Doras Gift; Or, Lacans Homage to Dora

J E A N - M I C H E L R A B A T , PH .D.

Lacan reopened Doras case in 1957. In his 1951 talk (published in 1952), transference was the key; in the 1957 seminar, he focused on hysteria. Dora loved by proxy and refused to be an object of heterosexual desire. Her object was homosexual because Mrs. K embodied Doras essential question, femininitya question that cannot be divorced from that of the lack of the phallus and her fathers gift of nothing, which is the gift of love. There is no greater gift than the gift of what one does not have. Drawing from Mauss and Lvi-Strauss, Lacan concluded with an analysis of the cultural meaning of the gift.

N JANUARY 1957, LACAN REOPENED DORAS CASE IN THE CONTEXT

of his seminar on object relations. A few weeks earlier, he had alluded repeatedly to Dora in his extended discussion of Freuds (1920) seminal text, The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman. Throughout this seminar, Lacan returned to the systematic reading of Doras case that he had put forward in his Observations on Transference, perhaps, as I try to show, to update and change his outlook. The first talk had been given at the Conference of FrenchSpeaking Psychoanalysts in 1951 and published in Revue Franaise

Jean-Michel Rabat, Ph.D. is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania; Author, Cambridge Companion to Lacan (2003) and Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies (2004). He is completing a book entitled Logiques du Mensonge. 84

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de Psychanalyse in 1952 (republished in Lacan, 1966). Lacans starting point in Observations on Transference had been Freuds critical remark to Dorahis telling her that she had played the part of an accomplice in the comedy of gifts, exchanges, and betrayals in which she had been caught up. In Freuds (1905) words, Dora had made herself an accomplice in the affair, and had dismissed from her mind every sign which tended to show its true character (p. 29). Or, again, it was quite certain that the reproaches which [Dora] made against her father of having been deaf to the most imperative calls of duty and of having things in the light which was most convenient from the point of view of his own passionsthese reproaches recoiled upon her head (p. 31). Freud then returned against her the charges she had leveled against her fatherthat he was exploiting his bad health to further his illicit amorous passionand asked consequently that Dora take a good look at herself. This she did, and their exchange providing an indirect confirmationwas the first and, alas, only successful moment in the treatment. Dora complained of gastric pains, and Freud easily identified these as an imitative symptom, in echo of Doras married cousin. He then sternly asked, Who are you copying now? His triumph was, unhappily, short-lived: Freud had [hit] the mark (p. 31), but only once. From what he saw as Freuds masterful inversion of the presenting query (i.e., Freuds effectively turning the tables against Dora), Lacan developed a series of three dialectical reversals or moments. The first is the one just mentioned: Freud sent Dora back to her unexamined function in the quadrille linking her to Mr. K, Mrs. K, and her fatheran eye-opening moment of disclosure that allowed her to become aware of her objective collusion in the little drama. The second moment of reversal is when Freud asked Dora to be aware that her jealousy over her fathers love for Mrs. K concealed something else. The third moment is when Doras fascination for Mrs. K was revealed for what it wasa concealment of the pure mystery of femininity (Lacan, 1952, pp. 9597). As the earlier text is relatively easy to read and poses few problems, I do not deal with it at length here but instead engage with a passage Lacan devoted to Dora in his seminar on object relations. I also focus on this passage because there is no authorized English translation available. Undoubtedly, Lacan felt the need to expand and revise his dialectical reading of transference six years later, though in 1957 he did

