7 Thomas Brown (January 9, 1778- April 2, 1820) was a Scottish metaphysician. His works includes The Physiology of the Human Mind, and his Lectures on the
Philosophy of the Human Mind.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Brown_(philosopher)> ; Johann Friedrich
Herbart (May 4, 1776 – August 11, 1841) was a German philosopher, psychologist, and founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbart>
is real, but they also listen to their stories, believing that it is in those stories that a cure can be found. Freud begins Dora’s treatment by asking the whole story of her life and illnesses, but even so “the information I receive is never enough to let me see my way about the case” (1905e [1901]: 16). Similarly, Dr. Jordan is interested in
everything Grace tells him, as “the small details of life often hide a great significance”
(AG 162), but he is confused by Grace’s narrative. Freud and Breuer take Charcot’s discoveries on hysteria out of the medical theater into their consulting room. Likewise, Dr. Jordan doesn’t adopt the “abreaction” or “hypnotism”; instead, his
psychoanalytical methods emulate Freud’s.
Dr. Jordan uses an early form of “talking cure,”8 which plays an important part in Grace’s treatment. Because Grace’s lawyer, Kenneth MacKenzie, often teaches her to keep silent and tells her how to act, Grace is used to remaining silent, and her lawyer nicknames her “Our Lady of Silence” (AG 373). So it is difficult for Grace to start talking, for she has not talked very much for the past fifteen years and is not used to having her opinion asked (AG 67). In her first meeting with Dr. Jordan, Grace withholds her suppressed memory through silence, and she plays the part expected of her, thinking “I have a good stupid look I have practiced” (AG 38). However, Dr.
Jordan wishes her to tell what she really wants to say regardless of others’ opinions, which makes Grace feel she is taken seriously for the first time. She thinks, “now I feel as if everything I say is right. As long as I say something. Anything at all” (AG 69). Dr. Jordan is trying to lead Grace into remembering the event on the day of the murders in order to solve the riddle of her guilt or innocence and establish his own medical reputation.
8 “Talking cure” is a term originally offered by Josef Breuer’s patient Bertha
Pappenheim, also known as Anna O., along with “chimney sweeping,” to describe the talking therapy that has relieved her of her hysterical symptoms. See: Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. (1893a[1892]). “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication.” Freud, Standard Edition 2: 30.
Dr. Jordan explains to Dr. DuPont that he has begun with the method based on
“suggestion” and association of ideas in order to restore Grace’s vanished memory (AG 84). Since“there is an inner World to be discovered” in the study of the mind, Dr.
Jordan hopes that he might in time “make a modest contribution” in the field (AG 300). To plumb the secret he believes buried in Grace’s mind, “I have begun,” writes Dr. Jordan to Dr. DuPont,
with a method based on suggestion, and the association of ideas. I am attempting, gently and by degrees, to re-establish the chain of thought, which was broken, perhaps, by the shock of the violent events in which she was involved. (AG 85)
According to The Language of Psycho-analysis, “association” influences the thinking of “young Freud,” and “it was integrated and transformed by Freudian discovery of laws of the unconscious” (Laplanche and Pontalis 41). Added also is this finding:
Associations…correspond in Freud’s view to a complex organization of memory….set up according to various methods of classifications….the idea (Vorstellung) or the memory-trace (Erinnerungsspur) of a single event may be found in several of those groups which Freud still referring to as “mnemic systems.” (Laplanche and Pontalis 41)
As a representative of young Freud, Dr. Jordan is eager to prove his theory by obtaining the vegetables with which he has been hoping to prod Grace’s memories and find Grace’s memory-trace of the murders (AG 144). In one of Dr. Jordan’s theories, the right object ought to evoke a chain of disturbing associations in her (AG 90), for the vegetables that are dug out from the earth and saved in the cellar can be compared to the memory buried in Grace’s mind, which is what Dr. Jordan wants to dig into. Everyday he brings a fruit and a small object in front of Grace and asks her to tell him what it causes her to imagine in an attempt to “evoke a chain of disturbing
associations in her” about the deaths in the cellar where Nancy’s body is discovered.
