ABSTRACT
The celebrated collection In Dora's Case concludes with a bibliography listing some fifty articles on Sigmund Freud's 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria' published in the previous thirty years, in addition to two other collections of articles on the case, plus a play and a film. Almost every article in the collection opens with an acknowledgement of Dora's key status in the psychoanalytic canon. Notable here are the multiplication of analytic subjects proposed in Jacques Lacan's dialectical theory of transference, and Suzanne Gearhart's further elaboration of this dialectic of psychoanalysis into 'a series of conflicts that both define and put into question its limits'. The chronological structure of In Dora's Case elides this Lacanian critique of essentialist interpretations of Dora into precisely its opposite, Maria Ramas's 'traditional feminist reading'. Even if Dora is unable to compose herself out of the bodily fragmentation characteristic of hysteria, Lacan's commentary does it for her.
