Response to Dora

Well, now enough time has elapsed that my initial impressions concerning Dora have faded and my observations have become muddled. So this will be hardly be the essay-length response I envisioned it to be... but in the interest of getting this monkey off my back:

I greatly appreciate how Freud is continually modeling the processes he describes in his own texts. Since I'm new to Freud's work (and psychoanalysis in general) I really could only detect the processes from Dreams (Freud's subtle invocation of secondary revision stood out particularly strong in the "Prefatory Remarks" section) although now that I've finished the text and have been introduced to transference as a psychoanalytic concept, I see that Freud was modeling it in the text all along (or is that just my own secondary revision...?).

All in all, this makes plain the necessity of reading each of Freud's work more than once. Dreams certainly wouldn't have made a bit of sense (especially that infamous "Dark Forest" at the beginning!) if I hadn't gone through it twice (once last term on my own, and again this term for this Freud seminar), and I'm sure that Dora would be much more lucid if I had the time to go through it again as well.

...but alas, that's not going to happen anytime soon. C'est la vie d'un étudiant, non?

Blogging Dora, Part [?]

This term, I'm taking a seminar on Freud -- and loving every minute of it. (Freud is such a clever -- and creepy -- writer!) I've already made my way through Dreams, and this week I read Dora. I had planned to type up some thoughts on Dora as I was going through the text, but I got through it surprisingly quickly (it's a much faster read than Dreams) and as such, I wasn't as thorough in my note-taking. Instead of composing several posts on different sections of Dora, I think I'll just dedicate a single post to a variety of bits that jumped out at me.

But, no time for that now. Biopolitics calls me. Dora can wait until this afternoon. Or, more realistically, a few days from now.