Erella Brown

In Portrait de Dora (1976), Helene Cixous explores the possibility of feminine theater by rewriting Freud 's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria for stage performance. Anticipating her Nom d' Oedipe (1978), Portrait takes as a pretext the myth of Oedipus, which underlies Freud's analysis of the case history, as central to both psychoanalysis and classical drama. Indeed, Portrait de Dora along with her Nom d' Oedipe are innovative attempts to define feminist performance by placing psychoanalysis and classical drama under the scrutiny of the theatrical. By locating Freud's case-history within theater,' Cixous underscores the theatricality of psychoanalytical discourse as the "talking cure," using voice, gestures, staging, ritual, and myth, in order to scrutinize the relationship between the semiotics of symptoms as the "acting out" of the hysteric body and the Symbolic order that authorizes its meaning. Moreover, as Sharon Willis observe...