post-print self-archived version – please cite published printed version 
 
Gladhart, Amalia. "Transference and Negotiation: Sabina Berman Plots Dora and Freud." 
Trans/Acting: Latin American and Latino Performing Arts. Ed. Jacqueline E. Bixler and Laurietz Seda. 
Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2009. 125-42. 
 
 
Transference and Negotiation: Sabina Berman Plots Dora and Freud 
 
Amalia Gladhart 
 
The past and our knowledge of it is a recurring theme in plays both traditional and 
experimental. Staging the past becomes a way to clarify what really happened, either in 
the shared, public past of historical experience or in the imagined past of invented 
characters. Theatre is at once immediate (live performance) and distant (relegated to the 
audience's memory almost at once, yet often written down in the form of a script, 
available to the memory of either spectator or critic). Potentially reproducible, codified 
yet variable, the theatre  provides a rich arena for the consideration not only of the 
concrete events of a specific past, but of the way in which individuals or groups might 
have access to that past. In plays such as Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud (2000) and 
Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (1993), Sabina Berman reinvents historical characters–
and the process of historical discourse–through a theatrical lens. Berman's plays reveal a 
variety of historical themes, among them the conquest of Mexico (Aguila o sol, 1985), 
the French theatre  (Moliere, 1998) and the Inquisition in Mexico (En el nombre de 
Dios/Herejía, 1996/1983). This essay will consider Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud and 
the ways in which identities and perceptions are transferred, negotiated and reinvented.1 
The play, clearly based upon historical events, nevertheless hinges on the interplay of 
characters determined to define (or defend) a particular version of a private memory 
imperfectly shared. It is a play of transference and transmission, as the roles are replayed 
  
and, in the process, communicated (again) to the audience. Transference in Berman's play 
might best be thought broadly, not only in the psychoanalytic sense but in terms of 
transfer or exchange, as roles are shared, gestures are appropriated and plots are reworked 
or translated from one version to another, from one historical time period to another, from 
one individual memory to another.  
The plot of Feliz nuevo siglo is essentially concerned with the negotiations of the 
characters surrounding what happens between and among them but also–perhaps more 
importantly for its larger theoretical implications–what happened in the past and what 
they make of it. The audience, too, is left with multiple, sometimes contradictory, 
representations. In the century that has elapsed since Freud's analysis of Dora, the 
multiple Freuds of Berman's play have been supplemented by myriad interpretations, 
both laudatory and highly critical, of Freud and his work. Freud's work on human 
sexuality has been a point of reference, even for those who take issue with some or all of  
his ideas.  Berman's play acknowledges Freud's influence while drawing attention both to 
the content of Freud's writings–was he wrong about Dora?–and to the intrinsic instability 
of any conclusions based on attempts to reconstruct and interpret individual memories.  
The characters' disagreements about the plot further reflect a difficulty of representation, 
particularly the representation of the past, a difficulty the play highlights but which it 
does not necessarily resolve.  
Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud, premiered in Mexico City in November of 2000, 
presents the famous case of "Dora," discussed in Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a 
Case of Hysteria," first published in 1905. The play combines scenic fragmentation, few 
actors in multiple roles, and repeated (re)enactments of a few scenes to highlight a 
  
reading of Dora as both misunderstood and abused by the men who surrounded her. Feliz 
nuevo siglo comprises a rapid sequence of 21 scenes, many of which present action in 
widely separate parts of the stage. The "reading" of Dora's case that the play outlines 
suggests that Dora, in fact, was not all that neurotic. The play presents Freud's narrative 
of the case, Dora's disagreement with his conclusions, followed by her attempt to flee to 
Leipzig and study on her own, and her rape on the train by Herr K. Dora returns to 
Freud's office some years later. In the final scene Dora and Ana Freud cross paths, and 
Freud begins writing, closing with the memorable words, "Una infelicidad. . . general y 
difusa. . . es el signo. . . de la buena adaptación" [a general and diffuse. . . unhappiness. . . 
is the sign. . . of successful adaptation].2  In Berman's play, Dora's sexuality is a tangle of 
crossed desires and understandable fears; she is at once ingenuous and knowing, 
victimized and manipulative, self-assured and defeated. 
Peter Brooks argues, in Reading for the Plot, that "plots are not simply organizing 
structures, they are also intentional structures, goal-oriented and forward-moving."3 
Brooks' theory, drawing heavily on Freud, is particularly apt here, as it describes the 
workings of plot and highlights the importance of transference, two elements central to 
Berman's theatrical representation of Freud. The plot of Freud's analysis of Dora must be 
her treatment and eventual cure–though this is frustrated in both the original case history 
and in Berman's play–but the history play is structured by another level of plotting, the 
preexisting structure of the historical record. The intention, then, is double (or multiple), 
as the events of the past, perhaps relatively random or disordered in their first occurrence, 
are re-plotted into a more or less fictionalized scheme. Freud's case study, it should be 
stressed, represents a first deliberate plotting, that is, a narrative shaping of events. In 
  
