by Abby Norman
“You got in—?” he asked incredulously. His gaze fell from mine, dropping to the letter as he inspected it more closely. “Oh my God,” came his wonder across a single breath. He looked up at me again, a smile breaching his lips, his eyes sparkling over his spectacles. “You did it. You got in. You actually got in.”
I blinked, a bit startled by his doubt. But as I watched him processing the news, I realized that his scruples were not unlike those of any other grown-up who had hesitated to believe me, or in me. I didn’t want to think my faith in him had been misplaced. He had been the one who had taught us all about Joseph Campbell’s archetype of the Hero’s Journey—leaving the known world for the unknown, enduring the struggle, becoming transformed—and, in the end, attaining the much-sought-after reward. It was the most ubiquitous story in human history, and he’d been the one who had taught it to us. So how could he not see what seemed so obvious to me? That letter was my ultimate boon. Whether or not he, or anyone else, had even been aware of the strange little saga I’d been living, he couldn’t deny the triumph in its conclusion.
After all, he was holding the proof in his hands.
CHAPTER 5
The body never lies.
—Martha Graham, Blood Memory
THE DISCOURSE ON THE ILLS of women, not just in the psychological and medical community, but culturally, almost always includes a diagnosis of hysteria. Even before it had a name, the concept of what hysteria would become was integral to how women were perceived: they were emotionally labile to a pathological degree, or vulnerable to demonic possession or other manipulations by unseen evils, or perceived as being more likely to sin (intentionally, through their wicked witchery, or unintentionally, because of their fragility or stupidity relative to men).
In the annals of not-that-distant psychology, Sigmund Freud—a nonfriend to women if there ever was one—published a case study about a woman he called Dora that would become one of the most influential case studies ever to grace our contemporary understanding of hysteria. Dora had come of age in the mid-1890s—a period in history when women were constrained physically not just by the limits imposed on them by the men in their lives, but also through the en vogue fashions of the day, which relied heavily on corsets. Whether women were seeking permission or approval, their fathers or uncles or brothers, and eventually their husbands, had a great deal of power over them. For those who began to exhibit functional neurological or other symptoms, physicians and psychiatrists—who were also predominantly male—were thrown into the mix, too.
Among those men who sought to understand hysteria—which they believed to be strictly a female disease—Freud’s theory seemed to be the one that stuck, and it has remained part of the public consciousness ever since. Eighteen case studies—a small sample size, really—were the basis for his belief that the sole cause of hysteria was a sexual trauma that took place during a woman’s childhood. But a woman only became hysterical if she repressed those memories, so that they were left to fester in her unconscious mind. Her first major hysterical “episode” was usually “triggered” by a sexual experience that she had at or after puberty, and Freud believed that the severity of symptoms was directly linked to the frequency with which she’d been sexually abused. He eventually revised his theory to add that an actual sexual experience during childhood wasn’t even a prerequisite for hysteria: if a woman had so much as imagined that she’d had one—or, perhaps, had the memory planted—that was enough to cause hysteria. His theory for curing hysteria, then, was to use the principles of psychoanalysis to help the woman recover the traumatic memories she’d repressed—whether they were based on real events or her “fantasies”—and acknowledge them, at which point her physical symptoms would be resolved.
Dora presented with a troubling constellation of symptoms that, at the outset, like anyone else’s, needed to be attributed to a cause. She had been in poor health most of her life. She’d had episodes of difficulty breathing starting when she was as young as seven, and as she grew up, she was plagued with migraines, had difficulty speaking at times, and had a “chronic cough”—a peculiar symptom that seemed to be somewhat quintessential of hysterics. She was kept at home throughout most of her young life, schooled by governesses and tasked with taking care of her family, who were also prone to ill health, it seemed.
Many scholars at the time would no doubt have thought that Dora’s hysteria arose as a culturally acceptable response to emotional conflict, by which they would have meant, essentially, that her persistent cough was her demure—but increasingly obnoxious—way of expressing how unhappy she was. Freud’s thoughts, however, turned to the sexual: while Dora was no doubt frustrated that she couldn’t receive a real education outside the home, like her brother Otto, Freud ultimately ascribed her more pervasive depression to frustrations of a different nature. He first reaches this conclusion when Dora tells him that after a cousin of hers had appendicitis, she read about the ailment in an encyclopedia, desiring to know what it was. To anyone but Freud this might be a sign of her curiosity and intelligence. But the doctor decided that she must have also read about sexual intercourse in the encyclopedia, and repressed the memory of doing so.
As Dora opens up about her physical symptoms, Freud never asked what any of her other doctors had said; nor did he himself probe for a possible organic cause or explanation. Rather, he based his analysis on a story relayed by Dora’s father sometime early in her treatment. It was this story that became the foundation for Freud’s belief about the girl and her ills. This is interesting, because while the story was about Dora, it did not come from her. Precisely because it was delivered to Freud by her father, it was respected as a matter of fact. It seemed that, during a stay at the lake with a couple who were friends with Dora’s parents, the man—who in the case study went by Herr K.—made sexual advances toward Dora. Naturally this frightened and confused her.
