Freud and the Dora Case

A Promise Betrayed

Cesare Romano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781782200963
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429913983
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Cesare Romano revisits Dora's clinical case in light of Freud's own seduction theory. His central thesis is that Freud failed to follow through with his initial proposition of confirming his theories on the traumatic aetiology of hysteria. He also suggests a new dating for the duration of Dora's therapy, placing the beginning of the analysis within the context of Freud's concurrent and recent life events. A detailed analysis of Dora's first dream shows that Freud did not go back to Dora's first infantile traumas, but stopped instead at the period of her infantile masturbation. In analysing this dream, Romano's theory begins to take shape around the idea that Dora suffered an early trauma: possibly, a sexual abuse inflicted by her father. Drawing on Ferenczi, the author uses the notion of the 'traumatolytic function of the dream' to show that Dora, through her two dreams, was elaborating her early sexual trauma. Dora's analysis is investigated alongside what was happening in Freud's life at the time of the therapy.

PART I

THE CASE HISTORY

CHAPTER ONE

The first encounter with Dora

Freud saw Dora for the first time before 30 June 1898 (Mahony, 1996, p. 19). Back then she was not yet sixteen, she suffered from coughing and hoarseness, and Freud immediately judged her as being “unmistakably neurotic” (p. 19). During this first encounter, which had no follow-up, Freud only had the opportunity to gather a little information from her father, who accompanied her. He may have had the chance to carry out an accurate anamnesis of the patient, since he recommended that she undergo psychological treatment. Yet, because Dora’s symptoms spontaneously receded, Freud’s advice was not followed.

We can formulate the hypothesis that, during this first visit, Freud was informed by Dora’s father that she had suffered from enuresis at the age of seven, since her father had himself been assigned by her mother the task of weaning her off the habit of bed-wetting. Let us examine Freud’s ideas on infantile enuresis at the time. In September 1898, he was treating a young hysteric, a twenty-five year old patient who had suffered from enuresis at the age of seven. With regard to this symptom, Freud formulated the following hypothesis, which he communicated to his friend Fliess in a letter dated 27 September 1898:

Now, a child who regularly wets his bed until his seventh year [without being epileptic or the like] must have experienced sexual excitation in his earlier childhood. Spontaneous or by seduction? [Masson, 1985, 27 September 1898, p. 329]

By “spontaneous excitation” we must not understand “masturbation”, since if this were the case Freud would have made explicit reference to an auto-erotic activity on the child’s part. We must, rather, think of the child’s having witnessed a scene of a sexual nature (such as the primal scene) or experienced a self-induced sexual excitement, stimulated in any of the multiple ways whereby a child seeks to satisfy his own sexual curiosity. The other alternative is seduction at the hands of an adult, thus some kind of sexual activity initiated by an adult. We will see later how Dora’s dream of the burning house provides motives for opting, in her case, for this second hypothesis.

Thus, at the time of his first encounter with Dora, Freud might already have suspected that the patient’s hysterical symptomatology could be ascribed to an early sexual trauma. In fact, although he had confessed to Fliess that he no longer believed in his “neurotica”, and notwithstanding his refutation of the seduction theory, he had not yet abandoned it completely, and he periodically continued not only to pursue its confirmation, but also to find it in his case histories.¹

Dora’s father had unashamedly lied about the nature of his relationship with Frau K. He described this erotic relationship as a sincere friendship between two poor creatures suffering from a nervous condition who would simply offer each other mutual sympathy. Not even this lie could alter Freud’s positive judgement of Dora’s father. Since Philip Bauer himself deemed his version to be not entirely convincing, he felt the need to add: “With my state of health I need scarcely assure you that there is nothing wrong in our relations” (p. 26). It is rather puzzling that Freud would have believed him, particularly since a few lines above he had criticised, in a footnote, those colleagues of his who, dealing with hysteric patients, would give up at the first disavowal of sexual factors. Lopez (1967, p. 230), moreover, cannot comprehend how Freud could sympathise with Herr K. who, “all things considered, does not seem very pleasant and certainly was not a worthy individual”. In the same vein, Mahony (1999, p. 3) describes Philip Bauer as “crippled in both body and mind”, as well as “given to hypocrisy and self-serving secrecy”. Yet, for some undisclosed reason, Freud straight away formed a very positive opinion of Philip Bauer, Dora’s father, judging him to be an extremely intelligent person and an individual full of admirable qualities—an opinion that he repeats on multiple occasions.² Nothing would subsequently affect Freud’s judgement, not even that extreme mental confusion accompanied by slight psychic ailments which, had it not been treated in time by Freud with an antileutic therapy, could have resulted at the time in a paralytic dementia.