addition, in the plot of Dora's analysis itself, as detailed in the published case study and 
as performed in the play, there is disagreement as to intention, for the determination of 
what is to be cured remains at issue. Berman's play, finally, in its re-presentation of 
Freud's case study, plots those events yet again.  In doing so, it replays both the 
importance Freud's plotting of Dora has had for subsequent writers, and the ways in 
which Freud inserts–plots–Dora into an interpretative framework that she patently does 
not fit.  The complexities of Dora's inner conflicts, misconstrued or repressed in Freud's 
analysis, evidently fall beyond the scope of his interpretive lens. 
Feliz nuevo siglo presents an example of what Freddie Rokem terms "performing 
history." Rokem writes: "History can only be perceived as such when it becomes 
recapitulated, when we create some form of discourse, like the theatre, on the basis of 
which an organized repetition of the past is constructed, situating the chaotic torrents of 
the past within an aesthetic frame."4 Rokem argues further–his study centers on 
contemporary stagings of the French Revolution and the Holocaust–that "the theatre can 
seduce us to believe that it is possible for the actor to become a witness for the now dead 
witnesses."5 In contrast to a play like Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda, in which the one 
fully historical character (Villa) seems as much a figure out of a movie as out of the past, 
in Feliz nuevo siglo all of the characters are drawn from the historical record. Even 
Gloria, in her 1970s attire, might be taken for Gloria Steinem.6  The history performed in 
Feliz nuevo siglo is also a part of the history of sexuality, and particularly of Freud's 
interpretation or distortion of Dora's sexuality and the long-lasting echoes of those 
interpretations across the 20th century. Berman's play "redoes" the case of Dora, plays it 
again and redoes it as one might redo a room, but also redoes it a deeper sense, that of 
  
repeating a past action in hopes of getting it right. Thus, the actors do seem to become 
witnesses for the absent, misunderstood young woman masked by the name of "Dora." 
Whether their witnessing can achieve justice for Dora, and what shape that justice might 
take, remains an open question. 
In The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson asserts that the drama "has always been 
centrally concerned not simply with the telling of stories but with the retelling of stories 
already known to its public."7  Feliz nuevo siglo falls within this tradition and makes 
implicit claims to both familiarity and truth. The audience has heard the story before, and 
believes that the events–or some version of them–really happened. According to Rokem, 
"Theatrical performances about historical events are aesthetic adaptations or revisions of 
events that we more or less intuitively (or on the basis of some form of general 
knowledge or accepted consensus) know to have actually occurred. The theatre, by 
performing history, is thus redoing something which has already been done in the past, 
creating a secondary elaboration of this historical event."8 That "redoing" in turn is often 
far from simple. Rokem suggests that "What may be seen as specific to the theatre in 
dealing directly with the historical past is its ability to create an awareness of the complex 
interaction between the destructiveness and the failures of history, on the one hand, and 
the efforts to create a viable and meaningful work of art, trying to confront these painful 
failures, on the other."9 Redoing a destructive or painful past reawakens some of that 
violence in the present–hence the delicate tension that Rokem describes.  The history 
play's engagement with an identifiable past may further press the audience to recognize 
its present in the past portrayed. The play may highlight the negotiation inherent in all 
  
communication; it may offer an interpretation of events that goes counter to accepted 
histories, and/or question the nature of theatrical representation.  
The historical episode that Berman here chooses to reenact centers on a past in 
dispute at the time (the question of who did what to Dora; Freud's disbelief, mirroring her 
parents', of Dora's accusations). Memory offers the only access to the material to be 
analyzed. Memory is always in a sense working on borrowed time, available and present 
only so long as the individual survives, and concerned with a time (the past) that is no 
longer directly available. Moreover, memory is conditioned by loss, and is as much a 
process of forgetting as of retaining information. As Freud works through Dora's 
analysis, memory becomes something that hides, that is hidden. Yet Dora is also, with 
Freud, part of the "memory," the historical record, of the 20th century. And memory, of 
course, is activated in the attention of the theatrical audience as well. As Brooks points 
out, "memory–as much in reading a novel as in seeing a play–is the key faculty in the 
capacity to perceive relations of beginnings, middles and ends through time, the shaping 
power of narrative."10 In other words, there is no plot without memory.11   
In the case study, Freud himself acknowledges the role of memory in the writing 
of the case, noting two, widely separated, moments of recording and interpretation: "The 
wording of [Dora's] dreams was recorded immediately after the session, and they thus 
afforded a secure point of attachment for the chain of interpretations and recollections 
which proceeded from them. The case history itself was only committed to writing from 
memory after the treatment was at an end."  Freud does not, however, suggest that the 
reliance on memory undermines his case. On the contrary, he asserts that "the record is 
not absolutely–phonographically–exact, but it can claim to possess a high degree of 
  
