freud and dora case study

Learn More Psychology

• Freudian Psychology

Dora Case Study

A look at the background and dreams of sigmund freud's well-known patient, dora..

Permalink Print   |  

• Behavioral Psychology
• Biological Psychology
• Body Language Interpretation
• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Dream Interpretation
• Memory & Memory Techniques
• Role Playing: Stanford Prison Experiment
• Authoritarian Personality
• Memory: Levels of Processing
• Cold Reading: Psychology of Fortune Telling
• Stages of Sleep
• Personality Psychology
• Why Do We Forget?
• Psychology of Influence
• Stress in Psychology
• Body Language: How to Spot a Liar
• Be a Better Communicator
• Eye Reading: Body Language
• Motivation: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
• How to Interpret your Dreams Guide
• How to Remember Your Dreams
• Interpreting Your Dreams
• Superstition in Pigeons
• Altruism in Animals and Humans
• Stimulus-Response Theory
• Conditioned Behavior
• Synesthesia: Mixing the Senses
• Freudian Personality Type Test
• ... and much more
• Unlimited access to analysis of groundbreaking research and studies
• 17+ psychology guides : develop your understanding of the mind
• Self Help Audio : MP3 sessions to stream or download

Best Digital Psychology Magazine - UK

Best online psychology theory resource.

• Freud, S., Bell, A. and Robertson, R. A Case of Hysteria: (Dora) . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Which Archetype Are You?

Are You Angry?

Windows to the Soul

Are You Stressed?

Attachment & Relationships

Memory Like A Goldfish?

31 Defense Mechanisms

Slave To Your Role?

Are You Fixated?

Interpret Your Dreams

How to Read Body Language

How to Beat Stress and Succeed in Exams

Psychology Topics

Learn psychology.

• Access 2,200+ insightful pages of psychology explanations & theories
• Insights into the way we think and behave
• Body Language & Dream Interpretation guides
• Self hypnosis MP3 downloads and more
• Behavioral Approach
• Eye Reading
• Stress Test
• Cognitive Approach
• Fight-or-Flight Response
• Neuroticism Test

© 2024 Psychologist World. Home About Contact Us Terms of Use Privacy & Cookies Hypnosis Scripts Sign Up

Psych Reviews

Psychology, Meditation, and Philosophy book reviews

Case Studies: Dora – Sigmund Freud

The bauer’s and the zellenka’s.

In  Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) , Freud first published a case study on Ida Bauer, under the pseudonym “Dora”, a daughter of parents in a loveless marriage. Her father, a merchant, and mother, immigrated from Bohemia to Vienna. In Freud’s case study, the 18 year old subject was stuck in what could be called an imbroglio, with a couple the family befriended, under the pseudonym “the K’s”: Hans and Peppina Zellenka, also in a loveless marriage.  Dora’s mother was described by Freud as having a “‘housewife’s psychosis’. She had no understanding of her children’s more active interests, and was occupied all day long in cleaning the house with its furniture and utensils and in keeping them clean – to such an extent as to make it almost impossible to use or enjoy them. This condition, traces of which are to be found often enough in normal housewives, inevitably reminds one of forms of obsessional washing and other kinds of obsessional cleanliness.” Fights between the family led to Dora supporting her father and her brother supporting their mother. The typical Oedipus Complex pattern.

Dora was forced to enter analysis by her father, after failed hydro and electro treatments with physicians. With nervous obsessive thoughts, difficulties breathing, a shuffled step, and a persistent nervous cough, Freud put her under the label of hysteria. Dora at the time would introduce to Freud what he termed as transference: See below. Psychologists today are readily aware of how their patients can project emotions they have for other significant people in their lives, onto the them. There is often a difficulty in finding the concealed truth behind the patient’s resistance and transference, or even more difficult to be aware of one’s own countertransference response as an analyst. Reacting with contempt towards the patient naturally leads to them becoming more hostile and quitting early, but in the early days of psychoanalysis it was something new to investigate. Freud delved deeper into Dora’s resistance and eventually found that transferences could be useful for him, and future therapists. Especially to harvest information to make the client aware of their unconscious material, and defenses.