Thus, it was extremely unlikely that Freud could have held this man, whose “intelligence and his character” (p. 18) he esteemed, responsible for a sordid perversion such as the sexual abuse of his little daughter. Yet on 14 November 1897, thus only seven months prior to his first encounter with Dora, Freud had written a long letter to Fliess which, as we will see, seems to anticipate all the sexual themes that would later be tackled in Dora’s case history. Yet, his solution in that case differed significantly from his earlier suggestions.

For these reasons, I believe, Freud initially refers to the Studies on Hysteria (1895d) in the theoretical reflections incorporated into Dora’s case history. He distances himself from Breuer’s theory of hypnoid states, and only later would he mention the traumatic theory (the seduction theory) and the Aetiology of Hysteria (1896c) in sufficiently convincing terms:

If, therefore, the trauma theory is not to be abandoned, we must go back to her childhood and look about there for any influences or impressions which might have had an effect analogous to that of a trauma. Moreover, it deserves to be remarked that in the investigation even of cases in which the first symptoms had not already set in in childhood I have been driven to trace back the patient’s life history to their earliest years. [p. 27; italics added]

We will see, nonetheless, that these influences and impressions no longer pertain to adult perversion and sexual seduction. They are represented, rather, by the primal scene, that is, by the child having witnessed or overheard the parents’ coitus—a normal adult sexuality which is offered to the child’s gaze and his, not always involuntary, indiscreet hearing of it.

As regards the figure of Dora’s mother, whom Freud never met personally and whom he was not even interested in meeting, he is satisfied with the (probably tendentious) information provided by the father and daughter, who were allied against her. Freud describes Dora’s mother as “an uncultivated woman and above all as a foolish one”, affected by “housewife’s psychosis” (p. 20). The contempt he showed towards her was as uncritical as the appreciation he had manifested for her father, from the outset. Mahony (1996, p. 3) observes that, “though telling, the particulars about Käthe are sparse. If she zealously scoured the house, Freud thoroughly wiped her out of his case history.” Lewin (1973, pp. 519–520) affirms that Freud “accepted as accurate the description of the mother given by Dora and her father, a team of observers unreliable because of their personal biases, as Freud discovered later. He never re-examined Dora’s relationship with her mother and the cause of their feud. In fact Freud never filled that gap in Dora’s history, her early years with her mother.” Akavia (2005, p. 200) has observed, “Freud’s view of the mother’s relation to Dora is ambivalent. On the one hand, he tried to marginalize her role in Dora’s psychodynamics and to present their relationship as one based solely on rivalry and jealousy. On the other hand, he viewed the latent and repressed symptoms, uncovered during treatment, as indications of Dora’s identification with her mother.”

When Dora’s father claimed that his daughter had inherited his stubbornness, Freud observed “on other occasions he tried to put the chief blame for Dora’s impossible behaviour on her mother—whose peculiarities made the house unbearable for every one. But I had resolved from the first to suspend my judgement of the true state of affairs till I had heard the other side as well” (p. 26). Yet, Freud and Käthe, Dora’s mother, would never meet.³

CHAPTER TWO

The second encounter with Dora and the beginning of the analysis

Two years after their first encounter, Freud took Dora into treatment—she “was by that time in the first bloom of youth—a girl of intelligent and engaging looks” (p. 23). She had already become the object of Herr K.’s attention—her father’s friend.

We know with certainty the date when the treatment was interrupted, 31 December 1900, but the date of its beginning remains uncertain. Everyone who has commented on the case has taken it for granted that the treatment began around 14 October 1900, the day Freud communicated to Fliess that he had a new case, involving a young female patient. Jones strengthens the thesis that the treatment lasted under three months, and he declared with confidence, but rather superficially, that “the treatment lasted only eleven weeks” (Jones, 1953, vol. I, p. 397). This affirmation was uncritically repeated by the majority of historians of psychoanalysis and scholars dealing with Dora’s case, an assertion that, if further examined, appears implausible for a number of reasons. I believe it is possible to prove that the treatment began at least a month before this time, and that it therefore lasted almost four months, rather than the canonically received three months determined on the basis of Freud’s declarations, and of his confused memories of the therapy. Later, in his writings of 1914 and in a footnote added in 1923, he dated it between October and December 1899, that is a year before the actual date.

