The DORA case: a psychological analysis.

The story of Dora, first of the “Five Psychoanalysis” published by Freud in 1900 is well known but deserves however that we resume the details.
This resounding failure transformed by the brilliant illusionist into a paradigmatic case of the psychoanalytic cure is the subject of a long narrative that illuminates Freud’s personality above all.

For Freud it is a “little hysteria with somatic and psychic symptoms of the most commonplace: dyspnoea, nervous cough, aphonia, perhaps also migraine; with that depression, unsociable hysterical mood and probably not very sincere disgust of life”.
Since then, the Cas Dora has been revisited by exegetes of all kinds; he even inspired playwrights and poets.
Was it really hysteria? In other words: the symbolic expression of a psychological conflict affecting sexuality; or simply neuro-vegetative dystonia: functional disorders due to an exaggeration of physiological reactions due to the emotion?
Freud, of course, puts all his art to prove Dora’s hysteria, neurotic symptom, that is to say: “formation of compromise between unconscious sexual desire and opposite internal requirements”.
Here, for him, the proof of hysteria:
Dora’s parents have a relationship with a couple, the K. (Zelenka, whose real name) who have two small children of whom Dora cares a lot. One day (Dora is only fourteen) Mr. K., whose store is well placed to attend a religious solemnity, invites his wife and Dora to go there. But he manages to get his wife away and send the employees away. Alone with Dora, he closes the iron curtain and throws himself on her to inflict a strong kiss; kiss strongly impregnated with tobacco, we are told. Dora “experiences intense disgust” and runs away. She does not talk about the scene to her parents, but avoids being alone with K. and refuses to accompany them on an excursion.
After this event, Dora, who ate badly, has an aversion to certain foods. On the other hand, she flees the sight of embracing couples.
Then everything seems forgotten. Dora has a deep friendship with Mrs. K. for whom she has adoration. (She does not know yet that she is the mistress of her father). Mr. K. fills the teenager with gifts. His father too; this rich industrialist does the same with his wife in order to be forgiven for his prodigality towards Mrs. K.
Two years are passing. One day (Dora is sixteen years old) Mr. K. takes the girl on a walk by a lake and is pressed again, telling him that his wife “was nothing for him”… (Detail spicy for the middle and the time he rolls a cigarette!). This time, Dora slaps him and runs away. The next day Mr. K. tries to surprise her when she takes a nap in her room, after which Dora gets a key to lock herself, but the key disappears.
She now refuses to stay in the K’s house and demands to leave with her father (who was at the hotel where Mrs. K. was coming to find him). Two weeks later she tells the scene to her parents. The father asks K. for an explanation, which denies fiercely, accusing Dora of fabrications and invokes the girl’s sexual perversity. (K. later publicly acknowledged the merits of his claims)
At the same time, Dora loses her last illusions about the nature of Mrs. K.’s relationships (the adored friend, the confidante, the model) with her father who reveals himself at the same time as a being not only fickle but liar, selfish and cowardly. Dora realizes that he has delivered him as a hostage to K. to have his hands free with his wife. It demands their separation. The father refuses.
The girl breaks definitively with the household.

Freud persists in portraying this Mr. K. as an endorsement, agreeable, delicate, generous, attentive, torn between obvious matrimonial intentions towards Dora and a tender love for her two children, the only obstacle to her divorce. (While he had, a few days before the scene of the lake, seduced the young governess of the children assuring, like Dora, that his wife “was nothing for him” …)
While, for Dora, she is obviously hysterical, if not, how to explain her reaction of disgust at the kiss in the store? “There was something to provoke in a girl of fourteen who had not yet been approached by any man, a clear sensation of sexual arousal,” says Freud. Later, he professes that he holds “without hesitation for hysterical any person in whom an occasion of sexual arousal causes especially or exclusively disgust, whether this person has somatic symptoms or not.” Just before he writes that “the behavior of the fourteen-year-old child is already quite hysterical” (What hysterical, then, in the world: all these little girls abused by adults, sometimes wounded for life, never reconciled with Sexuality!) Instead of putting the rapists on trial, whose sin is, after all, venial since they only obey a natural impulse, should not we rather psychoanalyze the little girls until they have recognized their hysteria?…
My argument is exactly that of Freud’s contemporaries, shocked, (even his best friends) by the publication of the Dora case. The classic phenomenon of “resistance” diagnosed Freud. But how does a century of brainwashing take away from the good sense of the resistance fighters of the day?
And that’s not all that odious in this text. It is a real lawsuit against the girl, flouting the most basic rules of ethics.
First, the publication of the observation without the permission of the patient. Freud cynically explains to us that in this matter scruple and shyness are out of place, as long as the disclosure must serve science. Yet it is “certain that the patients would never have spoken if they had thought of the possibility of a scientific exploitation of their confessions and it is in vain that they would have been asked permission to publish them”. But he is of the opinion that the duties towards science have priority over the duties towards the sick. Starting from there, “the publication of what we think we know about the cause and the structure of hysteria becomes a duty, omission, a shameful cowardice”.