Herr K. denied any fault when confronted by Dora’s father. His wife, Frau K., who had taken a shine to Dora, further defended him by implying that Dora “showed an interest in sexual matters and nothing else.” She had probably, said Frau K., misconstrued her interaction with Herr K. with something she’d read in a book.
Dora’s father told Freud, in no uncertain terms, that he simply didn’t believe his daughter was telling the truth. He refused to break off his friendship with the couple and felt quite sorry, in particular, for Frau K.: “Poor woman, she is very unhappy with her husband, of whom, incidentally, I don’t have the highest opinion.”
Essentially, Dora’s own father sided with the man she had accused of being sexually inappropriate with her because he wanted to remain on good terms with the man’s wife. Even Dora’s mother was an apologist, relaying a story to Dora about how Frau K. had followed Dora’s father into the woods when he had meant to commit suicide, and convinced him that he must stay alive for his family. Dora did not believe this story for a second, assuming instead that the two had probably been caught together in the woods, and her father had fabricated a great story of salvation to cover up their tryst.
Despite Dora’s pleas, her father held firm. He asked Freud to “please bring her [Dora] around to a better way of thinking”—that is, his way. He did admit, though it wasn’t much help, that the entire situation was probably the reason for Dora’s “low spirits, irritability and ideas of suicide.”
Dora later revealed to Freud that the advance by Herr K. had not been the first: years earlier, when she was just fourteen, he had kissed her quite suddenly upon the lips while they were attending a church festival. She told Freud that it had disgusted her—a reaction that Freud said was most certainly a hysteric one.
“I would without another thought consider anyone a hysteric if a cause for sexual arousal evokes overwhelmingly or exclusively feelings of disgust in her, whether or not she shows somatic symptoms,” he wrote in her case study. He called the reaction affective reversal. A healthy girl, he wrote, would have felt genital arousal at such an act. The disgus
t that lingered, morphing into a depression and overall avoidance of Herr K. (or any man who sought only to “engage her in amicable conversation”), seemed to further prove his point.
He also felt that Dora’s problems went back a lot further than her forced sexual awakening. They perhaps began when she was just barely of school age, a time when many children discover that they can use illness as a way to get attention from their parents. Dora had carried this tool of manipulation into her young adult life, Freud reasoned, and was once again employing it, but this time as means to get rid of Herr and Frau K., who were taking her parents’ attentions away from her. In the case of her father, she was using her illness to create an even more tangible hostility.
As for explaining away her physical symptoms (that pesky cough, for one) Freud thought it was caused by a phantom penis—one that only existed in the fantasies of her mind. Dora, he believed, was having unconscious dick-sucking fantasies that were causing her to have a chronic tickling sensation in her throat, which made her cough.
He noted that this phenomenon was common among his female patients, and that it all stemmed from the suckling at a mother’s (or wet-nurse’s) breast, which at one time had been associated purely with comfort, safety, and satisfaction. Combine that with Freud’s Oedipal theories of father-daughter sexual attraction, and his clinical picture of Dora emerges.
Dora had taken care of her father, who had a chronic illness, for much of her youth, during which time she had become his confidante. She was arguably closer to him than her mother was, as her mother had not exactly been in the wifely way with him for quite some time. Dora’s relationship with her father, Freud said, had been shattered by the appearance of his alleged mistress, Frau K., and Freud believed that this disruption was the key event that had precipitated Dora’s own ailments.
As it turned out, Dora’s story had a somewhat tidy conclusion: several months after she stopped seeing Freud for analysis, she reported back to him that she had gone to visit the K.’s after the death of one of their children, intending to reconcile with them. She had called out Frau K. for sleeping with her father—an accusation the woman did not deny—and gotten Herr K. to admit that he had made sexual advances toward her. She had taken this information back to her father, feeling entirely vindicated.
She was feeling very well after this cathartic meeting until mid-autumn, she said, when she suddenly developed another attack of her symptoms. Freud asked her what had caused it, and she said that she had witnessed a man being run over by a streetcar. The man had been coming toward her on the street, and when he saw her he stopped short, right in the midst of busy traffic.
That man was Herr K. She was, of course, horrified—but would it be a stretch to imagine there was relief in there, too?
She told Freud that she no longer spoke with Frau K. or with her father, and was instead “focused on her studies and had no intention of marrying.” (With glib satisfaction, Freud noted at the end of her case study that she did eventually marry.)
ALTHOUGH I’D READ ABOUT DORA’S case in high school, she would invariably come up again during my freshman year at Sarah Lawrence. When I arrived in the fall of 2009, my housing was an apartment building on Midland Avenue called Hill House that was a solid fifteen-minute walk to campus. I hardly minded, though, because as a freshman it meant I had an apartment with a kitchen, bathrooms, and living spaces. It was co-ed, and three of my five suite-mates were male.