On 14 October 1900, Freud announces to Fliess that he is working on an essay about the dream, and also that he has a new patient. He says that the case “has smoothly opened to the existing collection of picklocks” (Masson, 1985, p. 427). Thus, it appears doubtful that Dora’s treatment began around that date, 14 October, because—leaving aside for a moment the vulgarly erotic metaphor used by Freud—he would not have used this expression if he were referring to a therapy that had only just begun. As able a “cat burglar of the unconscious” as Freud was, we must nonetheless presume that he took a long time to overcome the resistances of this reluctant adolescent. Thus, 14 October had to mark a more advanced phase of the therapy. Freud had returned to Vienna after his summer holiday on 10 September, and, as he reported to Fliess on 14 September, “on the very same day was back in harness”. Therefore, Dora could have been a patient of Freud’s since his return to Vienna, that is to say a month before he reported the case to Fliess. After all, we should not assume that Freud was always so timely in giving news to his friend from Berlin; what is more, since he had come back from his holidays, Freud had only written three letters to Fliess. First, on 14 September, when he indulged in describing his summer travels and where his attention was far too focused on his holidays to mention the new patient; then, in a brief letter dated 24 September, containing just a few lines, in which he talks about the “psychology of everyday life”; and lastly, through the 14 October letter in which he refers to his scientific activity and the new case history. Thus, it appears plausible that Dora’s treatment had begun soon after Freud’s return to Vienna, that is, around mid-September, and that he had communicated this to his friend a month later. Freud claims that “the following autumn […] the family left the health-resort of B—for good and all. They first moved to the town where her father’s factory was situated, and then, scarcely a year later, settled permanently in Vienna” (pp. 22–23; italics added). Thus, Dora’s family had left Merano in the autumn of 1899,¹ and less than a year later, before the autumn of 1900, they had settled in Vienna, where they might already have been living at the beginning of September, before Freud’s return from his summer holiday.

Furthermore, even if one were not entirely convinced by this evidence as to the reason Freud would write to Fliess about the case one month later, we must bear in mind that he was still under the effect of the recent “Breuerization”.² This had occurred at the end of May, and Freud had announced to his friend that such an event would have an impact on their relationship. Therefore, I find it reasonable to suppose that Dora’s treatment had begun as early as at the start of the “Viennese autumn”, hence around the middle of September 1900, soon after Freud’s return from his summer vacation.

To support my thesis, I could also add that Anzieu (1986) believes that the table d’hôte dream, which he situates in October 1900, contains a reference to the erotic transference with which Dora solicited Freud. It would not be plausible to assume that Dora had developed an erotic transference for Freud at the beginning of the treatment, and that he had included his young patient in a dream after a few days of treatment. Rather, it seems more likely to suppose that this took place a month into the therapy. Anzieu (1986, p. 544) goes so far as to “assum[e] that the dream of ‘Company at table d’hôte’ preceded the letter to Fliess of October 14”. Referring to Dora’s story and the two traumatic scenes with Herr K.—that of the kiss and that by the lake—he maintains that the dream is contemporaneous with the investigation of these scenes and of the childhood memories connected to them. Yet, it would have happened before the production of the two dreams that form the backbone of the case study. The collocation of the dream with the investigation of the two traumatic scenes appears to be a rough guess on the author’s part, and he deduces it from his interpretation of the dream: neither the correspondence with Fliess nor the text On Dreams (1901a) contain any clear indications that Freud’s dream and the phase achieved in the Dora analysis are linked.

At any rate, the fact that Anzieu situates the dream prior to the letter in which Freud announced the new case history to Fliess confirms our hypothesis that Dora’s treatment began in mid-September, soon after Freud’s return to Vienna. Then, if it is true that Freud saw Dora six times a week for treatment, as Decker has claimed (1991, p. 94), when Freud wrote this to Fliess the treatment would probably have already been in its twentieth meeting. This would make the tone and burglar-metaphor with which Freud announced the new patient to his friend from Berlin more understandable, even if still not very orthodox.³

When Freud took Dora in for treatment, he was at a peculiar moment of his life that certainly will have affected his judgement of the familial events that emerged during the analysis. If it is true, as Swales (1982) has suggested, that in the summer of 1900 Freud had an affair with his sister-in-law Minna, ⁴ then when, back in Vienna, he began Dora’s therapy and was informed of the erotic patterns involving the two families, he would not have been in a position to express his disapproval for Philip Bauer’s and Herr K.’s conduct. Freud had spent the last two weeks of the summer vacation travelling around Trentino with Minna. His summer holidays lasted over six weeks, the first four of which had been spent with his wife Martha, and the last two, the most interesting ones according to Freud’s account, with his sister-in-law Minna. He describes these two weeks to his friend Fliess as follows:

Finally—we have now reached August 26—came the relief. I mean Minna, with whom I drove through the Puster Valley to Trentino, making several short stops along the way. Only when I was complete...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
• FOREWORD
• PART I: THE CASE HISTORY
• PART II: THE COUNTERTRANSFERENCE
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING
• INDEX