Does Psychoanalysis work?

Freud’s famous and controversial case studies are considered by some critics a fiction, and even to Freud himself to a smaller extent, simply incomplete. Psychoanalysis has the tendency to over-analyze or under-analyze manifesting as a lack of resonance with the patient. On the other hand, what these case studies do well, is to show the reader the different theories, and how they  might   apply. The problem with Freud, and all psychology, and even all science, is understanding the correct context and applying the right interpretation at the right time. As science moves on, and more data is collected, the theories are forced to become more refined. Though, the danger of throwing out a particular psychologist’s entire bibliography, because it’s been surpassed, means throwing out all the good insight already found.

This is the particular the problem with Freud’s work. He conflates experiences together from different clients into theories and then tries to interpret case studies in a way that can be too general, and invites outright dismissal. His insights hit the mark some of the time, and at other times individuals are put into boxes that don’t give the full picture, or are misleading. Also having notes on clients written farther and father away from the session in question can lead to errors by the analyst. Freud did this to avoid distracting the client, but this could lead to forgetfulness and a conflation of material from different patients. Ultimately, interpretations have to predict behaviour and allow others to test their validity to gain wider acceptance. Even more difficult with Freud’s work is that some situations are untestable. For example, can we really test what was running through the mind of a patient at a particular time in the past? Or, how do you test dreams? In those cases, we are only left with theories to rally around. This is even more the case as later critics and authors re-read his case studies with more facts than Freud had, and also with new interpretations based on data from later patients in similar circumstances.

Deliberate falsification and Screen Memories

The opposite extreme of dumping psychoanalysis is believing patients who have resistances and needs for impression management to avoid stigma and ostracism. They will resist correct interpretations because they hit the mark and are threatening. In many cases the reader will never really know which interpretation is more correct, the therapist’s, or the client’s interpretations. For example, Freud talks about forgotten knowledge of the client. “[Patients] can, give the physician plenty of coherent information about this or that period of their lives; but it is sure to be followed by another period as to which their communications run dry, leaving gaps unfilled, and riddles unanswered; and then again will come yet another period which will remain totally obscure and unilluminated by even a single piece of serviceable information.” Accounts from patients can seem realistic, but still untrue.

For Freud this comes from clients being “consciously or unconsciously disingenuous.” Recollections in the first stage of repression are full of doubts trying to disguise the memory. The second stage of repression involves actual forgetting, or a falsification of memory. Here is where screen memories can fill in the blanks. These are narratives from a later period in adolescence, which can include justifications, or disguises caused by displacement and condensation, that are believed by the subject to be situations that actually occurred. [See:  Dreams – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtf6j-dreams-sigmund-freud.html ]

Freud favours the recollections that are being attacked by doubt over the later censored ones that are comfortable for the client. This is also keeping in mind there is another goal of the analyst: “Whereas the practical aim of the treatment is to remove all possible symptoms and to replace them by conscious thoughts, we may regard it as a second and theoretical aim to repair all the damages to the patient’s memory.”

Psychoanalysis when all else fails

In Freud’s narrative, Dora was emotionally attached to her father, especially during his illnesses. Her mother’s constant attention to domestic affairs, plus her father’s illnesses led to their estrangement. As Dora continued being dissatisfied with her family life, she left a suicide letter in a desk for her parents to find. 

For many people who run away from friendships and romantic relationships it’s often because of the unexpected and unwanted entanglements and expectations. Dora’s family connected with the K’s, and like in many situations, friends start helping each other. Over time, the family roles can get interchanged. For example, Freud says of Dora that she “had taken the greatest care of the K.’s two little children, and been almost a mother to them.” Dora had private conversations and influences from governesses, Frau K., Herr K., on top of her own family’s influence. As the different values are imitated, an ambivalence is already starting. When friends exchange help they naturally think of utility and how these friends can help in other ways. As emotional claims are made unconsciously, some of those claims conflict with the claims of others. This is especially true when values are different and are violated.

