Re-Imagining the Female Hysteric: Helene Cixous' Portrait of Dora (Critical Essay‪)‬

In her 1976 play Portrait of Dora, prominent French feminist theorist and playwright Helene Cixous constructs an interpretive re-reading of Sigmund Freud's case study entitled Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. (1) Published in 1905, Freud's study documents his treatment of an eighteen-year-old girl named Ida Bauer (for whom Freud uses the pseudonym of Dora) who commenced analysis with Freud in 1900 and abruptly ended her treatment after only eleven weeks. In his case study, Freud details Dora's dreams and memories and his own analysis of them in an attempt to uncover the root of Dora's psychological condition, which Freud diagnoses as hysteria. As numerous feminist critics have observed, Freud's understanding of Dora is limited by his patriarchal and hetero-normative frame of vision. (2) In Portrait of Dora, Cixous exposes Freud's phallocentric biases and focuses upon the contradictions, exclusions and gaps in his case study. She creates an alternative version of events to that documented by Freud by reconstructing the narrative from Dora's perspective and showing the oppression of Viennese bourgeois life at the turn of the century.