Note in passing the abuse that is made of the word science. Scientific assertion based on formulas as fuzzy as “what we think we know” or “we are entitled to assume”; “She probably felt …” “We are deceiving ourselves if we admit that …”. Or this comment on the report “not absolutely faithful… but claiming a high degree of truthfulness”. Or again, “I could draw some of this material from the analysis; I had to make up for the rest by my own means.” Freud compares his “science” to that of the archaeologist who, from a few fragments can afford to extrapolate to the whole.
What he forgets is that the archaeologist belongs to a body, to a discipline that has a history and that his discoveries are subject to a collegial audit.
Over the course of the presentation Freud is convinced by his own patter; then to hell with the oratorical precautions! “At that moment,” he wrote, commenting on Dora’s second dream, “my suspicion turned into certainty. The train station and the graveyard instead of the genitals, that was pretty clear”. Just as, despite Dora’s denials, he has “unmistakable evidence of infantile masturbation,” the clues on which he relies being misappropriations of information given by the patient.
Certainty is law, and Freud hears that his patient complies with the law. She can always claim her innocence, he uses a court vocabulary, such as the words “confession” or “suspicion” or expressions such as “you do not have the right to …”. For those who would label me paranoid, (this comes very quickly in the Psy environment) I will add this quote which is on page 43 of “Five psychoanalyses”: “She suddenly remembered Mr. K.’s birthday, which I did not fail to use against her”.
Freud’s method, in cases where the facts contradict him, is that of the conquistador. He then replaces the quiet development of a discourse argued by a shower of exaggerated assertions. Well-known process of successful leaders (like hawkers, for that matter).
The reader is mature (half KO), it remains more to the confident conjurer of his complicity that to enter the game as co-editor of the story: “All the determinations we found …” he writes . Further: “We had reasons to complete the story ….”
The publication project was present at the time of the analysis. It was therefore necessary for Dora to conform in all respects to its illustrative role of the theory (already very elaborate since Freud did not change much when he preface and annotated the 1923 edition).
This theory is summarized to us from two widely interpreted dreams around which turns the whole fragment of analysis.
At the beginning of the cure Dora “walks”. She works so well that her sexual fantasmatic life is revealed to the doctor without any particular difficulties or reservations. She “brings” her dreams conscientiously and intelligently associates them with Freud’s instructions.
The first dream analyzed is a dream of repetition whose first edition takes place a few days after the scene of the lake. Here it is as Freud recounts: “There is a fire in a house,” Dora tells me, “my father is standing in front of my bed and waking me up. I get dressed quickly. Mom still wants to save her jewelry box, but Dad says”, I do not want my two kids and me to be charred because of your jewelry box. “We go down in haste, and immediately outside I wake up.”
Freud suggests that Dora replace the father standing in front of his bed, by Monsieur K. standing in front of his chaise-longue. Dora nods. Freud now asks to associate about the jewelry box
— Mom loves jewelry a lot and has received a lot of dad’s.
— And you?
— I used to love jewelry too; since my illness, I do not wear anymore. There were also four years ago… a big fight between mom and dad about a jewel. Mom wanted a certain jewel: pearls in the shape of drops like earrings. But Dad does not like them and brought him a bracelet instead of pearls. Furious, she said that if he had spent so much money on something he did not like, he could give it to another.
“So, you probably thought that you would take it gladly?”
— I do not know. (In note: the usual way she had then to accept a repressed thought). I do not know why Mom is in this dream, since she was not at L … with us. (In a second note Freud claims that this formulation — associated with other indices — is the proof of a material that has been very strongly repressed).
— I’ll explain later. Does not anything else come to mind about the jewelry box? So far you’ve only talked about jewelry and you have not said anything about the box.
— Yes. Mr. K. had given me some time ago a very precious jewel box.
— It would not have been inappropriate to give a gift in return. You may not know that “jewelry box” is an expression willingly used to refer to the same thing as… female genitals.
(Did Freud mean by this that K. had paid enough for Dora’s virginity with this gift, and that it had been ungrateful to refuse her? …)
This is what Dora had to understand because from that moment she does not follow her analyst so willingly in her quest for sexual metaphors.
“I knew you were going to say that,” said the fly. (Freud described this as “a very common way of dismissing knowledge arising in the unconscious”).
In reality, with this sentence, Dora takes her fate in hand, rejects the role of subordination assigned to her. She is as smart as Freud and he does not support it. By what right does it not behave like a true hysteric, that is, led by its unconscious. She is not here to make the strong spirit!…
From there Freud gratifies his patient of an interpretative festival from which it emerges that: if it is at the mercy of Mr. K. it is the fault of his father but then why, in the dream, dad figure- he as a savior? Very simple: because “in this region of the dream, everything, in general, is transformed into its opposite”.
So, what does mamma do in the dream? … “She is, as you know, your former rival with your father. During the bracelet incident, you would have gladly accepted what your mother had refused”. Now, let’s try to replace “accept” with “give”; “repel” by “deny yourself” This means that you were ready to give your father what your mother refused him, and what it is said to have had something to do with jewelry.