For example, he brings many root vegetables, hoping to secure a connection that will lead downwards: Beet-Root Cellar－Corpses, or even Turnip－Underground－Grave (AG 90). Applying “free association,” Dr. Jordan encourages Grace to say what she wants to say rather than what he wants to hear. Like Dora, Grace is also uncooperative and has intentionally treated his offerings simply at their face value. The apple Dr.
Jordan gives Grace on the first day of meetings is supposed to be associated with the Tree of Knowledge and the sin Eve commits. When Dr. Jordan asks what an apple makes her think of, she thinks: “He’s playing a guessing game, like Dr. Bannerling at the Asylum….The apple of the Tree of Knowledge is what he means. Good and evil.
Any child could guess it. But I will not oblige. I go back to my stupid look” (AG 40).
Dr. Jordan tries to make sense of Grace’s narrative through his medical theories, so does Grace smartly use those same concepts to construct her own narrative. She triumphantly sees through Dr. Jordan’s purpose: “he thinks all he has to do is give me an apple, and then he can collect me” (AG 41). From the beginning, Grace not merely suspects that Dr. Jordan is just another doctor who views her as “a sight that must been seen” (AG 244) but also smartly knows that he “is a collector” (AG 41) whose intention is to collect her fragmented memories in a scientific manner. When Dr.
Jordan asks her to tell her story, she thinks that “perhaps I will tell lies” (AG 41).
When Dr. Jordan asks what she thinks about the things he has brought, Grace only says things to keep him happy (AG 66). Although failing the association of various kinds of root vegetables, Dr. Jordan doesn’t give up the method of free association, and thus brings a silver candlestick in order to remind Grace of the cellar into which Nancy’s body is thrown. Seeing through his purpose, Grace still claims that she has no recollection of giving the kerchief that strangles Nancy to McDermott. At least, Dr.
Jordan feels frustrated and gives up the method of giving Grace various vegetables in
order to incite Grace’s association, and he decides to let Grace tells what she’d like to talk (AG 242). On the day their talking comes at last to the murders, Dr. Jordan openly reminds Grace that he simple wishes to know what she actually remembers. While he turns to the subject that the butcher testifies that he has spoken with Grace on the murder day, Grace begins to say “but I cannot remember it” again (AG 317). He tries in vain to open her up because Grace manages to tell him as little as possible of what he wants to learn (AG 133). Since the root fruit and the candlestick fail to help Grace associate them with the corpses, Dr. Jordan begins to try to ask about Grace’s dream in order to trace something. Uncooperatively, Grace knows immediately that Dr.
Jordan is interested in her dreams “because a dream can mean something” (AG 100).
She has seen through Dr. Jordan’s mechanism and has decided to keep her secret. “I can’t remember,” she lies to him, “I cannot remember what I dreamt last night as it is something confusing (AG 101). Without doubt, Dr. Jordan writes that down. For the hysterics, the psychical trauma is “intentionally” repressed from her conscious thought and cannot be disposed of by means of association (1893a [1892]: 11). The
“free association” turns out to be a total failure, for Grace is too smart to be plumbed.
We have to bear in the mind that “Grace’s reconstruction of her life story is not only governed by her own interpretation of events, but forecast by her repression of certain traumatic events of the past” (Staels 431). According to the idea mentioned in Freud’s “The Psychotherapy of Hysteria,” in fact, the unpleasant memory of the murders can be likened to “the incompatible idea,” which has been “intentionally”
repressed from the patient’s conscious thought. It is inhibited and repressed because of the resistance and repulsion of the patient’s ego (1895d: 269). In her interior monologue, Grace feels that she is shut inside the doll of herself and her true voice cannot get out (AG 295). Grace has left Ireland without much sense of a homeland because of her poor miserable childhood memories which always make her feel
uncomfortable, as she tells Dr. Jordan, “I don’t recall the place very well…; only in scraps, like a plate that’s been broken….; and there are the empty spaces, where you cannot fit anything in” (AG 103). It implies that she prefers to leave the unpleasant memories behind, and lets the gaps in her memory empty rather than to recall them, including the memory about the murders. According to Mrs. Moodie’s accounts of Grace’s confession, she denies the memory of it (AG 78). As a pre-Freudian American psychoanalyst with an incomplete knowledge of psychoanalysis that would later make right, Dr. Jordan is completely lost in Grace’s design of seductive labyrinthine quilted from her fragmentary pieces of memory and is fascinated by Grace. Although Dr.
