Between Freud and a Naked Woman by Bruno Bosteels

So please, therapists and analysts, since she is not castrated, even though she may be unsure of her rights and abilities, don't you castrate her. - Marie Langer, From Vienna to Managua: Journey of a Psychoanalyst

In January of 2001, theater-goers in Mexico City were treated to a "scene" worthy of Charcot's notorious seances with hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris: On the stage, a young woman called "Dora" is lying naked on an operating table, flanked by two characters called Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, both of them fully dressed-when the latter announces in an aside to the audience that the doctor has decided to perform "major surgery" and is preparing his symbolical scalpel to "castrate" his patient: "If the illness of the independent woman is an imaginary phallus, we must cut off the phallus. "1 The scene, in which Freud struggles with a woman still boldly talking back at him, even though she now finds herself exposed in the utmost vulnerability of her naked body, comes toward the end of Feliz nuevo siglo doktor Freud (Happy New Century, Doctor Freud), itself a dramatic rewriting of the famous case of Freud's Dora by the Mexican playwright, journalist, producer, and psychologist by training, Sabina Berman. Directed by Sandra Félix, with superb stage design by Philippe Amand, the play at the time of its opening featured Ricardo Blume in the role of Sigmund Freud, Marina de Tavira as Dora (as well as both Anna Freud and Gloria, described in the stage directions as a 1970s-type feminist, dressed in black and with short hair-I will return to this combination of roles in a single actor, which is the exact opposite of the reduplication of actors for one character that happens in the case of Freud), Juan Carlos Beyer as Freud 2 (also Herr K. and Otto Rank), Enrique Singer as Freud 3 (also Herr F., a railway worker, and Carl Gustav Jung), and Lisa Owen as Lou Andreas Salomé (also Frau K., Martha Freud, Frau F., Dora as adult, and Ernest Jones).