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Essay / « Freud's Anna O and the Meaning of Private Theater ". Abstraction reveals in itself two distinct personalities, and therefore a notable self-awareness. It cannot be that in the middle of a reverie she described the experience, because she would no longer dream. This thought doesn't seem random either. It is a most refined abstraction revealing at least a partial understanding of the nature of his fantasies, if not the nature of his illness. It is coherent and astute German, the product of intelligent thinking. It is astonishing both that she was able to reach this level of understanding after three pages, and that the invisible hand of Breuer and Freud never tells us exactly how far they went to get there. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Since the case history hides the context, the only way to make sense of the phrase is to trust Breuer's explanation. He writes: "The young girl, who overflowed with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her Puritan-minded family. She embellished her life in a way that probably influenced her decisively in the direction of her illness , engaging in systematic practices of daydreaming, which she describes as her “private theater”. While everyone thought she was present, she was living fairy tales in her imagination... She pursued this. activity almost continuously while attending to her household chores, which she carried out without exception... "The long quote is the best way to achieve this. understand the relationship between the sentence and the patient. What first emerges is a world of opposites: an “intellectual vitality” opposed to a “monotonous existence”; “fairy tales” versus “attend”; “activity” versus “household chores”. “Private theater” is therefore much more than a simple “daydream”. It is an escape from a specific setting, from a fortress backed by his “puritan-minded family”. However, his “household chores” are always “done”. Unlike the “final direction of one’s illness,” reverie is a silent and imperceptible rebellion. At this early stage, the patient is "always on the spot when spoken to." Daydreaming is such a temperate activity, it displays such restraint, that Breuer calls it a simple “embellishment” of life, a solitaire game played for the same purpose. It is only later that she will act in a “naughty” way by “hallucinating[s]”. For now, the affliction is artistic and non-violent. Hence the expression “private theater”, as opposed to the public nuisance that it will become. But the expression has not lost all its meaning. Breuer compares the plays to “fairy tales,” an analogy that strips the expression of its realism by emphasizing liveliness: a play is subject to rules that a fairy tale is not. An accurate parody of real life is equally inessential, but a play is doomed to a stage on which the characters must move exactly as we do. Magic is possible, but depends on the audience's capacity for abstraction. On stage, a frog cannot actually transform into a prince. In this sense, the "private theater" foreshadows the real symptoms of Anna's hysteria. This is therefore an allusion to the fact that she dreams of "throwing cushions at people", of "pulling the buttons out of her sheets", because, of course, she cannot assume a supernatural feat. idea, we find that it is unclear whether Anna is the author or the audience or, as is probably the case,both. In fact, she scripted the work in her unconscious and looks at it with maximum awareness. With her “great poetic and imaginative gifts,” Anna creates plays that exist in an impossible realm, since a play is by definition public. It’s a show for everyone to enjoy. Thus, a “private theater” is as confusing an oxymoron as a “public newspaper.” This contradiction is perhaps the subtext of any work of art that the artist creates only for himself. But in the case of a hysteric, the theater seats must fill up. Like the suicide note that Dora hides in her office for her father to find, the characters must say their lines to someone, even if the speech is so garbled that only a psychoanalyst can be a fair critic. Hysteria is then the means of making this private theater public. Anna was visited by a compulsive need to play her own characters. The curtain on his psyche slowly lifted and out came the fits, the coughs, the squints and a whole host of symptoms that are no longer content to work for the director's eyes alone. As Breuer says in his conclusion, "daydreaming... prepared the ground on which the affect of anxiety and fear could be established. This implies that the greater the tension between the room and reality , the greater the tendency to hysteria, Dora also suffered from the tyranny of the kitchen. “She was,” writes Freud, “on very bad terms with her mother, who tried to get her to participate in the work of the kitchen. house". She attended "women's conferences" to escape, it seems, the call of the rag. Once again, the two worlds are too far apart to be coherent. From there, the hypnooid states take over. their example Now that the pieces are at our disposal, the stories capture our attention. Instead, she falls prey to “the deafness caused by the shaking” or by “the fear of the. noise.” Both plots have “origins” in Anna’s past. Both are reenactments. Dora also plays out events that happened years before, whether in reality or fantasy. So if hysteria is theater, then only stories are on show. “Hysterics”, Freud and Breuer teach us in their “Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena”, “suffer mainly from reminiscences”. Therefore, the treatment must establish a clear relationship between the memory and the one who remembers, between the play and the playwright. Just as an artist can say of his most disturbing work, "I didn't really write that," so too can a hysterical appeal to the unconscious principle. “I haven’t really experienced that.” Implicit in the “private theater” is Anna's impossible belief that she is not participating in the productions; the theater is played, always in the passive voice. The psychoanalytic method requires the absolute attribution of paternity, in daydreams, nocturnal dreams and their physical expression, the hysterical “scenes”. The means to achieve this is speech. Anna “talks” about her hysteria. Exactly at the moment when her “poetic vein dried up” following the deployment of her reserves, her symptoms disappeared after she explained their origin. The work of Freud and Breuer was to allow Anna to understand what each symptom represented, to explain how the piece worked to its creator. It goes without saying that authors are notoriously resistant to criticism. There is, however, a downside to me making the Anna metaphor as much as I do. To what extent exactly is the concept of abreaction reconcilable with the model of private theater becoming public? It seems here that the director/playwright suddenly dissolves into his main character; there.
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