trustworthiness."12 Intriguingly, the "photographic memory" so often used as a short-hand 
description of superlative accuracy is here transposed to the realm of sound.  But in 
transcribing his recollections of Dora's words–transferring them to the page–Freud enacts 
yet another transfer, this time of medium.  Dora, no longer present, takes on a purely 
textual existence.  The "Dora" available to Berman's theatre is the accretion of Freud's 
contemporary accounts combined with subsequent writings–by Freud on other topics, and 
by others on Freud's work. 
One premise of Berman's play would seem to be that the accuracy Freud claims to 
have achieved is overstated. Freud is presented as having mistaken Dora's symptoms and 
their causes at every turn. If his memory has not failed him, his chain of interpretations 
has. When Dora resists Freud's reading of her dream, accusing him of an unwillingness to 
take her side, Freud tells her that, if the dream does not mean she loves Herr K, her No 
must be a Yes. Dora, perplexed, demands, "¿En qué planeta un No es un Sí?” [On what 
planet is a No a Yes?] to which Freud replies, "el inconsciente" [the unconscious]. Dora, 
defeated, concludes, "Si cae cara usted gana, y si cae cruz yo pierdo" [If it falls heads you 
win, and if it falls tails, I lose].13 Here, Berman's Dora echoes the historical Freud who, as 
Peter Gay notes, wrote a paper long after Dora's partial analysis in which he 
"characterized the analyst's problem of proof with the English saying, 'Heads I win, tails 
you lose'."14   
Freud ascribes the failure of Dora's analysis, in part, to the fact that he failed fully 
to understand the transference at work.15  Brooks underscores this point, and goes on to 
suggest that Dora's case "reads like a flawed Victorian novel, one with a ramifying cast of 
characters and relations that never can be brought into satisfactory form."16  In staging 
  
Dora's case, Berman presents one attempt to re-form the material, to give it a shape that 
might, as Brooks writes elsewhere of a process of narration and transference, work "to 
make an obsessive story from the past present and to assure its negotiability within the 
framework of 'real life'."17 In Feliz nuevo siglo, an obsessive story of the past–the story of 
Dora so frequently reconsidered and reinterpreted–is brought into the "real life" of the 
stage. Brooks' discussion of transference and narrative addresses certain of the tensions 
between past and present evident in Berman's play. A key element in any narrative, as 
Brooks emphasizes, is its capacity for transmission–the teller requires a listener. Brooks 
argues that the analyst reshapes the analysand's flawed, incomplete story, "attempting to 
translate it back into the terms of the past."18 That is, to return to the story the meaning it 
had in the past–a meaning, in the case of Dora, very much in dispute. Brooks suggests 
that "there is in the dynamics of the transference at once the drive to make the story of the 
past present–to actualize past desire–and the countervailing pressure to make the history 
of this past definitively past."19 Berman's reenactment of a reenactment takes it a step 
further, as the meaning Dora's story had in the past is given new meaning in the present. 
There are two stories being told in this play: the story Dora tells to Freud and the story of 
Freud's analysis of Dora (a story that goes beyond the material contained in his case 
study).  
In the play, Freud appears in triplicate. Freud 2 is also, with a slight change of 
costume, Herr K, the husband of Dora's father's mistress and the man Dora accuses of 
having kissed her inappropriately and sexually propositioned her. Freud 3 is also Herr F, 
Dora's father. Dora is surrounded, and the discourse of the three becomes equivalent. The 
transformation occurs in front of the audience, making the point yet more clearly. For 
  
example, Freud 2 "se quita el bisoñé y saca de la bolsa de su pecho las puntas de un 
pañuelo rosa: ya es Herr K" [takes off the hairpiece and pulls from his breast pocket the 
tips of a pink handkerchief:  he is now Herr K].20 The multiple Freuds provide, among 
other things, a visual representation of transference: according to Freud, Dora saw in him 
first her father and later Herr K. The dual roles played by Freuds 2 and 3 make it clear 
that they are, for all intents and purposes, speaking with one voice. In similar fashion, the 
same actor plays the young Dora, Ana Freud and Gloria. That Dora is also Gloria 
suggests gently that Gloria's is "her" voice in the future. Moreover, the requirement that 
the same actor play both the young Dora and Ana Freud highlights Freud's identification 
of his patient with his daughter. Finally, a single female actor plays all the remaining 
female characters, among them Martha Freud, Frau K, Lou Andreas Salomé, Frau F, 
Rank and the adult Dora. 
Suffering from shortness of breath, loss of voice and a persistent nervous cough, 
Dora–Ida Bauer–was treated by Freud in 1900 at her father's request, a treatment cut 
short by Dora herself. She has been and continues to be the subject of numerous studies, 
plays and fictional accounts.21 The published Dora case is itself preceded by explanatory 
notes by Freud, which are in turn dramatized in Berman's play as Freud explains to the 
audience his motives in publishing the case study. The three Freuds, in a mutually 
interrupting chorus, protest the way his publications have been read, at least in "morbosa 
Viena" [morbid Vienna] as romans à clef, "noveluchas," [cheap novels] "pornográficas" 
[pornographic], "al estilo Sherlock Holmes" [in the style of Sherlock Holmes], "sin 
ningún valor científico" [without any scientific value].  Freud concludes, "Esto debido a 
su énfasis en el tema sexual y, según me han explicado, a la fina redacción de la que soy 
  