Dora’s example was when she was 14, (possibly 13 in reality) she was approached by Herr K., alone in his workplace, and forced into an embrace and a kiss. She ran away in disgust. Later on she was approached again for a kiss by Herr K., at a lake. She rejected him and complained to her father. Herr K. said that she was reading “Mantegazza’s  Physiology of Love  and books of that sort in their house on the lake. It was most likely, he had added, that ‘she had been over-excited by such reading and had merely ‘fancied’ the whole scene she had described.'” When denials like this happen, the result is neurosis for the victim when they can’t find anyone to believe them.

“Dora”

Dora’s father brought her to Freud, a man who helped him with his syphilis in prior appointments, to sort her out. “‘I have no doubt’, [he said], ‘that this incident is responsible for Dora’s depression and irritability and suicidal ideas. She keeps pressing me to break off relations with Herr K. and more particularly with Frau K., whom she used to positively worship formerly. But that I cannot do. For, to begin with, I myself believe that Dora’s tale of the man’s immoral suggestions is a phantasy that has forced its way into her mind; and besides, I am bound to Frau K. by ties of honourable friendship and I do not wish to cause her pain. The poor woman is most unhappy with her husband, of whom, by the way, I have no very high opinion. She herself has suffered a great deal with her nerves, and I am her only support. With my state of health I need scarcely assure you that there is nothing wrong in our relations. We are just two poor wretches who give one another what comfort we can by an exchange of friendly sympathy. You know already that I get nothing out of my own wife. But Dora, who inherits my obstinacy, cannot be moved from her hatred of the K.’s. She had her last attack after a conversation in which she had again pressed me to break with them. Please try and bring her to reason.’”

During their sessions Freud found that, “Dora’s criticisms of her father were the most frequent: he was insincere, he had a strain of falseness in his character, he only thought of his own enjoyment, and he had a gift for seeing things in the light which suited him best.”

Freud concurred: “I could not in general dispute Dora’s characterization of her father; and there was one particular respect in which it was easy to see that her reproaches were justified. When she was feeling embittered she used to be overcome by the idea that she had been handed over to Herr K. as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and his wife; and her rage at her father’s making such a use of her was visible behind her affection for him.”

These were the early days in psychoanalysis, and Freud was bound to make some big mistakes, including not seeing his own sexism. The year was 1900 and his attitude towards women was irritating Dora. He said that “the two men (Dora’s father and Herr K.) had of course never made a formal agreement in which she was treated as an object for barter; her father in particular would have been horrified at any such suggestion. But he was one of those men who know how to evade a dilemma by falsifying their judgement upon one of the conflicting alternatives. If it had been pointed out to him that there might be danger for a growing girl in the constant and unsupervised companionship of a man who had no satisfaction from his own wife, he would have been certain to answer that he could rely upon his daughter, that a man like K. could never be dangerous to her, and that his friend was himself incapable of such intentions, or that Dora was still a child and was treated as a child by K.” Yet Freud is conscious enough to see. “But as a matter of fact things were in a position in which each of the two men avoided drawing any conclusions from the other’s behaviour which would have been awkward for his own plans.”

That pattern, as can be seen in the Irma injection dream in  The Interpretation of Dreams , shows a willingness for men to collude together, and ignore each other’s actions, while also having an opposite attitude of increased scanning of women and their foibles. Freud emphasizes, in the illicit kisses, how this could arouse sexual feelings in the girl, and be hysterical if rejected. His point was that she should have been more flattered at these attentions. “The behaviour of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical. I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable; and I should do so whether or not the person were capable of producing somatic symptoms.” Naturally an adolescent would, even in 1900, find this invalidating.