We must interpose here the explanation of the pearl in the form of drop, given a little later in the story and which leads us in a Bachelardian maze where fire and water, enemies in reality, are united in love : allusion to the fire of the dream. But as if to evacuate all poetry — the science of which has nothing to do with it — water is related to the urine, which makes it possible to introduce the brother into this dream, since he has suffered for a long time from incontinence, and discover that Dora, too, has petted in bed at age seven. It does not take more to track the “drops” of Dora who admits suffering white losses. This track leads to the syphilis of the father, to gonorrhea that his mother went to cure Franzenbad in the company of his little girl and, of course, to the sperm of Mr. K. (Would not it take a lot, a lot of imagination to unconscious to associate all these moods with drops, and especially with pearls? …)
So we come back to Mr. K. but the ideas are now parallel and not transformed into their opposite. “Mr. K. must be put in your father’s place. Mr. K. has given you a jewelry box, so you should give him your jewelry box; that’s why I spoke earlier of a gift in exchange.” (More doubt: for Freud, Dora is a whore). “In this dream, it is also necessary to replace the mother by Mrs. K., who was present”. Dora is, therefore “ready to give Mr. K. what his wife refuses him”. This is “the idea that must be repressed with so much effort, which makes it necessary to intervene in their opposite of all the elements”. This idea thus awakens Dora’s former love for her father in order to protect himself against the temptation to yield to Mr.K., thereby confirming, says Freud, “the intensity of your love for him”.
Disillusioned, he wrote: “She naturally would not accept this part of the interpretation.”
At this point in the story, Freud writes in a note of the first edition (why note?) That he added again this: “I must also conclude … that you have decided not to lend yourself to a cure to which only your father has decided to resort to you”.
Following this note, Freud recognizes that he did not give enough importance to the “transfer” in this cure. Yet he remains convinced, but the guard for him, of Dora’s unconscious desire for a new smoky kiss, his, a big cigar smoker (!)

Freud delivers there a rearguard fight. He guessed that she will no longer lend herself to the cure. He knows the enamity of his interpretive hype from the point of view of therapy. But, as he wrote in his introduction, his contribution to psychoanalytic science is more important than the healing of Dora. He speaks, sort of on the run, hoping to remember all this (because he does not take notes) when he writes the report.
In these circumstances, why stubbornly publish this observation, while receiving six to eight patients a day? …
Behind the technical-deontological explanation that he gives, one can see his own unconscious swarming, to him, Freud. Right in his self-analysis, he had to settle his sentimental conflict with his great friend Fliess who ended in the final scramble.
Freud’s hostile feelings towards Dora did not escape his most zealous hagiographers. They speak of negative countertransference. (Which means more simply that he was terribly upset!)
Dora’s secret seems to have been kept for twenty years. Today we know almost everything about the fate of Ida Bauer. The girl married, had a son, emigrated at the beginning of the war in the United States where she died about sixty colon cancer. Unhappy in the household, she spent her life complaining of various ills, tyrannized his entourage, especially his son whose female dating made her very anxious.

I noted in this clinical observation what I found reproduced almost identically in some psychoanalysts that I met in the past. In particular this way (which always makes me think of the fable The wolf and the lamb) to always be right.
When Dora says “yes” to an interpretation, it’s taken as cash, but does she think she’s saying “no” or “I do not know” or reasoning so little, then the battery of anti-resistance missiles is put in place. One expects nothing more from one’s goodwill, except that it reduces to silence all that is out of touch with one’s conscience, in order to listen to the borborygms of the Great God Unconscious, whom only he, Freud, has been able to decipher.
Every one arrives with his story that he believed to have lived himself. But Freud-Champollion removes the dust of amnesia and it is always the same text that he deciphers. This is what he calls “science”. This denial of the truth of the other seems to me what is most inadmissible in psychoanalysis because it recalls the methods of all totalitarianism. In the catechism of my childhood, there was the assertion that everyone believed in God, those who claimed the opposite were “foolish or deceitful”. Foolish and impostors were also the protesters of the Soviet regime who found themselves in a psychiatric asylum!
My argument is not new and Psychoanalysis has long ago concocted its parade, (it is already in the Dora Case): “But you are absolutely free to interrupt your cure.” Yeah, of course…
You were also pointed out that the sick (sorry, the analysands!) Ended, not by healing, which would be of the order of pure triviality, but by recognizing in them the announced manifestations of the universal unconscious.
And then, we do not want to impose anything on you, but no! Besides, it’s you who speak. We in your back, neutral and caring, we remain silent. We do not think of anything else, believe it, but our attention is floating (that is to say that in our half-sleep only words that cross the appropriate reading grid have the gift of mobilizing us). We are discreet railroad workers who open or close at the right moment the switches to let the train of your thoughts pass. Only, we always find ourselves in Freud-City or Lacan-Park!
A few years ago, with such comments, one immediately appeared “fool” or “impostor”. The listener, impregnated to the marrow without knowing it by the vulgate, immediately adopted the form of orthodox listening, made of mistrust and suspicion, then total disinterest for what is said for the exclusive benefit of the why it is said.
Today, it seems less iconoclastic. It may be possible to say that Freudianism is a doctrine, an ideology like the others that will anyway pass one day.