capaz" [This is due to their emphasis on the sexual theme and, according to what I have 
been told, the fine writing of which I am capable].22  What Freud's texts say is already in 
dispute, even before the action of the play begins. Berman's Dora is no passive victim, 
and she is fully aware of Freud's textual identity. She manages to insult Freud even as she 
asks him to autograph his books for her, noting that the titles were extremely hard to find. 
Though the scarcity of his books might be an index of high demand, Freud's response–
"parpadea: tiene su orgullo, no le gusta saber que las librerías no tienen su obra" [he 
blinks; he has his pride, he does not like to think that the bookstores do not have his 
work] –suggests that he resents Dora's insinuation that his books have been poorly 
distributed.23 
Freud acts as narrator and intermediary, introducing to the audience the scenes or 
episodes to be enacted or redone. The three Freuds, and the dual roles played by Freuds 2 
and 3, ensure that Freud's interpretive presence is never far from center stage. Scene 2 
presents the meeting between Freud and Herr F, Dora's father, in which the latter 
describes his daughter's symptoms. Dora, physically separated from the two men, 
nonetheless experiences the physical impact of her father's blows. When Dora accuses 
him of lying, Herr F, in Freud's office, states, "La abofeteé" [I slapped her] and Dora 
receives the blow.24 The division of the stage allows for the dramatization of a dispute 
that would otherwise appear only as narrative recollection. Dora's narrative to Freud is in 
turn a redoing or reliving of the experiences that are allegedly at the base of her hysteria. 
The play points up a central redoing (performing) and a memory problem embedded 
within the events it sets out both to reproduce and to question. The transmission of Dora's 
  
experience is blocked, to the extent that Freud is unwilling or unable to accept her point 
of view.  
Freud's explanation to the audience serves to clarify the "plot" and guide audience 
interpretation. His explanation also reminds the spectator that the issues in question on 
stage are also "in question" over time: the meaning has not yet been resolved. At various 
points, Freud's explanations to the audience drown out the words of the other characters. 
For example, at the end of scene 3, Herr F "sigue hablando pero no lo escuchamos 
porque Freud nos habla directamente a nosotros" [continues talking but we do not hear 
him because Freud speaks directly to us].25 Freud fills the stage–and dominates the plot–
both verbally and physically. Dialogue is reproduced through Herr F's retrospective 
narration of events, yet the speakers remain physically separated, and the events 
described belong to the past of the play's action. Thus, Herr F describes Dora's suicide 
attempt to Freud: 
HERR F: Encontré la carta, subí a su habitación, como le he dicho. Dora 
tenía en la mano un frasco de sedantes, se lo tiré de la mano. . . 
En otra área menos distante que la de su primera aparición, Dora tiene la 
mano extendida, abre la palma y caen unas pastillas rojas. . .  
HERR F: Guardé el frasco de sedantes en mi saco. Ella me dijo. 
DORA: Has elegido. Yo debo morir. 
HERR F: Le pedí que fuera sensata, pero ella siguió en su tono dramático.  
DORA: Es natural: te conviene creerle a él, porque tú y ella son amantes.26 
 
  
[HERR F: I found the letter, I went up to her room, as I have told you.  Dora 
held in her hand a bottle of sedatives, I tore it from her hand. . . 
In another area, less distant than that of her first appearance, Dora has her 
hand extended; she opens her palm and a few red pills fall. . . 
HERR F: I put the bottle of sedatives in my jacket.  She said to me. 
DORA:  You have chosen.  I should die.   
HERR F: I asked her to be sensible, but she continued in her dramatic tone.  
DORA: It's natural:  it serves you to believe him, because you and she are 
lovers.] 
As in the previous scene, Dora accuses her father of lying and adds, "Todo sería más fácil 
para ti y esa puta" [Everything would be easier for you and that whore].  Again her father 
says, "La abofeteé" [I slapped her]; again, Dora "recibe la bofetada" [receives the 
blow].27 The element of repetition is important, both as part of memory and as a key 
component of theatrical representation. Repetition is ultimately fundamental to all 
memory. Patrick Hutton describes what he terms "two moments of memory: repetition 
and recollection. Repetition concerns the presence of the past. It is the moment of 
memory through which we bear forward images of the past that continue to shape our 
present understanding in unreflective ways. . . . Recollection concerns our present efforts 
to evoke the past. It is the moment of memory with which we consciously reconstruct 
images of the past in the selective way that suits the needs of our present situation."28 The 
play is an act of recollection, an evocation of the past that encloses, within its action (or 
plot) prior acts of repetitive recollection. As an act of recollection, the play is a deliberate 
and selective recreation. Undertaken in the present, the act of recollection is part of a 
  