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not change his point of departure radically. Here is how Lacan now condensed his view of Freuds handling of the case. He let Freud speak to Dora and ask the crucial question, Isnt what you attack as a disorderly state of affairs something in which you yourself have participated? (Lacan, 1957, p. 137). Indeed, as Freud had noted, Dora agreed to be instrumental in making the tryst between her father and Mrs. K possible (e.g., by being a devoted baby-sitter, thus freeing Mrs. K to go out with her father). In Lacans view, this confirmed Doras equation with Hegels (1957) beautiful soul. She was an inveterate protester who denounced chaos and confusion outside to avoid seeing her own murky objective role and obvious contradictions (Lacan, 1952, p. 65). Hegel was probably thinking of his own sisters pathology (she ended up institutionalized), but he also seemed to allude more directly to Molires The Misanthrope, in which Alceste is an emblematic figure of the schne Seele paradigm. In Hegels analysis, the only outcome for the beautiful soul is madness: The beautiful soul, lacking an actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an actual existence, and dwelling in the immediacy of this firmly held antithesis . . . , this beautiful soul, then, being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is disordered to the point of madness, wastes itself in yearning, and pines away in consumption [Hegel, 1957, p. 407]. To condense things a little more, one might say that a beautiful soul is someone who, for purely sentimental reasons, refuses to see what he or she gives and is given, or at least deliberately remains blind to the network of the actual give-and-take that defines all exchanges in the symbolical realm. The beautiful soul wants to veil the cruel realities that define the symbolictherefore, the structure of social relationships. In his seminar of January 23, 1957, Lacan began examining the Dora case by focusing on what strikes first readers mostFreuds notorious confusion as to the real object of desire for Dora. Freud admitted that he had missed her homosexual attachment to Mrs. K because of his unanalyzed assumption that Dora should normally have been attracted to Mr. K. Yet, even if his belated admission was necessary,

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one cannot discard Mr. K totally in the dialectic of Doras desire. Lacan related this ambiguity to a clinical observation that he saw as foundational for all hysterical structures: hysterics love by proxy and therefore have a problem with being an object of heterosexual desire; moreover, the hysterics object is fundamentally homosexual (Lacan, 1957, p. 138). Then Lacan located in Doras ego (the ego being essentially narcissistic, as Lacan saw it) the identification with Mr. Kan identification that accounts for her transformation into a virile character. In other words, it is through the intermediary of Mr. K., it is insofar as she is Mr. K. at the imaginary point constituted by the personality of Mr. K., that Dora is attached to the character of Mrs. K. (Lacan, 1957, p. 138). It follows that Mrs. K derived her importance from the fact that, beyond her election to the status of object of desire, and beyond the narcissistic investment Doras Verliebheit entails, she embodied Doras most essential question. For Lacan, Dora repeated what all hysterics have in common: having been blocked on their way to oedipal resolution, they both can and cannot overcome the oedipal crisis. For Dora, what was of prime importance was that her father, though rich (vermgend), was also impotent (unvermgend), which was not the case of the father of the young homosexual woman. What function does the father have in the oedipal pattern in Lacans grid? The father is normally the agent who symbolically gives the missing object or the phallus. In Doras fathers case, he could not give it because he did not have it. The fathers phallic lack is crucial in that it yields a new twist in the dialectics of giving. This is how Lacan (1957) developed the idea: What is giving? Isnt there another dimension that is introduced in the object relation when it is brought to a symbolical level as an object that can be given or not? In other terms, is it ever the object that is given? Such is the question, and with Dora we see one of its outcomes, one which remains exemplary [p. 139]. Thus, Dora remained exclusively attached to a father whose virile gift she would never receive. If Doras problems seem at the time of her struggle to resolve her Oedipus, this entailed an increase in love: she loved her wounded or deficient father all the more. Thus, her love for her maimed father was

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proportional to the diminution of his status. This can be generalized: there is no greater gift than the gift that one does not have. A true sign of love is giving what one does not have. However, Lacan never forgot that the cultural meaning of the gift is provided by the framework of the symbolic law. As sociologists aver, a gift circulatesthe gift you give is something you have received. But when it comes to a gift between two subjects, the cycle of the gifts comes from elsewhere, since what establishes the love relationship is that the gift is given, if one may say so, for nothing (Lacan, 1957, p. 140). Nothing for nothing remains the formula of this type of exchange. It might look like an expression of interest, but it is in fact the formula for pure gratuity. In the love gift, something is given for nothing, and this something is a nothing. What constitutes the gift, is that a subject gives something in a gratuitous manner, for as much as behind what he gives there is something that is lacking, and thus the subject sacrifices beyond what he has. The same happens with the primitive mode of the gift that one can see as the effective root of all human exchanges under the shape of the potlatch [Lacan, 1957, p. 140]. Lacan commented that, if someone is extremely rich, then a gift from him or her proportionally loses value. In the same way, if God is thought of as infinitely rich and endowed with attributes, then there is no reason to love him for his giftsexcept if we suspect that he is lacking in being. There is no reason to love God, excerpt that perhaps he does not exist (Lacan, 1957, p. 140). Thus, Dora loved her father for what he did not give her. But then he engaged in another behavior, one partly brought about by Dora. There is a ternary relationship: III Mrs. K Dora Father It looks as if Dora had only to ask the question, What does my father love in Mrs. K? Clearly, she did not know what it was. What she was looking for was the phallic object insofar as it could be given. As we have seen, for Lacan, a woman can enter the dialectic of the symbolic order only through the gift of the phallus. Desire aims at the phallus