Does this mean that you have to have the eyes of the child of Andersen’s tale and begin to pretend that the King is completely naked? Certainly not.
There are still psychological profiles close to those analyzed by Freud. But above all, there is in Freudian discourse such an abundance of interjected ideas, sketched hypotheses, subtle exogenous theories, intuitions expressed at random, that it is impossible for certain truths to have not updated. This is what I call “the harmonica effect”. Of all the notes played at the same time, maybe the right one. Not necessarily, alas, the one he highlighted.
But Freud wanted himself head of school. For the sake of clear didactic clarity, he had to draw a common thread, formalized by a logical discourse, on a corpus of pictorial concepts, extremely pregnant, as all the great creators know how to do. Who will dare to say that Sherlock Holmes, Eugenie Grandet or Captain Nemo did not exist? … Or that Oedipus did not want his mother? …

There is certainly in Dora a “sexual problem” as it seems today. Without going so far as to affirm as Freud “that the undoubted proof of infantile masturbation is made” (what the patient denies) everything suggests that her sexuality was early awakened. His precocious intelligence put at the service of an excessive vigilance with regard to an extremely anxiety-provoking entourage, will have favored a weakening hypersensitivity.
One of the axioms of psychoanalysis consists of situating in infantile sexual repression the etiology of anxious habitus. Why not consider the opposite situation where the excitation of the urogenital sphere can be due to a state of stress?
Dora lives in a climate of great insecurity: father brilliant, warm, admiring his daughter whom he makes his confidante, therefore without authority, spoiling excessively, but often absent and especially sick (diseases that may be of a psychiatric nature). Unintelligent mother, without culture, obsessive housewife; She was a neat maniac who also left windows open both summer and winter (perhaps a simple reason for Dora’s cough!). Moving in the early years leading to the break with the Viennese family which seems to be the only circle of the relationship of the girl.
Freud sees Dora’s education as “of a high intellectual and moral level”. While a teenager, she studies (probably artistic) but from a moral point of view, say that the benchmarks for this child should be rather vague. The Bauer, Jews of the merchant bourgeoisie, completely assimilated, are intimately connected with a dubious couple: the K… A woman of free morals who neglects her two children, interested (according to Dora) who, at the first opportunity betrays the confidence of a teenager who had made it her ideal; a shopkeeper taking the pretext of a religious ceremony (Catholic I suppose) to abuse a child; both acquired in the event of a divorce, are singularly atypical under the Habsburg monarchy. And, to complete the picture, the Bauer’s presence of a selfish, hypocritical and vicious governess who, too, betrays Dora.
In K.’s defense, we may think that the little Dora, raised in this climate where sexuality seems to be a privileged relational modality, had to be unconsciously a bit tease.
Freud persists in placing on her a model of virtuous hysterical, in the style of Anna O … Breuer’s famous patient, in love with her father, but with an oblative, sacrificial love, a love’s form of, which Sigmund is also gratified by the only partner of his sex life, (at least before the extra few with his sister-in-law) his wife, the very little hysterical Martha. Having no other references, he credits Dora with the same kind of tenderness for his father as for Mr. K. Gold, nothing in Ida Bauer’s biography indicates any generosity. Everything shows, on the contrary, a background of egocentrism. A child spoiled and flattered by his father, contemptuous of his mother, all her symptoms combine to give her importance, to draw attention to her. (Secondary benefit according to Freud). She would like to exist for herself and not in the shadow of another. This is his drama.
Dora had a brother of one and a half years older than she had taken as a model; now, at school time, this early child caught up with his results (a fact quite common among girls). She was also athletic and well-constituted since she easily followed him on his excursions. Until the day when, around eight years, the avatars of growth played him a trick that she had not planned: she was no longer able to follow her brother of nine and a half years. From there, a providential sprain and his first attack of nervous asthma (attributed at the time to overwork).
This intelligent and sensitive child would have needed strong stakes that would have allowed him to give up sterile competition without crises with his brother. She would have needed a mother figure to identify with and the image of a trustworthy father, and not of that fickle creature bearing in her flesh the stigma of a shameless life. On the other hand, who around her could have played an exemplary adult role? … It seems that the couple (until the meeting with K. who were somehow “family” by the way of life) only attended parents.
The maternal parentage was undoubtedly considered insignificant, Dora felt more affinity with paternal uncles and aunts, brilliant but unfortunately very neurotic. She was studying; she could have met with examples in this environment to follow, but she is a spoiled child accustomed to ease, not to effort and competition. Is there not in his case a sort of “laziness” to give in to illness? … (Freud recognized in a note of 1923 this tendency which he calls “primary profit”). The origin of hysterical phenomena is, above all — and Freud insists — a “somatic complacency”.
One can not play all parts of one’s body like an instrument, but some people have access to ropes that elude others. Among those who have this gift, there are several registers. At the top of the hierarchy, that of voluntary operations: ear stirrers, ventriloquists, fakirs etc. Then comes the area of ​​involuntary operations, which can be taken, such as tics, gestures accompanying oral expression, mimicry or imitation of the actions of others. Finally, the involuntary operations quite unconscious whose hysterical phenomena are the most spectacular.