Jordan feels frustrated because “she’d told him only what’s chosen to tell. What he wants is what she refuses to tell; what she chooses perhaps not even to know” (AG 322), he has no ability to overcome Grace’s resistance. Dr. Jordan is amused at the remarkable association of ideas in one’s own mind, but cannot figure out the associative mechanisms operated in the insanity’s mind (AG 60). For her, silence, evasion and amnesia become a means of defense. Since “amnesia” is very easy to fake, Grace’s “amnesia” seems to be her “conscious disingenuousness” that is intended for her purposes. Grace molds her tales to Dr. Jordan’s needs and uses her tale for her own ends. Freud says that the resistance offered by the patient includes a careful collection of memories in which “pathogenic recollections” are avoided.
Grace only tells what she believes Dr. Jordan wishes to hear and insists that she has lost the part of memory concerning the murder. Despite Dr. Jordan’s effort in trying to persuade her to remember the day of the murders in the hope of restoring her mental health and determining whether she is innocent or guilty, Grace has determined from the beginning that, “In any case I can’t remember, I can remember other things but I have lost that part of my memory entirely” (AG 41). “That part of memory” is exactly what interests Dr. Jordan: the part concerns the murders.
In “Screen Memories,” Freud says that a hysteric shows pathological amnesia for the psychical significance of an event or experience which leads to the illness (1899a:
303). Therefore, it is understandable that Grace claims that she suffers from
“amnesia” and cannot remember what happened to the murder of Nancy and Thomas.
Dr. Jordan’s theories lead him to believe that a hidden nugget of Grace’s memory needs to be dug up in order to solve the murder mystery, and thinks that Grace loses her memory for some hours only during a normal-enough fit of hysteria. Grace, however, thinks that “there are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again” (AG 26). Grace purports to have no memory of the murders.
The aversion of Grace’s ego has driven the details of the murder, the pathogenic idea, out of association and memory. Because the only memory Grace seems to have forgotten is the murder details during the fits of hysteria, Dr. Jordan suspects Grace’s honesty and has an uneasy sense that Grace’s recollections is a way of drawing the mind away from some hidden but essential fact (AG 185). He is sure that Grace knows she is concealing from him. Later on, Dr. Jordan also realizes that things arouse painful memories in the mind are forgotten by the subject’s will. Grace’s will, in his eye, is of “the negative female variety－she can deny and reject much more easily than she can affirm or accept” (AG 362). Grace’s denial of “the memory of it (the murder)” is in fact a “not wanting to know” rather than a “not knowing.” As Dr.
Jordan reflects, Grace has “told him a great deal; but she’s told him only what she’s chosen to tell; what she chooses perhaps not even to know” (AG 322). MacKenzie has said in terms of the criminal element, “forgetting is a good deal more convenient than remembering” (AG 373). Grace’s lawyer has taught her
not to tell the story as I truly remembered it, which nobody could be expected to make any sense of; but to tell a story that would hang together, and that had the chance of being believed. I was to leave the
parts I could not remember, and especially to leave out the fact that I could not remember them. And I should say what must have happened, according to plausibility, rather than what I myself could actually recall.
(AG 357)
As she says to herself, “so that is what I attempted to do” (AG 357), she apparently practices this skill with the stories she tells Dr. Jordan and readers, which is her way of hysterical defense. What the reader knows is only the selective information.
