ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to sketch, the text itself as it were evolves from a psychoanalysis of suspicion into one of relationship, as if the evidential paradigm were ‘dreaming’ its aesthetic counterpart. The image manifestly lies at the centre of the text, constructed as it is around two dreams and two paintings, that of the Madonna and that of the nymphs in the wood the latter being, rather, an image of the street girl. Any contemporary re-reading of the Dora case history is bound to take account of our postmodern sensibility concerning the construction of texts, the pervasiveness of rhetorical truth and ideology, and what we have learnt from structuralism, deconstruction and narratology about the functioning of texts. Freud is thus seen to present to us a Dora who adores him and regrets her ingratitude. He connects his triumph with Dora’s self-punishment, as if she had finally acknowledged that she had been wrong about him.