It is certain that Dora possesses this faculty of playing unconsciously of her body, privileging the pathological manifestations of which she constantly has the example. Thus, the relation of the case teaches us that she has “imitated” in turn: the infantile diseases of her brother (unless there is a coincidence there), her tardy incontinence, the cough and dyspnea of his father, the stomach-ache of a cousin, the appendicitis of another, the leucorrhoea and constipation of his mother.
This exemplary “somatic complacency” is quite typical of what was then called hysteria. But (persistent in my disrespect, excused all the same by the fact that Freud’s cure was a failure), I maintain with Dora that the explanation given by him of his symptoms is not the right one. In any case, if some bits of truth has been reached by the interpretive flood, it is thanks to the “harmonica effect” (which I defined above).
What are the causes explained by Freud of this case of hysteria? … They range from syphilitic heredity to the hearing of parental coitus (breathlessness), passing through infant masturbation, a repressed fantasy of fellatio, desire unacknowledged for the father, homosexuality and sadism. These are the “go-anywhere”, as he writes to Fliess about the Dora case that are supposed to fit quite well with his “collection”.
How does Freud feel about this lack of causal linearity? … All right, as always. It is because, to make a symptom, one needs several causes. It is “overdetermination”. (See the Hysteria Studies). But we must believe that this list of determinations yet hearty seemed insufficient to Dora. The great diviner thought he had revealed to him all the sexual content of his dreams and symptoms, carefully repressed by his so-called “moral education,” and he already congratulated himself on the result when she declared to him, “It is not great.” thing that came out!”.

In reality, sex is her familiar universe to this little girl. She bathes, she macerates in sex all day long, until nausea.
What pleased him in Mr. K’s attitude was the attention he had for her: postcards, flowers, small gifts. Perhaps at fourteen, she did not hate to feel that he no longer saw her as a child.
When the question arose: “How to become an adult?” Perhaps the eloquent look of a mature man was a step. Perhaps the sexuality of Dora, not repressed but at the edge of the skin, has given its requirements an equivocal connotation. But from there to accept to be taken for a sexual object! .. Attention, mister, I’m not the one you believe I am! All coquettes know this game of cat and mouse. Are they hysterical?
Apart from a few extras with her sister-in-law, Freud had no experience of women; otherwise, this forty-five-year-old old henchman would not have embarked on this endless journey of his Carte du Tendre where Love and Sex are one. Mr. K. fails to violate Dora, Freud fantasizes long about the erection that must accompany the kiss: he loves it! Dora, after breaking with the K., sees her former suitor in the street; she is pale: she still loves him. Do not we read under the pen of the great professor this sentence worthy of the Harlequin collection: “The thoughts (of Dora) culminate in the temptation to give to Mr. K. in recognition of the love and tenderness he has testified to him in recent years,” and he is moved to the place of his patient on the “memory of the only kiss she has hitherto received from him. “
If there is one thing that has accelerated Dora’s escape, it is her doctor’s lack of insight into her deep motivations.
Dora does not intend to give anything to anyone. She thinks only of herself. To make him aware of it would certainly have done him more service than all this talk beside the plate (even if Freud had put more shape).
Similarly, throughout the analysis he credits her feelings of guilt, remorse: “I realized that, behind the thoughts that accused his father aloud, was hiding, as usual, self-accusation He writes against all likelihood. Nothing in the anamnesis or in his dreams indicates “self-accusation”. In this, it is extremely modern. Responsible (she tries to be) but not guilty. Once again Freud projects on her his own thoughts (as Fliess has just accused him).
It must be said that at the time of this analysis, Freud was going through a period of great trouble. He had just published his book The Interpretation of Dreams in which he had taken the risk of exposing his intimacy, discounting the compensation of a large immediate success. Now, on the one hand, the book was not sold, on the other hand, the scientific critic did not speak about it or was generally scornful or hostile. The writing of this book, together with his self-analysis that he was doing parallel, had awakened all his past neurotic and his childhood lived under the sign of shame. On the other hand, we know from his correspondence with Fliess that he had probably renounced all sexual relations with his wife to no longer have children. And to make matters worse, the confusion with this one friend (and even more in his fantasies), his confidant, his “only public” as he himself said, was almost consumed.
Poor Dora was really badly fallen!
What she expresses in her first dream — and which is obvious — is that she has more than enough of all that sex. If the dream expresses a desire it is that of having a father who behaves like a father and not like an unscrupulous lover. She wants a mother who is less futile, less cowardly, less blind, less complicit in the acts of her daughter’s love. It is “the agenda of the unconscious” as Freud very judiciously says, but he does not respect it. It would be only the “manifest content” of the dream, intended to hide the essential, and returned, as well as the “screen memories”, to the accessories store.
