Dora's Gift; Or,Lacan's Homage to Dora

Lacan reopened Dora's case in 1957. In his 1951 talk (published in 1952), transference was the key; in the 1957 seminar, he focused on hysteria. Dora loved by proxy and refused to be an object of heterosexual desire. Her object was homosexual because Mrs. K embodied Dora's essential question, femininity—a question that cannot be divorced from that of the lack of the phallus and her father's gift of nothing, which is the gift of love. There is no greater gift than the gift of what one does not have. Drawing from Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, Lacan concluded with an analysis of the cultural meaning of the gift.