Transference and counter-transference

Freud admitted that he “did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time.” This was his reason for the failure of the treatment. He recounts “at the beginning it was clear that I was replacing her father in her imagination, which was not unlikely, in view of the difference between our ages. She was constantly comparing me with him consciously, and kept anxiously trying to make sure whether I was being quite straightforward with her, for her father ‘always preferred secrecy and roundabout ways.’ But when the first dream came, in which she gave herself the warning that she had better leave my treatment just as she had formerly left Herr K.’s house, I ought to have listened to the warning myself. ‘Now,’ I ought to have said to her, ‘it is from Herr K. that you have made a transference on to me. Have you noticed anything that leads you to suspect me of evil intentions similar to Herr K.’s? Or have you been struck by anything about me or got to know anything about me which has caught your fancy, as happened previously with Herr K.’ Her attention would then have been turned to some detail in our relations, or in my person or circumstances, behind which there lay concealed something analogous but immeasurably more important concerning Herr K. And when this transference had been cleared up, the analysis would have obtained access to new memories, dealing, probably, with actual events…In this way the transference took me unawares, and, because of the unknown quantity in me which reminded Dora of Herr K., she took her revenge on me as she wanted to take her revenge on him, and deserted me as she believed herself to have been deceived and deserted by him.”

Freud also had trouble seeing his own transferences of sexual interest in Dora, calling her “a girl in the bloom of youth, with intelligent and pleasing features,” and his being titillated with the sexual conversation similar to the position of Frau K. talking to Dora about sexuality. He also had trouble seeing his low attitude towards her by using the pseudonym Dora, a name given to a nursemaid of his sister.  

Freud goes on describing the phenomenon of transference. “They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. Some of these transferences have a content which differs from that of their model in no respect whatever except for the substitution.” It becomes difficult to develop rapport if the therapist is dealing with negative transferences, but “psycho-analytic treatment does not  create  transferences, it merely brings them to light… All the patient’s tendencies, including hostile ones, are aroused; they are then turned to account for the purposes of the analysis by being made conscious, and in this way the transference is constantly being destroyed. Transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psycho-analysis, becomes its most powerful ally, if its presence can be detected each time and explained to the patient.” [See: The ‘Ratman’: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html ]

The pot calling the kettle black – Projection

In particular Freud was trying to detect a form of projection originating in Dora by her efforts to enable the relationship. One of the clues for Freud is how the person who accuses another person of an indiscretion seems to know every detail about it, and this may in fact tell about similar situations in the accuser, that they also know a lot about, but are repressing. Freud uses the example of her accusations towards her father’s infidelity, “there were no gaps in her memory on this point.”

Just like the ambivalence that Freud often describes, people have similar goals, like romantic love, and it’s easy to point out what others are doing while ignoring that we have the same goals, and similar approaches to them. Our consciousness is like a spotlight and when it’s on someone else, it’s not on ourselves. Freud says, “a string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content. All that need be done is to turn back each particular reproach on to the speaker himself. There is something undeniably automatic about this method of defending oneself against a self-reproach by making the same reproach against some one else. A model of it is to be found in the ‘you too’ arguments of children.” It’s a kind of “I feel better if other people are doing it too.” Pride is maintained if everyone else is guilty. Also if two people make the same claim for another individual, based on an interest like love, they usually have reasons that are justifiable to only to themselves.

Behind these reproaches is also another layer of unconscious material. Freud says, “but it soon becomes evident that the patient is using thoughts of this kind, which the analysis cannot attack, for the purpose of cloaking others which are anxious to escape from criticism and from consciousness.”

The partially conscious, or unconscious agreements happen when a person’s self-interest becomes front and center. Freud used as evidence Dora’s past attitude of leaving her father and Frau K. alone, and taking the K.’s children for a walk, since they would have been sent out anyways. The scene at the lake was when she realized that she was being passed off onto Herr K., to make it convenient for her father and Frau K. Being slighted in that way enraged her. Dora described similar behaviour in her governess. “So long as the governess had any influence she used it for stirring up feeling against Frau K. She explained to Dora’s mother that it was incompatible with her dignity to tolerate such an intimacy between her husband and another woman; and she drew Dora’s attention to all the obvious features of their relations. But her efforts were in vain. Dora remained devoted to Frau K. and would hear of nothing that might make her think ill of her relations with her father. On the other hand she very easily fathomed the motives by which her governess was actuated. She might be blind in one direction, but she was sharp-sighted enough in the other. She saw that the governess was in love with her father. When he was there, she seemed to be quite another person: at such times she could be amusing and obliging. While the family were living in the manufacturing town and Frau K. was not on the horizon, her hostility was directed against Dora’s mother, who was then her more immediate rival. Up to this point Dora bore her no ill-will. She did not become angry until she observed that she herself was a subject of complete indifference to the governess, whose pretended affection for her was really meant for her father. While her father was away from the manufacturing town the governess had no time to spare for her, would not go for walks with her, and took no interest in her studies. No sooner had her father returned from B– than she was once more ready with every sort of service and assistance. Thereupon Dora dropped her.”