Why should the “manifest content” be less important than the deeper strata of the unconscious? Why should the unconscious not have the right to decide its own priorities? Why, since psychoanalysis exists, are we concerned only with the water table and not at all with the river flowing over it? Imagine a horticultural treatise in which we do not would study that the roots of roses? Or, in an encyclopedia of cheeses, the Gruyere would be treated only by the shape or the disposition of the holes? …
Dora was endowed with a strong form of intelligence capable of understanding the role of the unconscious. If Freud had trusted him, if he had “listened” to it, she would have conducted it where she felt obscurities; what she tries to do besides throughout the analysis.
Why not follow her when she says “no” or “maybe” or “I do not know” or “he did not come out much”b? …
On the other hand, should not we be wary when she “walks” a quarter turn to certain interpretations? …
There are, however, these interpretations that are very suspicious! For example, when Freud analyzes the pseudo-appendicitis which results in the painful appearance of the rules, followed by a long period of constipation accompanied by a resurgence of lameness. In search of the key to the enigma, Freud seeks his sexual meaning and thinks of the “misstep” that may have been at the origin of the struggling leg. Does he ask when appendicitis appeared before or after the lake scene? The immediate answer, which solved all the difficulties at once, was this: “Nine months later (underlined by Freud)… The pretended appendicitis,” he continues, “thus realized a fantasy of childbirth. .. by pain and menstrual bleeding.”
It was impatience (I dare say childish) to solve “all the difficulties at once” the analyst should have realized that it takes a minimum of time to count to nine. Whatever the cooperative spirit of Dora she had to think, help herself with landmarks: “Let’s see… it was in the month of… Mars. The lake scene took place at the end of June; what makes: July, August, September, etc ….” Or so, we must assume that knowing the monomania of Freud (“ I knew you were going to say that”) she had, before the session, made his own Freudian analysis. The answer was not a spontaneous emergence of the unconscious, but rather a conscious construction.
When one has a gift of body imitation as pronounced as Dora had, there would be nothing unexpected that it imitated as well the ways of thinking of who imposed on him so little (in this case the teacher). And how can one not believe that the analytic situation, still so impregnated with the hypnotic suggestion, has not influenced it? … (This is the whole process that psychoanalysis, reductionist by necessity, has subsumed in the notion of transference). Perhaps Dora had the curiosity to read the writings of Herr Doctor. In particular, his contribution to the studies on hysteria and the recent interpretation of dreams …
There is in Dora as in all beings a little complex, a personality bis. Neither of them “pushes” the other but they are manifested successively. There is that of the project, of the decision, turned towards the future and freedom, and that of the conditioning, of the paralyzing habits undergone by more or less good grace. To speak of the principle of pleasure and the principle of reality is a bad cleavage (as well as a life drive and death drive). To pretend that every project is a fantasy that aims more or less at the revival of a past event is part of a questionable philosophy.
The enlistment of all the nuances of psychic motivation under the banner of Desire lends itself to the greatest confusion. The term desire does not account for the difference Dora has between compulsively wanting her father to leave Mrs. K. and wanting to try to fend for herself in life, as an adult, as evidenced by the last dream that she brings in the analysis.
It is necessary to relate this dream — longer than the first — in its almost totality: “I walk in a city which I do not know … I then enter a house where I live, I find (in my room ) a letter from Mom”. She writes that since I had gone out without my parents’ knowledge, she did not want to inform me that Papa had fallen ill. Now he’s dead and if you want you can come back. So I go to the station and I ask perhaps a hundred times where is the station. I am answered invariably: five minutes. Then I see before me a thick forest in which I enter, and I question a man that I meet there. He said to me: Another two and a half hours. He proposes to accompany me. I refuse and go alone. I see the station in front of me and I can not reach it. This is accompanied by the feeling of anxiety that one has in a dream where one can not advance. Then I’m at home. In the meantime, I had to go by car, but I do not know… The maid opens me and answers: Mom and the others have already gone to the cemetery”.
For Freud, the “facade of the dream corresponds to a fantasy of revenge against his father”. Vengeance is a term he uses very often in this analysis; he was then absorbed by the “suitcase” of sadism that his sexual origin allowed to integrate into his “mat-all”. But revenge and sadism belong to a register that does not go with the egocentrism of Dora. They testify, in a negative sense, of interest for the other which is not his fact. By crediting her in this dream of a spirit of revenge against those around her, it is still lending her feelings much more altruistic than what she expresses. To get rid of his father, in a dream, does not mean to make him suffer, but rather: “since you are disinterested in me, well, I too am leaving you.” Which is, after all, a more adult attitude than revenge.
At the moment of this dream, Dora wondered why she had finally told the lake scene to her parents. “A morbid desire for revenge,” comments Freud. He adds that he “considers that a normal young girl can overcome such events alone”. Why, then, does he treat hysterical little 14-year-old Dora who, after the sexual assault of Mr. K. kept the incident for her, continued to associate with K. but avoided being alone with him? … Was not that the normal reaction he’s talking about? … (Beautiful illustration of the fable The wolf and the lamb!)
The rest of the analysis leads Freud to the pot with the roses, the pseudo-childbirth, following the “misstep” fantasized with Mr. K.
