Eyes, ears, lips, fingertips, secrets: Dora, psychoanalysis, and the body

The topic of secrets will be expanded here to apply to complex secrets of the body, sex, and gender kept by both patients and analysts. Their detection is made harder by our field's current lack of interest in them compared to Freud's curiosity. We tend to ignore body narratives these days, with both men and women, keeping secret from ourselves daily challenges to theory that do indeed exist. Dora's case will be used to examine her own, her father's, and Freud's expectations of what constitutes a sexed and gendered portrait of grown-up males and females, and how they behave together. Contemporary embodied questions will emerge in discussion of Dora and her mother(s), the men in the story, and some male case vignettes. Ordinary secrets, hidden in broad daylight in both 1905 and in 2014, will be "revealed."