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when it can be received as a gift; when the phallus is brought up to the dignity of the gift, the subject can be introduced into the dialectics of all subsequent exchanges. Thus we can understand Doras central questiona reiteration of the riddle What is a woman? Mrs. K embodied the feminine function; she was femininity as such. As object of the fathers love, Mrs. K was what was loved beyond Dora, and this is why Dora was so fascinated with her. Dora remained poised between her father and Mrs. K. As long as her father loved Mrs. K, Dora could be satisfied. The position of the impotent father in love was compensated by all the symbols of munificence that were multiplied, including material gifts showered equally on the mistress and the daughter, who shared them. Dora participated in the symbolic function displayed here, but at a remove, as it were. Soon this could not suffice, and Dora would try to reestablish a triangular situation that implied Mr. K. Mr. K Mrs. KDoraFather [Lacan, 1957, p. 142] Because she was still haunted by her question, which was just the riddle of femininity, Dora considered that Mr. K had to bring into the bargain his own adoration of his wifean adoration that she expressed clearly when she superimposed the Sistine Madonna and Mrs. K. Mrs. K had to be adored by all those who were close to her, including Dora, of course. If Mr. K could provide an element of normality, it was his masculinity, by which he had to take his own wife and not Dora as an object of desire. Thus, Dora slapped Mr. K not when he courted her or declared his love for her, but when he told her, Ich habe nichts an meiner Frau. This ominous sentencerepeated in the case study as it migrates from Doras father to Mr. K, both talking about their respective wivesreintroduced the nothing into a circuit that can be schematized as: Mrs. K Mr. K With whom Dora identified The question DoraFather Remained the Other par excellence

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For if Dora could admit that her father loved through her what was beyond her (i.e., Mrs. K), then Mr. K could be tolerated only if he remained in an inverse and stabilizing position. When Mr. K blurted out that he was interested only in Dora and that his wife was for nothing in the circuit, this suggested conversely for Dora that her father might also be interested only in Mrs. K and that henceforth she would be for nothing in the quadrille. This is what she could not stand and what brought about the crisis and the complaints. This reading of Dora was clearly colored by Lvi-Strausss structuralist anthropology. Lacan quoted Lvi-Strausss thesis, developed for the first time in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. For LviStrauss, the basic rule of kinship and exogamic exchanges is summed up by the formula: I have received a wife and I owe a daughter (Lacan, 1957, p. 143) As Lacan added, such a principle transforms any woman into a simple object of exchange, and this is precisely what Dora refused. She could not bear being excluded from the institutions of the gift and the law. If she renounced the paternal phallus as object of the gift, then there was nothing she could accept from anyone else, at least from any other man. This is why, as soon as she saw herself reduced to a pure object, Dora rebelled and concluded that her father was merely selling her to someone in order to further his extramarital intrigue. When Mr. K confessed that he was not part of the circuit in which Dora could either identify with him or think that she was the object he was aiming at beyond the wife he was supposed to adore, all the fragile but dense links that had connected the four partners fell to the ground. Dora herself fell from her own justifications and entered a violently querulous attitude. All of a sudden, she claimed a need for what she might have thought up until then had been given her, though obliquely through the intermediary of anothernamely, her fathers love. As this love was refused to her totally, she had to claim it all the more exclusively (Lacan, 1957, p. 144). Dora was then trapped in a metaphor with no exitsa metaphor expressed in signifiers recurring in her dreams . . . jewel box, Bahnhof, Friedhof, Vorhof. That multivalent courtyard (-hof) was repeated and multiplied because, fundamentally, Dora could not situate herself anywhere else. She did not know who she was anymore and could not fathom what use love may have. Even if she wanted to know as much