Freud said, “the poor woman had thrown a most unwelcome light on a part of Dora’s own behaviour. What the governess had from time to time been to Dora, Dora had been to Herr K.’s children. She had been a mother to them, she had taught them, she had gone for walks with them, she had offered them a complete substitute for the slight interest which their own mother showed in them. Herr K. and his wife had often talked of getting a divorce; but it never took place, because Herr K., who was an affectionate father, would not give up either of the two children. A common interest in the children had from the first been a bond between Herr K. and Dora. Her preoccupation with his children was evidently a cloak for something else that Dora was anxious to hide from herself and from other people.”

Freud at this point offered the conclusion that she was in love with Herr K. more than she let on. This Dora did not assent to. Yet later on “when the quantity of material that had come up had made it difficult for her to persist in her denial, she admitted that she might have been in love with Herr K. at B–‘ but declared that since the scene by the lake it had all been over.” 

Freud then gets caught in a bind. He asks “the question then arises: If Dora loved Herr K., what was the reason for her refusing him in the scene by the lake? Or at any rate, why did her refusal take such a brutal form, as though she were embittered against him? And how could a girl who was in love feel insulted by a proposal which was made in a manner neither tactless nor offensive?”

Oedipus complex, or just envy?

As expected, Freud brought up the Oedipus Complex in how Dora missed her father. The way Freud describes it, it’s a form of envy where the subject is putting themselves in the place of others, imitating their desires, and therefore their identity, and not recognizing the influence. In particular it’s a fear of losing social rewards. Each time you find an object, or person to desire, you step into a similar identity of all the people who want the same things, causing rivalry. This is where you see in the case study people playing people off of each other, and are only nice to people because they get something out of it, like her governess. There was also another governess, but she worked for the K.’s. She had a relationship with Herr K., but he never left is wife, and the governess eventually left. She told Dora about the line he gave her saying “there was nothing between him and his wife.” That was the same line given to Dora at the lake. This is the reason for her rejection of Herr K.

What was not expected was Dora’s possible attraction to Frau K. Freud recounts, “when Dora talked about Frau K., she used to praise her ‘adorable white body’ in accents more appropriate to a lover than to a defeated rival. Another time she told me, more in sorrow than in anger, that she was convinced the presents her father had brought her had been chosen by Frau K., for she recognized her taste. Another time, again, she pointed out that, evidently through the agency of Frau K., she had been given a present of some jewellery which was exactly like some that she had seen in Frau K.’s possession and had wished for aloud at the time.” Yet Frau K. betrayed Dora when she let Herr K. know of her reading of Mantegazza’s  Physiology of Love , without disclosing her influence on Dora. Freud says, “Frau K. had not loved her for her own sake but on account of her father. Frau K. had sacrificed her without a moment’s hesitation so that her relations with her father might not be disturbed. This mortification touched her, perhaps, more nearly and had a greater pathogenic effect than the other one, which she tried to use as a screen for it, – the fact that she had been sacrificed by her father.”