reevaluation of the significance of Dora's case from the vantage point of the turn of the 
21st century. 
The play is marked by the repetition of gestures as well as words. Freud's habit of 
touching his ear so as to surreptitiously look at the clock occurs several times. This 
skillful staging of a small neurosis reflects, in its repetition, the obsessive nature of the 
characters and as well the theatricality of the piece. Dora moves physically closer to 
Freud over the course of several scenes, and finally, at the end of scene 3, is seated on the 
divan in Freud's office. Freud, using Dora's own quotation mark gesture, tells her "existen 
recuerdos 'nerviosos'" [there are 'nervous' recollections] and goes on to explain, "El 
recuerdo es real para ti, te lastima. Pero es importante que aquí aclaremos si sucedió en el 
mundo exterior o en tu imaginación" [The memory is real to you, it hurts you.  But it is 
important that here we clarify whether it happened in the exterior world or in your 
imagination].29 Freud adopts Dora's gestures as a way of quoting, and perhaps mocking 
her, a small action that nonetheless contributes to the tangled relationship of mingled 
familiarity and distance between the two characters. Importantly, the exchange of 
gestures works in both directions. Freud, whether deliberately or involuntarily, identifies 
himself with Dora. Dora, in turn, notices what Freud believes (or hopes) is a subtle 
gesture and takes it on as her own. As she prepares to leave their final session, Dora, too, 
scratches her left ear with her right hand so as to, "en imitación de Freud," [in imitation 
of Freud] look at the clock on the desk.30 Dora's appropriation of Freud's gesture is one 
more way to turn the tables: she is no passive object of analysis but actively resists 
Freud's interpretation–and appropriation–of her experience, her way of moving through 
the world. 
  
Jacqueline Bixler points out the intertextual self-reference, in Feliz nuevo siglo, to 
Berman's 65 contratos para hacer el amor, an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's La 
Ronde.31 The reference to Schnitzler's play is also important in theatrical terms, calling 
attention to the role of the theatre  in forming perceptions. In the case of Feliz nuevo 
siglo, we watch a play in which Dora's memories of another play, repressed and 
reconfigured, are said to explain her behavior. Dora's "perversions" are blamed on her 
exposure to "indecent" material. Herr K says, rather accusingly, to Herr F, "Su padre la 
lleva al teatro; la llevó a La Ronda, el último escándalo del nuevo teatro vienés" [Her 
father takes her to the theatre; he took her to La Ronde, the latest scandal of the new 
Viennese theatre].32 Noting that in an hour and a half La Ronde describes some ten 
seductions, one every seven minutes, Herr K argues that it is perfectly normal that such a 
play would feed Dora's imagination.33  Berman's Dora, in turn, has no trouble pinpointing 
the source of her problems. Her own self-diagnosis clearly comprehends her physical 
symptoms as a reflection of her entrapment or incapacity to act, likening her cough to an 
active, if ineffectual, resistance. She tells Freud that her nervous cough is far preferable to 
the asthma she suffered as a child, and even reflects improved conditions in her home, as 
compared to the "ambiente . . . irrespirable" [suffocating. . . atmosphere] of earlier years. 
When Freud asks why coughing is preferable, Dora explains: "el asma es así. . . (Imita 
tener asma.) No poder hacer nada. Y toser es para afuera, así. . ."  [asthma is like this. . . 
(She imitates having asthma.)  Being unable to do anything.  And coughing is toward the 
outside, like this. . .].34 Coughing represents a positive action, an attempt to expel a 
contaminant and to resist stasis. 
  
Dora's attempt to speak for herself, whether with words or with her insistent 
coughs, is hindered at every turn. Even those who might seem to be her allies are unable 
or unwilling to defend her. An important character in the play is Lou Andreas Salomé 
(1861-1937), best remembered for her friendships with Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud, 
though she was a novelist and critic in her own right and a practicing psychoanalyst.35 
Lou Salomé appears as Freud's interlocutor, listening to his description of his treatment 
of Dora and asking for further clarification. Lou, "una mujer madura de gran estilo" [a 
mature woman of great style], asks Freud, "Y entonces, en esta sesión que usted me 
narra. . ., ¿habló usted o habló ella?" [And then, in this session which you are relating, did 
you speak, or did she?] to which Freud replies, "Dora," while Lou, to the audience, 
confirms "Él" [He].36 Again, present dialogue and distanced reenactment coincide: 
DORA: Pero yo no quiero ser una mujer. 
LOU: ¿Lo dijo tal cual? 
FREUD: ¿Por qué no, Dora? 
DORA: ¿Por qué sí? ¿Para ser la sirvienta de un hombre? 
LOU: (A nosotros.) Como su mamá. O como Frau K, que es una cortesana 
al servicio de su padre. O como casi cualquier mujer en nuestra 
cultura: siempre supeditada a los varones.37 
 
[DORA: But I don't want to be a woman.   
LOU: She said it in so many words? 
FREUD: Why not, Dora? 
DORA: Why?  So as to be a man's servant?  
  
