The figure of Dora P. is someone I met in a stack of old photographs at a salvage store. She became more real as each subsequent piece over those weeks insisted on being about her or by her. She is not the whole of what I am, but someone I must explore. Does P. stand for pliant, patient, princess, privileged, ... plural, what? Suffice to say that in the end she was hospitalized and subjected to seventeen shock treatments. Her case history has been compiled in a book called The Unfortunate Case of Dora P., by Dr. Herrick N., Semioticist-
at-Large, under the direction of Dr. Niels J. Scharf, who had displayed his command of the subject in a previous book called The Patient Who Mistook a Fire Hydrant for a Lingam, When Actually It Was Her Analyst. It is difficult to write about Dora P. without entering her state of shifting identifications in practically every sentence. Dora's own paintings, several of which were made on yellowing pages torn from an old copy of Morte d'Arthur have yet to be catalogued.

Asylum, A Sanctuary for Higher Primates, By Dora P. (An Inmate). Mixed media dimensional pieces fashioned from stuffed toys wrapped and bound in digitally printed silk, suede gloves, or rough woven white wool, some dipped in beeswax and stitched with wax thread. Individidual sculptures from left are: Pudenda, Player, Pilgrim (note fish-like appearance), Prayer, Preacher, Penitente, Pointer, and Poulette.

The pieces that comprise Asylum were indeed made by Dora, and were found smudged with vaseline and stuck with fallen-out hair, under the narrow bed where she hid them after her seventeenth treatment. Just next to them was a collection of floor scrapings Dora had gathered neatly into glycine envelopes. As to the origin of the Floor Scrapings From Plato’s Cave, a title Dora confessed was to make up for her confused reading of the fire hydrants, Dr. Herrick N., Semioticist-at-Large, was able to trace them to Dr. Scharf’s floor: “What difference does it make?” he interpreted: “Plato, the Analyst, the Sublime, surely they are the same. For, as Lacan pointed out, ‘the one who interprets is the one with the penis!’”

These works emerge from Dora’s post-shock-treatment daylight dream state. She is reported to have whispered to the devoted nurse that the peculiar little sculptures are portraits not only of the elegant doctor and other researchers who officiated at her treatment, but of her fellow inmates as well.

When Dora started working with these toys she wanted only to deface them. She used string and rubber bands to bind them into different shapes, and dipped them into wax and paint to alter their original personalities. It was only after time that they assumed new identities. She wrapped one in a winding sheet made of strips of cloth upon which she had written a dream. The octopus became human hands clasped in prayer. She mounted an alligator (whose neck she had bent into a huge snout) on a scrap of yellow and black street barricade. He turned into a pig-like soap box orator and then a fulminating right wing preacher. In a state of remorse for mocking the preacher’s eloquence, she stuffed another animal into the fingers of a kid glove and called it Penitente. Remorse turned into glee as the figures became more and more phallic.She stretched the last figure into a pronounced protuberance by squeezing it into the single finger of a rubber glove. It was The Pointing Finger. Her remorse became more poignant — or ironic — when she realized that it was not the father’s power but the impending loss of power (in her own eyes) that she most feared as a child.

It was the week of the election. Gradually Dora's anger at the self-righteousness of the candidates began to overtake the forms. She was relieved when in her mind’s eye she saw them all — the worked figures along with every one of candidates — carrying on in the day room of an insane asylum, haranguing and ludicrous. Later still she knew they were periodically disowned parts of herself, whose ravings she can henceforth greet with amused tolerance as opposed to the utter deflation one experiences when taking back a projection that has also involved an inflated image of oneself.

Note from the artist Dorothy Nissen: The character Dora P. was imagined as a hybrid of Miss Miller, the young woman in C.G. Jung’s Symbols of Transformation (which I had read in 1962) and the Dora of Freud’s essay Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (“Dora”). (Freud, The Freud Reader, New York: W.W. Norton, 1998, 172-239.) Curiously both of these were in a sense failed cases, or at least cases of defeated analysis in that both analyses ended in psychosis for the patient. The desire to subvert the sanctioned authority of some male figure in power is a recurrent though sometimes problematic motivation in my own art. Somehow every time some intentionality emerges I experience it both as part of my own ego and at the same time connected with some outside father figure I resent, and then disown. Perhaps it is this pattern that leads to periodic feelings of disembodiment. In retrospect Dora P. is more like Jung’s figure than Freud’s. Freud’s discussion in my own perhaps skewed reading seems to veil his own titillation and desire, while Jung’s text in this book (which in fact marked his break from Freud) acknowledges the central importance of imagination in the psyche. One cannot help but feel that the diagnosis of insanity, especially of course hysteria, was flung about rather freely at the turn of the last century, and was not infrequently used to quell the energy of upper middle class women who suffered only from a vivid imaginal process that could have been better expressed in a social environment imposing fewer constraints in the name of propriety. It is also true that throughout history psychiatric diagnosis and treatment have been used as a form of punishment to discourage political dissent and sexual expression that might threaten the maintenance of social control.