Although Rebecca was my first college friend, and the friendship that ultimately endured once I left, she lived down the hall from me freshman year, and we met through the person I actually shared a room with: a diminutive but fiery girl from Ithaca named Ali. She was an incredibly gifted musician and artist, and despite the fact that she was considerably more outgoing than I was, we quickly hit it off. Almost straightaway, we fell into a routine of huddling together to watch Bones every week. She took to comparing me to the titular character, Temperance “Bones” Brennan: a crime-solving forensic pathologist and somewhat socially inept genius who had been kicked around the foster care system (ultimately escaping it). I tried to focus on the more positive aspects of the comparison, though there certainly may have been more than a grain of truth in the less flattering ones.
While I might have been called chatty and personable in high school, I immediately withdrew into myself once I started college. I think my two solid years of psychotherapy beforehand—while ultimately necessary and something I didn’t regret at all—may have made me a little too cognizant of my defects. Particularly my tendency toward exasperating enthusiasm. So, that first year, I didn’t talk much—except by making an occasional attempt to insert some witty retort into the conversation, which I couldn’t resist. Instead, I spent most of my social hours observing. I was delighted by my studies, and therefore focused on them, and I devoured my new surroundings. I remember waking up every day and leaping out of bed, wanting to fully experience every single sensation of my days from start to finish. The sound of the boys rustling in their room, searching for socks beneath their alpine piles of laundry. The smell emanating from the apartment of our next-door neighbor, David, who baked the most amazing cookies at one o’clock in the morning. The sound of my shoes slapping wet pavement as I hustled across campus to my first lecture. The acrid taste of the coffee in the dining hall that I learned to tolerate, and the countless early mornings I spent alone, having my breakfast under a large tree as birds chirped above my head and professors lumbered sleepily toward their offices.
This sudden burst of keen interest in every minute of my life was an entirely new experience for me. Even when I inevitably felt bogged down by schoolwork that kept me up late in the library, or endured dance injuries that benched me for a few days, there was never anything that truly discouraged me. I began to feel as though everything was an opportunity, a choice. I felt that I was in complete control of what happened to me.
Those around me—friends and professors—took me for who I wanted to be. Who I was trying so eagerly to become. My intellectual intensity was rewarded and a source of praise from my professors. Perhaps they sensed that I was desperately in need of their praise, or maybe—just maybe, they actually meant it.
My adviser was the head of the dance program—Sara Rudner, who had been the muse of the incomparable Twyla Tharp. She was well into her sixties by the time I studied under her, but she was still teaching a full schedule and choreographing with the same passion she had in the 1970s, when she had danced with the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Christopher Janney.
I actually didn’t have a very meaningful dance background when I arrived at Sarah Lawrence. I had begun attending dance classes in early childhood, as many little girls do, and had I not had such a nomadic existence, they no doubt would have continued with more consistency. I had the basics down, having continued my lessons sporadically when possible, but I had not been able to develop my skills beyond what repertoire productions of musicals had required of me. And I loved the art of dance, though I knew very little about its history. Eager to learn, I loaded up on history and critiquing courses as well as actual dance classes, which took up the majority of my week.
I had no aspirations about becoming a professional dancer, but I did like to envision dances without actually being part of them. Choreography and critique appealed to my auditory and visual senses, and I knew—from learning about the work of Agnes De Mille, who was not regarded as a technically proficient dancer herself, but was certainly lively, and has a beloved place in the canon of dance history—that for a lot of people, that could be enough.
One of the reasons I knew I would never dance professionally, or even as well as the majority of my classmates at the barre, was that I struggled to comprehend the meaning of my body in space. Growing up, I had always been perceived as being “too much,” and I had internalized this perception of myself until it became a deeply rooted belief. I later came to understand that it prevented me from being particularly good at moving through the wo
rld. I could never escape the notion that I was not wanted, wherever I was. The dance studio was no different. Taking up space, breathing in air, having a place at the barre—I didn’t feel like I deserved it. While I hadn’t acquired much evidence to the contrary in my life before I arrived at Sarah Lawrence, once I got there, I was imbued with not just permission to be there, but to be alive. I still remember the night I was standing on the sidewalk with one of the girls in my dance class, Rachel, waiting for the shuttle. It was late, and I was tired, and as we were talking about the challenges of our dance curriculum I teared up under that streetlight. I told her that, really, I wasn’t a dancer. I had never had consistent training. There were dancers in our class who were already in companies, who had expensive leotards instead of tattered hand-me-downs.
“I’m not a dancer,” I said, expecting Rachel to agree with me. She certainly was a dancer, and one that I had come to admire a lot because not only could she dance, but she could make dances.
She didn’t agree with me, though. Instead she laughed, shaking her head of dark curls.
“You love dance, don’t you? Even when it’s hard?” she asked, her voice the only sound cutting through the night, as if campus and the street had hushed so that I’d hear her clearly.
“Yeah,” I said, my mouth curling around a smile that felt too big for my mouth. “I do.”
“Look down,” she said, “Look at your feet. Look at how you stand.”
I looked down at my feet: turned out, first position.
“You are a dancer!” she laugh-yelled in that overtired way that always seems a little magical in the dark, cool hours of the night. We giggled as we turned sloppy, joyful pirouettes on the sidewalk in the moonlight.