LOU: (To us.) Like her mother.  Or like Frau K, who is a courtesan at the 
service of her father.  Or like almost any woman in our culture:  
always subject to men.] 
Lou urges Freud to recognize Herr K's aggression against Dora, but she is unable to 
redirect his thinking. The three Freuds later confirm Dora's "homosexual tendencies" and 
her attraction to Frau K, desires exacerbated by her own identification with her father as 
well as by her father's wish that she should be his heir.  As Lou puts it, "para el padre ella 
también es él" [the father also sees her as himself].38 When the men discuss Dora's 
reaction to Herr K's advances in terms of the sexual arousal that "cualquier mujer besada" 
[any woman kissed] might feel, Lou offers an alternative explanation, suggesting that 
Dora experiences not a spreading arousal but fear and rejection:  "El rechazo.  La 
protesta.  Un NO expresado con el cuerpo entero" [Rejection.  Protest.  A NO expressed 
with the entire body].39  Acknowledging this No, Freud sees it only as a response to 
Dora's recognition of her a priori mutilation, the castration intrinsic to womanhood. Her 
cough is a protest at being "irremediablemente, sólo una mujer" [irremediably, only a 
woman].40  It is not, in Freud's view, an attempt to expel the contaminated air that she 
feels is poisoning her. 
Listening to Freud's misogynist description of a woman as "un hombrecito sin 
pene" [a little man without a penis] Lou tells the audience, "Me sentí insultada, claro, y 
sumamente mujer. Como si un rubor recorriera todo mi femenino cuerpo" [I felt insulted, 
of course, and extremely female.  As if a flush covered all of my feminine body].41 On 
another part of the stage, dressed in the style of the 1970s, another woman appears, 
Gloria, who argues, while the three Freuds enumerate the absurd results that would no 
  
doubt follow should the Viennese suffragists succeed, that it is natural for any human 
being to resist being enslaved. Lou admits, ultimately, that she was unable to say no to 
her intellectual father and points out the impossibility of applying contemporary terms to 
older debates. She instead underscores Freud's genius in discovering the subconscious, 
which she likens to adding an entire cellar to the "house" of culture.  
Lou suggests that culture is "una casa hecha de ideas y no podemos pensar nada 
fuera de esa casa" [a house made of ideas and we cannot think anything outside of this 
house] and goes on to argue "Esto lo estamos hablando en otro tiempo; cuando sucede 
esta conversación entre usted–una feminista de los años setentas–y yo, Dora ya es un 
caso clínico célebre y yo llevo cuarenta años muerta. Por eso, de hecho, es que apenas 
ahora, en esta discusión imaginaria, se me puede ocurrir el símil de cultura y casa–por un 
sueño que Dora tuvo durante su tratamiento. Usted recuerda: Una casa se incendiaba y 
Dora dentro de la casa se asfixiaba" [We are talking about this in a different time; when 
this conversation takes place between you–a feminist of the 1970s–and me, Dora is 
already a celebrated clinical case and I have been dead for forty years.  It is for that 
reason, in fact, that only now, in this imaginary discussion, could the simile of culture 
and house occur to me–because of a dream that Dora had during her treatment.  You 
remember:  A house was burning and Dora inside the house was suffocating].42 In her 
dialogue with Gloria, Lou can recognize that Dora's culture was suffocating her, yet she 
admits that such a critique never occurred to her at the time. She notes that, "A nadie de 
los astutos y brillantes alumnos de Freud se les ocurrió, por lo demás. Excepto–qué 
curioso–a Dora, una niña de 17 años" [To none of Freud's astute and brilliant students did 
it occur, moreover.  Except–how curious–to Dora, a seventeen-year-old girl].43 In 
  
describing the situation, Lou can also call on Gloria's cultural memory–"usted recuerda" 
[you remember]. There is the visual irony as well, given that the same woman plays both 
Dora and Gloria: of course she remembers. Bixler notes that, "Como mujer, y más aun, 
como mujer de ciencia a fines del siglo, Lou no puede ocupar el centro del escenario. 
Aparece y habla varias veces, pero siempre desde un lado del escenario y casi siempre al 
público" [As a woman and, moreover, as a female scientist at the end of the century, Lou 
cannot occupy the center of the stage.  She appears and speaks several times, but always 
from one side of the stage and nearly always to the audience].44 Lou is presented as a 
contemporary of Freud's who could and should have said more and yet she is excused due 
to time, circumstance and cultural pressures. Although the actors appear to become 
witnesses for the long dead Dora or Lou, it is a fictional witnessing, as this exchange 
reminds us. The plot is a later, and also variable, construction. 
Dora's pleasure in trying shock Freud with her sexual knowledge is evident, as 
when she says of Frau K, "Con ella hablo de sexo" [With her I talk about sex].45  Yet 
Dora remains in some ways a child, so that while her description, to Freud, of Frau K's 
affair with her father includes explicit references to Herr F's impotence, when the sexual 
encounter is reenacted for the audience, it is highly stylized:  "Como si fuera un luchador 
de lucha grecorromana Herr F tumba a Frau K–es la percepción de una niña–.  Frau K 
cae de rodillas frente a él" [As if he were a Greco-Roman wrestler, Herr F knocks Frau 
K down–it is the perception of a girl–.  Frau K falls to her knees in front of him].46 The 
link between narration (telling) and performance is again important here, for while Dora's 
words express a self-conscious sophistication, the audience also sees her father's affair 
performed as if though a child's eyes.  Yet the reenactment is at the same time a staging 
  
