Between Freud and a Naked Woman by Bruno Bosteels

The first structural innovation that strikes the viewer of Feliz nuevo siglo doktor Freud, in comparison with Freud's original "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," is due to the inclusion of additional characters who are not present, at least not directly, in Freud's account and who, in some cases, could not even have been present historically speaking. In particular, Berman draws our attention to Freud's daughter Anna as a figure of contrast and similarity to Dora; she adds the fictive character of the 1970s feminist Gloria; and, above all, she makes Lou Andreas-Salomé into a major interlocutor for Freud already at the time of the latter's treatment of Dora in 1900, even though in fact "Frau Andreas" and the "Professor" (as they refer to each other in their correspondence) would not meet until eleven years later.11 The addition of characters who are technically outside the scope of Dora's clinical case thus allows for a unique syncopation of time, leading to an uncanny superposition of different historical periods or slices of time into an entirely fictive but otherwise not implausible present. It is precisely this simple structural innovation that enables us to take the "happy new century" alternatively as Freud's time or as Berman's, and thus also as our own.

By putting on the stage the character of Anna Freud, furthermore, Berman is able to suggest that Sigmund in some way "learned his lesson" from Dora's treatment, despite its failed and interrupted nature, insofar as he would have transferred onto his daughter the benefits of the insights learned from, yet never applied to, his patient. Witness, for example, the following scene of domesticity-commented upon by Lou in an aside to the audience, as if speaking from a different time frame to an even later moment in history-in which Freud all of a sudden decides to change the hierarchy of the roles of servant and served, child and adult, adolescent girl and elderly man of science: