HANS, DORA AND THE WOLF

The script is based on texts by S. Freud: “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” and “Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”

The performance creates three portraits basing on three famous stories of Freud’s cases: an analysis of a phobia experienced by a five-year-old boy (Little Hans), an analysis of the “Wolf Man”, and an analysis of hysteria, i.e. “The Case of Dora”. This story is inspired with Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic practice and it concerns three people whose phobias, hysterias and neuroses have saved them from anonymity forever. The details of the writings of “the father of psychoanalysis”, on which the performance is based, allowed for giving voice to the subjects who speak in the first or the third person, without Freud’s mediation. The factual – pseudo-scientific – material contains dreams, symptoms, and illusions on the one hand, as well as a matrix of the psychoanalytic analysis on the other. Joanna Wichowska, the theatre theoretician, wrote: “If one concurs that Freud is one of the thinkers responsible for the shape of contemporary culture, then Borczuch’s performance is a direct attack on it”.

The director explains his interest in Freud in the following way: “It is a story of a man struggling against an inherent instinct, more powerful than himself, produced by culture, society, and civilisation. The performance contains the fight between this instinct and all that covers it”. The characters’ struggles are translated into those of the actors, who balance on the verge between the theatrical and the personal. They subtly suggest the proximity of the limits of theatrical illusion and they put focus on the points when the story is broken to emphasise the fact that “we have no access to the essence”. What is exposed is Borczuch’s basic motif of the orphaned human condition, obscene, and non-narrative.