Atwood points out, “it is dependent on what she remembers; or is it what she says she remembers, which can be quite a different thing” (“In Search” 36). Just because Grace says she does not remember having committed the crimes does not mean that she is innocent. As a hysteric, the crimes are exactly what Grace does not want to remember and have been repressed in the unconscious. Dr. Jordan comments on Grace’s case after the hypnotism scene, which raises the theory of the unconscious and the
mechanics of repression in the human mind. “Perhaps,” says Dr. Jordan, “we are also
－preponderantly－what we forget” (AG 471). Atwood talks about the significance of forgetting in her lecture “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction,”
For history, as for the individual, forgetting can be just as convenient as remembering, and remembering what was once forgotten can be
distinctly uncomfortable. As a rule, we tend to remember the awful things done to us and to forget the awful things we did.” (1505)
Howells thinks that Atwood’s novel is “foregrounding the dimensions of amnesia in Canada discourse of nationhood….via the personal forgetting of Grace Marks”
(“Don’t Ever” 38). After analyzing Alias Grace within the framework of hysteria study, I regard Grace’s intentional forgetting as a mechanism of hysterical repression.
According to Freud, resistance is the analysand’s unwillingness to recollect the
repressed memories or saying everything that comes into her mind. “Hysteria
originates through the repression of an incompatible idea from a motive of defense” (.
1895d: 285). Anything that obstructs the analyst’s access to the analysand’s unconscious or the continuation of the treatment can be a kind of resistance.
Repression is a particular “defense mechanism” in that the patients wish to forget certain things, “and therefore intentionally repressed from his conscious thought and inhibited and suppressed” (1893a [1892]: 12). Freud points out that the process of repression or “reactive reinforcement” is “often achieved by means of an excessive reinforcement of the thought contrary to the one which is to be repressed” (1905e [1901]: 55). Therefore, although Grace has a good memory and tells Dr. Jordan a great deal about her childhood, her journey by ship from Belfast to Canada, her time in domestic service, and her life as a prisoner, she cannot remember the violent events of the murders. She remembers anything but what actually happened in the murders.
She smartly tells Dr. Jordan that she remembers some of the things she does. But there are other things others say she has done, which she cannot remember at all (AG 295).
Freud mentions that many recollections of the hysterics “might be described as the first stage of repression” which are “surrounded with doubts. At a later period, the doubts would be replaced by a loss or a falsification of memory” (1905e [1901]: 17).
Grace has repressed the truth because of her psychical repression, and the truth has been kept back by her or has not occurred to her mind. Because of “the gaps in her memory” or the presence of “amnesia,” her confession in the court and her narrative in the treatment are different from each other, both of which are full of doubts. Freud states that as “the practical aim of the treatment is to remove all possible symptoms and to replace them by conscious thoughts, we may regard it as a second and
theoretical aim to repair all the damages to the patient’s memory” (1905e [1901]: 18).
As far as Dr. Jordan is concerned, he is so eager to plumb the truth that he ignores the
aetiology of Grace’s symptoms, which he regards as a digression from the truth. As an inadequate doctor, Dr. Jordan fails to “fill gaps in the hysteric’s story” (Showalter 85) or to overcome her resistance to recollection. The more Grace remembers and relates, the more difficulty he keeps track of the pieces (AG 291). Thus, he has failed to
“translate into conscious ideas what was already known in the unconscious” (1905e [1901]: 49). Freud stresses that “the affect attached to an unconscious idea operates more strongly and…more injuriously than the affect attached to a conscious one”
(1905e [1901]: 49). Dr. Jordan’s method of “suggestion” turns out to be a failure because “recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result” (1893a [1892]: 6). In other words, only when the recollection of the memory brings “the discharge of affect” can the recollection be effective as therapy. In the case of Grace, she is just another Scheherazade who tells stories to keep the Sultan amused. Because she has merely been telling him what needs to tell in order to accomplish her desired end, that is, to forestall Dr. Jordon’s departure, and make him stay in the room as long as possible (AG 377), her recollection produces no affects, and “the truth” continues to exist in her unconscious after repression. Therefore, Dr. Jordan not only fails to repair the damages to Grace’s mind but also to remove Grace’s symptoms or to
replace them by conscious thoughts after the talking cure. In fact, such methods as Dr.
DuPont’s “hypnosis” and Dr. Jordan’s “suggestion” are rejected essentially because
“the passive resistance that certain patients set up against them” (Laplanche and Pontalis 395). Neither “hypnosis” nor “suggestion” can overcome or interpret Grace’s passive resistance.
Chapter Three Dream and Hysteria