Page 43 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 37

In a reading similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s, Jane Gallop deconstructs the Dora
case, another of Freud’s interpretative narratives laced with the concerns about
cleanliness, dirt, class and gender. Specifically, Gallop investigates the
composite figure of the governess/maid/nurse as she relates to the ‘mother’ and
to the question of transference. For Gallop, the maid’s presence in the family
constitutes the most pointed ‘intrusion of the symbolic into the imaginary’, an
intrusion that inscribes the ‘economic’ and ‘extra-familial’ on to the otherwise
imaginary homogeneity and unity of the family (1982:144). One of the illusory
features of the psychoanalytic imaginary is precisely the assumption of a private
sphere that encloses the family absolutely, that psychically constitutes and
positions all its members outside of economic exchange.
The fallacy of this assumption, made manifest in the Dora case, surfaces in the
figure of the mother. As Gallop puts it, ‘they [Freud and Dora] think there is still
some place where one can escape the structural exchange of women. They still
believe that there is some mother who is not a governess’ (1982:147). She
concludes, ‘In feminist or symbolic or economic terms the mother/wife is in a
position of substitutability and economic inferiority. For the analysis to pass out
of the imaginary, it must pass through a symbolic third term…a term that
represents a class’ (1982:148).
Gallop draws a comparison between the psychoanalyst and the governess or
maid on the basis that both are paid for their services and dismissed from the family
at the whim of their employer. This connection is one that Freud did not analyse,
because in Dora’s narrative, the governess is seduced and abandoned, a debased
and dirty identification that Freud could not tolerate (Gallop, 1982:147). Yet the
case, both as Freud wrote it and as Gallop interprets it, contains another narrative
of familial contamination, debasement and payment for services, articulated once
again around a related confusion of sexual acts and cleaning practices.
One of the very few comments that Freud makes about Dora’s mother is that
she suffered from ‘housewife’s psychosis’. Felix Deutsch, an analyst who treated
Dora after Freud, observed that this psychosis consisted ‘of obsessional washings
and other kinds of excessive cleanliness’, mannerisms that Dora inherited from
her mother. Deutsch remarks: ‘Dora resembled her [her mother] not only
physically but also in this respect. She and her mother saw the dirt not only in
their surroundings, but also on and within themselves’ (1957/1985:41). Indeed,
Dora’s mother apparently died from cleaning too much: ‘I learned from my
informant… [S]he worked herself to death by her never-ending, daily cleaning
compulsion—a task that nobody else could fulfill to her satisfaction’ (1957/1985:
43).
Writing about the notion of heterosexuality that Dora received from her mother,
Maria Ramas notes that it was ‘equated with contamination and self-destruction’.
Dora’s father had almost certainly infected her mother with syphilis and Dora
‘knew how he had become so…she understood that he [had led] a loose life’
(1985:159). Ramas then identifies another cleaning scene, left out of Freud’s
account, that shapes the obscure margins of the Dora case. In this scene, Kathe