of Freud's understanding of Dora's words: the childishness of Dora's perceptions may 
reflect Freud's views much more than her own imaginings, as is suggested when Freud, 
drawn back from his reverie by Dora's request for a mint, "sacude la cabeza para dejar 
de imaginar el coito" [shakes his head so as to stop imagining their coitus].47 
Berman's play goes on to stage Dora's mutilation, invoking a cure that Lou 
describes as "cirugía mayor" [major surgery].48  As Lou explains, "Si la enfermedad de la 
mujer independiente es un falo imaginario, hay que cortar el falo" [If the illness of the 
independent woman is an imaginary phallus, it is necessary to cut off that phallus].49 As 
Freud approaches, Dora lies on a gurney in a surgical theatre, covered with a sheet.  
When Freud uncovers her, the naked Dora sobs "como un animal herido" [like a 
wounded animal], further emphasizing her less-than-human status as a woman.50 The 
surgery, however, is interrupted by Dora's insistence that she is suffocating, in her dream, 
not for the reasons Freud asserts but because the cigar smoke of the men who surround 
her makes it impossible to breathe.  
Feliz nuevo siglo stages the process of Freud's work as well as the end result. As 
father-figure to Dora, Freud also refracts the representation of Freud as father.  The 
audience sees Freud at work in his study, struggling to find the clearest expression of his 
ideas. Freud's writing is interrupted by his daily life, in the person of his wife and his 
daughter, who at different times enter the study to call him to supper. Meditating upon 
the insights gleaned from his treatment of Dora, Freud highlights among them the 
transference and is at that moment surprised by his daughter Ana, bearing a tray: 
ANA: Papá 
FREUD 3: Tales como la transferencia / 
  
FREUD: (Alzando despacio el rostro) Sí, Do. . . 
FREUD 2: ¿Do. . .? ¡Dora! 
FREUD 3: No; Ana. Ana.51 
 
[ANA: Papa 
FREUD 3: Such as the transference/  
FREUD: (Slowly looking up) Yes, Do. . . 
FREUD 2: Do. . .? Dora! 
FREUD 3: No; Ana. Ana. ] 
Here Freud's transference–not Dora's–is enacted, as he makes of his daughter his patient. 
Ana Freud is present for many of the discussions between the three Freuds or between 
Freud and Lou. She appears initially in an entirely subservient role, offering to serve 
coffee or tea to her father and his guests (or to the several Freuds) but she is eventually 
invited to sit down and join the conversation. Still, her participation in the discussion is 
equivocal. Although Lou confirms that, "desde esa tarde, se sentó a menudo con nosotros, 
aun cuando habláramos de casos clínicos," [from that afternoon on, she often sat down 
with us, even when we would discuss clinical cases] her speech is at first limited to offers 
of sugar or cookies; between these terse interventions, Ana freezes.52 The slippages of 
parental identification are further complicated when Freud first praises Lou as a "mujer 
de excepción" [exceptional woman] and then asks that she "ocupe en la Psique de mi hija 
el lugar de la Madre" [occupy in my daughter's Psyche the Mother's place]. Lou, speaking 
directly to the audience, concludes: "así fue que fui la madre de la hija de mi padre 
intelectual" [so it was that I became the mother of the daughter of my intellectual 
  
father].53 The element of humor in this scene, carried in the tongue-twisting rhythm of 
Lou's repetitive "así fue que fui," also tends to highlight the absurdity of Freud's 
proposition as he seeks an intellectual "mother" to his daughter, thereby "re-doing" his 
own family at the same time that he seeks to treat (and cure) the families of others.  Ana's 
participation in later scenes, however, is more authoritative, and she takes her place as 
her father's colleague. Although the fact that she is a woman might tend to disrupt the 
continuity of Freud's work, and perhaps begin to counter his misogyny, because Ana is 
also his daughter, she remains to some extent in a subordinate position. She is his 
intellectual heir, so that, in carrying out her work, she also carries forward his. Lou, by 
contrast, were she to receive her due, would have to do so as an equal. Such equality, in 
Berman's rendering of Freud, remains impossible. 
For her final session with Freud, on December 31, Dora appears dressed as a man, 
visually indicating that his treatment has failed. Rather than acceding to the prescribed 
emplotment, and the restrictive gender roles it offers, she takes on the outward 
appearance of the dominant gender.54 Dora resists Freud's arguments that she must 
continue her treatment, and finally leaves, wishing him a happy new year–and new 
century. She is off to the university in Leipzig. Yet her escape is unsuccessful: the male 
costume affords her neither male autonomy nor freedom of movement. On the train she 
encounters Herr K, who reaffirms his love for her and later, after the train has twice 
passed through a tunnel–evident to the theatre audience in the abrupt cutting of the 
lights–Herr K "le ha tomado violentamente por el pelo con una mano mientras con la 
otra la abraza: exactamente el mismo movimiento que le conocimos con su esposa, Frau 
K. Levanta su ropa y la penetra con un dedo, una y otra vez, mientras el grito de ella se 
  
