Dora
...to see Dr Freud. This was the same doctor who, a few years earlier, had successfully treated him for venereal symptoms. Now, his daughter was acting peculiarly, saying strange things; she had even threatened suicide; could Dr Freud restore her to reason? From Freud's point of view, the case did not seem to be particularly promising, at least in terms of offering new features for the theories which he was developing. The young woman was displaying the typical signs of 'hysteria', which he had encountered many times previously. However, Freud took her on. His finances at the time were none too secure. A few days later, writing to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss, Freud mentioned that the "case has smoothly opened to the existing collection of picklocks" (Freud, 1985: 427). The young patient was to terminate the treatment abruptly at the end of that December. Freud wrote up his case-notes in the January of the new year. It was not until 1905 that the cautiously entitled 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria' was published in a specialist journal.
This was the inauspicious beginnings of a report which has become recognized as "the first of Freud's great case histories" and which has taken its place as "one of the classic reports in the psychiatric literature" (Loewenberg, 1985: 188; see also Marcus, 1986). 'Dora', the pseudonym, which Freud gave to the patient, Ida Bauer, has become a familiar name in psycho-analytic circles. In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in Dora and in Freud's treatment of her (see, inter alia, Blum, 1994; Cixous and Clémont, 1986; Gallop, 1982 and 1986; Gearhart, 1986; Jacobus, 1987; Lacan, 1986; Masson, 1990; Moi, 1986; Ramas, 1983; Rose, 1986; for background studies of 'Dora' and her family, see Appignanesi and Forrester, 1993; Deutsch, 1986; Rogow, 1978 and 1979; and, above all, Hannah Decker, 1991). Much of the...
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