Dora wisely listens to the presumed exposure of her unconscious motives. Once again she sees the master’s passe-partout: genitals symbolized by the train station, the cemetery, the vestibule, as well as by a new box appeared at the right time, as well as the key that completes it. In the thick forest arise nymphs (illustration of sexual geography) bringing a fantasy of defloration…
At this point in the development, Dora remembers a forgotten fragment of the dream: “she goes quietly in her room and reads a big book that is on her desk”.
For the diviner who knows so well how to read in her, the book immediately becomes a dictionary in which she drew her guilty knowledge from the things of the flesh. He forgets what the analysis had yet highlighted on the sex science of the girl (the young onanist cousin, the vicious housekeeper, the unrestrained confidences of Mrs. K.) The big book can not fall there like the hair on the soup; it must be integrated with the theory of imaginary pregnancy. It is in these pages that Dora found the instructions for use of childbirth.
This explanation had taken two hours. Dora is K.O. “It does not (me) contradict more,” he says. He is very satisfied.
It is at this moment that the fatal turn of events occurs. In response to the statement of his satisfaction Freud receives this scathing reply: “What came out of so considerable?”.
At the beginning of the next session, December 31, 1900, Dora announces that she will not be coming back. (This event had to provoke in Freud a quasi- millenarian quake because he persisted in all his writings to locate it on December 31, 1899).
It’s Berezina. He has an hour to save the furniture. Will he persevere in the libidinal explanation? … He starts: When did she make this decision? …. A fortnight ago (which corresponds to the eight days given in France by our servants who wanted to leave). Freud points out that she behaves like a servant. As a result, he will give her the pseudonym of Dora, as her sister’s maid name.
Ida is not too upset, apparently. The malignant had kept for the end a confidence that calls into question all the beautiful construction of Freud: the real reason for the slap to Mr. K. is that it had seduced the governess of his children, and she had told the thing to Dora. Now, at the height of guzzling, the seducer had gratified both of them with the same entry: “My wife is nothing for me”.
After a last fight between the two protagonists, where Freud strives to have the last word and belittle the girl, she presents her “warmest wishes for the New Year” and then goes to her sad destiny, inaugurate the “martyrology of psychoanalysis” as written by a contemporary author.

Since we can not redo History, let us imagine:
If we lend another ear to what Dora means in this last dream, we discover a very simple but very strong desire, that of leaving Papa and Mama and all this dissolute environment, and to fend for itself. (To be fair, Freud, in the last sentence of the story, touches on this idea, but he wrongly extends it by an optimistic prognosis due, of course, to the success of the cure). This desire of Dora is confirmed by a memory that reminds her of this dream: a visit to Dresden where she refuses the company of her cousin to visit the city alone.
But here it is, it does not have the strength. The station is far, too far. You have to cross a forest. Too bad, she wants to continue alone. She sees the station in the distance but experiences this “feeling of anxiety that one has in a dream where one can not advance”. So, she regresses a little. She is transported home. During the analysis she remembers another detail of the dream: “she sees herself in a particularly distinct way up the stairs”. (Here, she does not drag the leg anymore!). In the shelter of the family home, she can boldly climb the stairs to her room where, orphaned without sadness, she can quietly indulge in the study.
Is not this a “compromise solution” illustrating what Freud explains in his Traumdeutung? …
This type of explanation in the first degree, leaving aside the obligatory reference to sexuality, would it have helped Ida Bauer more than the Freudian subtleties? … (After writing the Dora case, Freud wrote to Fliess that he has never written such a “subtle” work). In any case, she would have had the impression that she was listening to her, Ida, and not a pre-recorded speech by Sigmund Freud.

Of course Freud wondered about the reasons that made his patient run away; but at no time did he question his diagnosis or the way in which he confessed this young girl. No ; his mistake was not to have spotted in time the installation of the transfer, this recent discovery which later became the keystone of the psychoanalytic cure.
The transfer is, as its name indicates, the postponement on the analyst of the sexual affects once experienced by the neurotic with respect to one of his parents. This phenomenon is, apparently, unavoidable. We fall “transferred” to the couch as we fall in love in life. And Freud would not have thought of receiving Dora in his transferential fall …
And if, instead of being in search of situations already lived, she was not rather eager to live what she missed? …
This closed parenthesis, we must recognize the evidence. The one who makes known profession of knowledge about Man in general and about his patient in particular (whose affective immaturity is accentuated by the analytic situation), can be invested with an aura reminiscent of parental omnipotence.
Weakness calls for strength, and this kind of experience speaks volumes about leadership phenomena, gurus, ideology makers. It should be noted that the impact on the public can do without the real presence. Mediation by the text can not be more obvious. The written word of Freud has the gift of transporting you, as it has never done, no doubt, its physical presence and speech.
In Collective Psychology and Self-Analysis, Freud considered the problem of leadership. The demonstration is interesting, unfortunately, prisoner of his sexual monomania. The essential gap that we can find (like Jung for example) in psychoanalysis consists of reducing any form of psychic energy to libidinal energy. In libido veritas. Even by stretching the concept to the extreme limits of permissible extension, it is not licit to exclude forms of attraction that belong to the social and nothing but the social. Why should not the human species, so closely related to the animal by all its physiology (including its sexuality), have like its impulses linked to life in society?