pierde en el aullido del silbato del tren" [has taken her violently by the hair with one 
hand while he embraces her with the other:  exactly the same movement that we saw with 
his wife, Frau K.  He lifts her clothing and penetrates her with a finger, again and again, 
while her cry is lost in the howl of the train whistle]. Lights out again: another tunnel, 
"éste muy largo" [this one very long].55 If Freud's diagnosis of homosexual desire is 
correct, Dora's desire for Frau K is here punished by Herr K's assault; Dora does not get 
to "have" Frau K, but is instead forced to replace her.  Herr K substitutes Dora for his 
wife, just as Freud has earlier substituted her for his daughter.  Dora becomes a kind of 
wild card, the token of multiple transferences far beyond the transference in her own 
treatment that Freud acknowledged he had failed to master. As celebrated case history, 
moreover, the experience of the historical Ida Bauer is subordinated to multiple 
rereadings and redoings of the fictional Dora and her truncated analysis.  The shopworn 
"train in the tunnel" and the treatment of Dora that repeats the treatment of Frau K by her 
husband foreclose Dora's attempted escape with another cluster of repetitions, so that the 
audience sees Dora trapped in her own circular life story and in an alien script. Dora's life 
story is circular because, in a historical play, the audience already "knows" the ending. 
More important, however, is the alien script of a gender role that Dora can neither 
adequately perform nor successfully evade. 
The scene in which the founders of psychoanalysis ice skate together and pose for 
commemorative photographs offers another kind of redoing, an enactment of a visual 
document, in this case one of the group portraits taken at the various international 
congresses. Immediately following the presentation of Dora's violation on the train to 
Leipzig, scene 19 opens with four prosperous men skating. Otto Rank, facing the 
  
audience, explains, "El Comité Central de la Sociedad Psicoanalítica Internacional, una 
tarde de invierno de 1913: patinando" [The Central Committee of the International 
Psychoanalytic Society, a winter afternoon in 1913:  skating].56 The early luminaries of 
psychoanalysis introduce one another in turn, each reciting the titles of his or her 
numerous books. Ana Freud takes her place at the center of the group beside her father 
and recites her titles as well. All of the skaters assemble for the photograph, and the scene 
ends with the burst of a flash bulb.57 The dramatization of the scene establishes a tension 
between the photographic image frozen in time–and our sense of the "reality" of that 
photograph–and the way it is made to move and "live" again on stage. The mannered 
grace of the skating rink is an appropriate ground for the highly choreographed 
presentation of the great men. Visually, the scene suggests that the psychoanalysts 
occupy shaky ground: they are poised on a slippery slope, they are skating on thin ice. 
But perhaps more important is the evocation of balance and strength, for Freud is able to 
glide across the ice untroubled by the "bumps" on the surface that a case such as Dora's 
ought to represent. The placement of the scene within the structure of Berman's play also 
implies that the peaceful–even playful–afternoon skating outing of this group of scholars 
and physicians depends upon the disappearance of Dora's messy and uncomfortable 
complaints.  
In the play's final scene Dora, now 32 years old, is again seated in Freud's office. 
She is pale, worn, her heavy makeup giving her the appearance of a geisha as if, in a way, 
she were now in female disguise.58 She describes her life–an unfaithful husband, a son, 
night-school classes in sociology and art history–and tells him she has heard much about 
his daughter's work as a psychoanalyst. She describes her pride at being identified as one 
  
of Dr. Freud's famous cases, but Freud ultimately does not have time for her. As she 
leaves, she runs into Ana Freud, and helps her retrieve some dropped papers, watching 
the other woman as an example of what might have been. At this point, Ana is played by 
the actress who also played the young Dora, so that the sense of possibilities lost is the 
more poignant. The play closes with Freud, carefully writing his next work. 
From the perspective of 21st century feminism, Berman's Freud is almost too easy 
a target, a straw man whose fundamental misogyny is often laughable.  What the 
theatrical representation of Freud and Dora offers, however, is a demonstration of both 
the issues involved in the case and a part of the reason for its staying power, for Freud's 
persistent influence:  the performance that is the doing again, that brings the past into the 
present, and that makes visible, in the staging, the repetitious patterns of memory.  The 
citation necessarily recapitulates–repeats, redoes–the original statement, so that the 
theatrical Dora is at once a copy of and a variation on the original.  As in the transference, 
the Dora on stage stands in for the off-stage, ultimately inaccessible historical Dora.  
Feliz nuevo siglo suggests a plot–in the sense of complot–against Dora, a cultural plot or 
trap from which she cannot escape. The play presents a reading of Freud. But the play–
like the Dora case–is also about the representation of and access to the past. The past in 
this play, like Dora's story, is both public and private. It is terribly private in this case–
intimate–and yet unquestionably public, in the way that Freud, adding his cellar onto the 
house of culture, made the subconscious available. Dora lost her privacy. Pseudonym 
aside, her identity is today widely known. The witnessing power of theatre  offers a 
chance to use theatre to clarify what really happened, either between characters or in the 
historical record. Yet that "really" may be unknowable, unattainable. The history play's 
  
redoing is necessarily a repetition, one that cannot erase or undo Dora's initial 
circumstances even as the witnessing play offers an alternative plot to guide our 
understanding. On stage, Dora becomes a witness. She acts her past again. And a new 
century opens, without a satisfactory resolution.