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about love as she did about sex, love remained a tantalizing riddle hinging on the mystery of femininity. The only way to unknot all this would have been for her to remain on a purely symbolic level. This insight allows us to understand Freuds basic mistake: he blundered most when he attempted to introduce something in the real, when he tried to tell Dora something that touched on her real feelings, as for instance when he tried to convince her that, in fact, she was really in love with Mr. K. (Lacan, 1957, p. 146). Freud did not see that the introduction of Mr. K. as a normalizing object of heterosexual love could only remain metaphorical, as a last attempt to comply with the law of symbolic exchanges (p. 146). As Dora could accept becoming an object of desire only after she had exhausted the riddle of femininity, what she was looking for in Mrs. K was less an object of same-sex desire as a desperately needed insight into how a woman, or anyone, could become an object of desire and what this entailed. What stands out in this short survey of Lacans 1957 reading of Dora is that, without renouncing his own brand of structuralism, Lacan more clearly distanced himself from Freuds most embarrassing sexist prejudices. Whereas in 1951 Lacan asserted that Dora would have benefited from a link with Mr. K and that her infatuation with Mrs. K was a regression (Lacan, 1952, p. 68), in 1957 he adopted a more systematic view of exchanges to take into account Mausss (1922) theory of the gift and potlatch.1 In his earlier essay, Lacan dismissed Doras Madonna fascination (which barely hid Mrs. K) as the traditional solution which Christianity has given to this subjective impasse, by making woman the object of a divine desire, or else, a transcendent object of desire (1952, p. 68), which in effect implied telling Dora, Go to a nunnery, go! In 1957, Lacan analyzed in depth the drama of a doubly impossible love linking Dora and her father. Moving further from the concept of transference as positive non-acting with a view to the ortho-dramatization of the subjectivity of the patient (Lacan, 1952, p. 72), his more systematic 1957 view allowed for a more generous appreciation of Doras gifts.

See Mauss (1922) and Malinowski (1925). For a good collection of texts on the gift, including Lvi-Strausss famous Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, see Schrift (1997).

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Indeed, using Dora as a fictional name for Ida Bauer may prove to have been Freuds most lasting stroke of genius.2 In transforming his patient into the Greek word meaning gifts, he was no doubt aware that the plural of dwron means presents, retaining fees or bribes. The legal overtones of the plural in Greek almost always hint at accusations against someone who is taking a bribe. However, if a gift involves the obligation to give back, which gift will not turn into a bribe? This is what Mauss (1922) and Malinowski (1925) had to ponder all along in their remarkable anthropological studies of the gift. Following Lacan, it is clear that, as long as Dora could be given the fathers nothing, a nothing that condensed the impossibility of a pure gift, Dora would maintain her role in a structure that allowed her to participate in her fathers love (with the double sense of the genitive, both objective and subjective). When another type of nothing was presented to her and forced her to renounce the other phallic substitutes that came up along the symbolic chain, she suddenly realized that she had merely occupied the position of an object. As an object barely represented by metaphors, she fell from the structure, as she was reduced to the function of bribe. Bribe or bride? That was the question, and in her poststructuralist bridal dilemma, Dora still elicits our admiration for having refused the most basically given form of the exchange.
REFERENCES

Freud, S. (1905), Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. P. Rieff. New York: Touchstone Books, 1997. _______ (1920), The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. Standard Edition, 18:145172. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Hegel, G. W. F. (1957), The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Lacan, J. (1952), Observations on transference. In: Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne, ed. & trans. J. Mitchell & J. Rose. New York: Norton, 1985.

Regarding the curious anonymity to which Freud consigned the real Peppina Zellenka and her husband, the use of the simple initial K, which happens to be the initial of the most neglected character in the entire story recounted by Freud (Ida Bauers mother was Katharina or Kthe), seems to announce quite ominously Kafkas fictional alter egos.

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_______ (1957), Le seminaire IV: La relation dobjet [Seminar IV: Object relations]. Paris: Seuil, 1994. _______ (1966), crits. Paris: Seuil. Lvi-Strauss, C. (1949), The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. J. H. Bell & J. R. von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Malinowski, B. (1925), Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton, 1961. Mauss, M. (1922), The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990. Schrift, A. D., ed. (1997), The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. New York: Routledge. Department of English 119 Bennett Hall University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6273 jmrabate@dept.english.upenn.edu