to the one I make in the analysis below.

Unlike Adams (1996), but like the majority of the Freudian accounts outlined above, Van Haute and Geyskens (2012), in a chapter that employs a Lacanian account of the case, argue that because Dora was attracted to Frau K., she identified with Herr K. Their argument rests on the supposition that homosexual desire wasn't viable for Dora, so she needed to adopt a masculine identification so as to avoid homosexuality. Whilst, like Rose (1985) above, it could be suggested that there is nothing about this account that is Lacanian, I include it here along with other Lacanian accounts due to the fact that Van Haute and Geyskens position their chapter as being Lacanian (which Rose does not do).

In terms of the slap that Dora gave to Herr K. by the lake, Ragland (2006a; 2006b) and Gherovici (2010) give two differing accounts of this event in terms of sexuation and identification. Ragland suggests that Dora identified with Frau K., and that when in his proposition to her Herr K. told Dora that he got nothing from his wife, this served to position Dora as an object, hence the slap. In a similar way, Ragland suggests that when Freud insisted upon naming masturbation and a love for Herr K. as Dora's secret desire, she was denied a subjective position within her fantasy, hence the termination of the analysis.

Gherovici's (2010) account of the slap, by contrast, is the closest to the one I will outline in my analysis below. Gherovici suggests that the slap was the product of a “charge of anxiety” brought about by an “encounter not filtered by desire and deprived of the veil of fantasy”. Gherovici suggests that Herr K's statement about his wife broke Dora's identification with Frau K., and hence she was “confronted with the enigma of sex with nothing to safeguard her” (p. 118). Gherovici also suggests that Freud similarly broke down the veil of fantasy by insisting upon Herr K. as the real object of Dora's desire, rather than as someone a part of whom possibly represented Dora's object a. As we shall now see, Gherovici's argument about the circulation of desire and the role of the object a touches upon the claims about sexuation that I make in regards to the case.

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