Sheila Kohler is the author of ten novels, including Cracks and Becoming Jane Eyre, as well as numerous prize-winning short stories. She will be talking at the American Library in Paris on December 10th about her newest novel, the critically acclaimed Dreaming for Freud.
a Paris Writers News interview
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Laurel Zuckerman: What drew you to the story of Dora and Freud?
Sheila Kohler: I read the case history first as a student of psychology in Paris at the Institut Catholique. We were assigned the "Cinq Psychanalyses" by our professor: and I began reading the first one, the Dora case, on an airplane going home to South Africa in the Christmas holidays. As I turned the pages, fascinated by the story and Freud's brilliant analysis, I began to feel ill. Was I , like Dora, hysterical and getting her illness by osmosis, I wondered. When I arrived in Johannesburg my mother greeted me with the words, "You look feverish," and it turned out I had caught the measles! Still, I never forgot the case history, but came back to it many years later and reread in a different frame of mind. I was appalled by Freud's arrogance, his "rage to cure," the way he thrust his interpretations down the poor young girl's throat! I wanted to give her a voice which she does not have in the case, but as I wrote Freud elbowed his way in and I felt sympathy and admiration for this youngish man, starting out his career and trying to prove his dream theory. He had just published his book on dreams and sold very few copies. I came to see them both as two struggling individuals very much like you and me.
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