ABSTRACT
I had often thought of dedicating interim to Dora’s mother—the woman who never made Freud’s acquaintance. He assumed she had housewife’s psychosis: too old for analysis? Too old to be noticed? In a sense, she underlines the dilemma for the older woman in representing her sexuality her desire, when she is no longer desirable. She can neither look forward, as the young girl does, to being a woman, that is having the fantasized body of maturity; nor can she return to the ideal moment of maturity—ideal in that it allows her to occupy the position of the actively desiring subject without transgressing the socially acceptable definition of the woman as mother. She is looking back at something lost, acknowledging perhaps that “being a woman’ was only a brief moment in her life.
