us to suppress the scandal, and, as is later revealed, in any case preoccupied with his own work and extramarital sexual adventures (Thomas 268), Elisabeth's father has distanced himself physically and emotionally from her.
The long-term emotional estrangement, together with the repressed memory, provoke in Elisabeth physical symptoms of asthma and menstrual pain, as well as pain in her left breast. These symptoms bring her to Freud, who analyzes the erotic dream poem and journal, which are versions of each other, and decodes the psychology of the physical symptoms, while seeking the cause of her hysteria. The poem and journal give an account of the narrator's (Elisabeth/Anna G.) unremittingly extravagant love-and-sex fantasy at a white hotel that is actually an exercise in collapsing and conflating knowledge of the circumstances of her mother's death and the circumstances under which she first found out about it. In the fantasy, the lovers (one of whom is meant to be Freud's son) are so obsessed with polymorphously perverse sex that they take little
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