Explicitly, in many of his works, Freud puts before our eyes his fundamental infirmity from the point of view of agape, generosity, the feeling of human community (foundation of the school of his dissident disciple Alfred Adler) despite his claim to make psychoanalysis a “social psychology”. In the Essays of Psychoanalysis (1914), his enumeration of the modalities of the relation to others is illuminating; they are four in number, and only four: “model”, “object”, “associate” or “adversary”.
Before ending this digression and return to Cas Dora, I must add that it is not my intention to minimize the strength of the sexual drive or to ignore the feeling of absolute that provides its genital satisfaction .
As for the unconscious appeal to satisfaction, if it is broken there is conflict, it is obvious. And there could have been (especially for the time) the field of application of open psychoanalysis, out of the guidelines imposed by the megalomania of Freud. Having put his finger on something essential, he then knew only to lock it in his gigantic palm of brass. He wrote to Jung in 1908: “I feel an aversion to principle against the assumption that my conceptions are right but for only one part… It is not possible. Entirely or not at all”. He repeats in 1909 complaining of his disciples who “come with autonomous productions”. He justifies his “literary dictatorship attempt” by the fact that “people can not do without being leased”.

At Dora there is almost permanent sexual arousal, certainly going back to childhood and maintained by the climate in which she lives, her conversations, her reading, the confidences and the examples of adults. Would she have been cured if she had let herself be deflowered and rammed by K …? Or even if she had found on the divan the distant origin of her first desires? … It is hard to believe.
It’s all his kind of life that should have been changed. Little Bauer was handicapped by a lax education, without authority and without solid criteria (as we see so much today) but the teenager was not devoid of high aspirations. She recounts seeing Raphael’s Sistine Madonna at the Dresden Gallery and remaining “two hours in admiration, collected and dreamy”. Freud, who had the same attitude to Michelangelo’s Moses, could have respected such a gesture. Instead, he saw in this episode only: narcissism (although the term did not exist yet) anguish of defloration, a fantasy of virginal maternity, purification of a girl who thinks herself sexually guilty, etc. but, artistic emotion, not the slightest trace.
It is known that Ida took an interest in the avant-garde movement of the Secession. Perhaps she could have herself become a painter or writer (or even a psychoanalyst, who knows? …) The Jewish bourgeoisie of Vienna did not have the same freedom of action as the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie of stock but the young girl’s intelligence and the fortune of her family would have allowed her to have a destiny comparable to that of the free young women of her time, as celebrated by the portraitist Klimt. (While she was struggling on the couch of Bergasse, a woman, the first, was made Doctor Honoris Causa by the Emperor, at the University of Vienna).
His most serious handicap is his social isolation. Frequenting only members of her family, she eventually preferred to stay alone. Her brother Otto, whom she admired so much, had a different career. Coming from the same pathogenic context, he found a balance by participating in the social movements of the time and became a leader of the Social Democrat Party. Very kind to his sister, he could have opened doors for her if she had taken the trouble to convince him. Instead, she complied with the machismo criteria celebrated by Freud, failed in her marriage, motherhood, and social life, recriminating and complaining incessantly, to the point of dying of a cancer that no one believed.
A doctor more in tune with the various movements of emancipation, or simply more interested in therapy than in theory, driven not by the desire “to prevent the world from sleeping” but by the desire to listen and help, would probably have addressed these themes.

Much different was the fate of another famous hysteric (a true one), Anna O … of Joseph Breuer. Much more seriously than Ida Bauer, Bertha Pappenheim presented, in addition to classic paralysis and visual disturbances, absences, and hallucinations. Her symptoms disappeared after she found and verbalized — with a great emotional charge, “cathartic” — the origin of her ills. She was the true discoverer of psychoanalysis, which she called the “talking cure”. But Breuer missed the sexual component of his neurosis. Yet he should have been alerted by the name she gave to these beneficial sessions of catharsis: the chimney sweeping. (Freud, called in reinforcement, held only that and made it his battle horse). It is certain that the very distinguished Bertha Pappenheim aspired to other “sweeps” since she once welcomed Breuer with labor pains, declaring that she gave birth to her child.
Be that as it may, despite some psychiatric vicissitudes — but never abandoned by Breuer as the legend claims — Bertha Pappenheim found a balance and lived long and healthy. She devoted herself to the protection and emancipation of Jewish girls, both by the institutions she created and by her writings. His image is in a German philatelic collection among four “benefactors of humanity”.
His doctor (general practitioner) Joseph Breuer was an intelligent and kindly but modest man. His generosity to Freud brought him only ingeniousness. Although he practiced hypnosis, he let his patient speak and never imposed his interpretations. The clinical observation published on the insistence of Freud is very enlightening. (Missing however the episode of imaginary pregnancy, told by Freud much later, orally). One learns that the patient was of “compassionate kindness,” that she “cared for the sick and the poor, which was of great help to her in her illness.”

Bertha Pappenheim… Ida Bauer… Two destinies, two therapists. Everyone probably had (or did) the hysteric he deserved. Posterity preferred the poisonous plume of the conquistador…