Like an Agatha Christie style extra twist at the end, Freud adds the deeper layer. “I believe, therefore, that I am not mistaken in supposing that Dora’s supervalent train of thought, which was concerned with her father’s relations with Frau K., was designed not only for the purpose of suppressing her love for Herr K., which had once been conscious, but also to conceal her love for Frau K., which was in a deeper sense unconscious. The supervalent train of thought was directly contrary to the latter current of feeling. She told herself incessantly that her father had sacrificed her to this woman, and made noisy demonstrations to show that she grudged her the possession of her father; and in this was she concealed from herself the contrary fact, which was that she grudged her father Frau K.’s love, and had not forgiven the woman she loved for the disillusionment she had been caused by her betrayal. The jealous emotions of a woman were linked in the unconscious with a jealousy such as might have been felt by a man. These masculine or, more properly speaking,  gynaecophilic  currents of feeling are to be regarded as typical of the unconscious erotic life of hysterical girls.”

So Dora is now implicated in desire for her father, Herr K., and now Frau K., albeit in a more unconscious attitude. This ambivalence is very typical of Freud, and is maddening for critics who want something that is more testable and clear. Freud says, “thoughts in the unconscious live very comfortably side by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes – a state of things which persists often enough even in the conscious.” I think Freud’s statement that  “an intention remains in existence until it has been carried out” , is the key to how he views desire. Once desires latches onto a target, but have too many obstacles, it can be repressed, and a new target is chosen. Yet when given the opportunity to be satisfied, the old desire can resurface. In a way, the Oedipus Complex is simply because a child has a lack of objects to pursue, and are around parents most of the time. As soon as other people enter the child’s life new influences are pursued.

Freud describes how this bisexual fluid desire can become convoluted. “In the world of reality, which I am trying to depict here, a complication of motives, an accumulation and conjunction of mental activities – in a word, overdetermination – is the rule. For behind Dora’s supervalent train of thought which was concerned with her father’s relations with Frau K. there lay concealed a feeling of jealousy which had that lady as its  object  – a feeling, that is, which could only be based upon an affection on Dora’s part for one of her own sex…I have never yet come through a single psycho-analysis of a man or a woman without having to take into account a very considerable current of homosexuality. When, in a hysterical woman or girl, the sexual libido which is directed towards men has been energetically suppressed, it will regularly be found that the libido which is directed towards women has become vicariously reinforced and even to some extent conscious.”

Cultural influences on psychological health

This being one of the famous Freud cases, there were other books written about it. One of the great books on this subject belongs to Hannah Decker,  Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900. It gives the necessary background to Dora’s life and the life of Jewish immigrants and their ordeals in assimilating in Europe. A lot of psychological problems are in fact cultural problems. Survival fears of ostracism and abandonment wreak havoc on the psyche. Hannah says, “historically, hysteria has appeared prominently among groups – such as slaves, soldiers, and servants – who feel they have little control over their lives.” The ups and downs of life take their toll on people who feel constant insecurity, and these can lead to all kinds of desperate behaviour to regain that feeling of security. Learning the backgrounds of clients, and their ordeals helps to explain why they behave the way they do. This is often the weakness of psychotherapy. The therapist only has a small window of time to work in, and client’s lies and resistances keep back important information.

Uncertainty and mental health

Hannah describes the life of the Jews in Bohemia, where the Bauer’s had come from: “Although characterized by cruel social and economic injustices that readily slipped into extremes of murder and massacre, the history of the Jews in Bohemia was not one of unbroken misery. Its particular curse was eternal uncertainty. Frequent expulsions were usually followed by some limited permission to resettle, and life would once more resume, but never with ordinary surety. The legacy bequeathed to Philipp and Katharina Bauer and their two children by centuries of state-decreed inferiority, familial upheaval, and spasms of dubious quiet was the trauma of hopes raised only to be brutally dashed. This pattern appeared yet again once the Jews were formally emancipated, and it colored the background of Freud and Dora’s encounter…The result of many generations’ precarious existence was an inherent sense of vulnerability. Although this psychological state accurately reflected their history, it led to the Jews readily agreeing with anti-Semitic explanations of why they were more disposed to neurosis than the non-Jewish population. Evidence of the Jews’ belief in their own ‘hereditary taint’ is rife…In keeping with Darwinian and anthropological emphases of the time, they discussed their vulnerability in terms of centuries of ‘inbreeding.’ Or, taking refuge with – generally anti-semitic – critics of modernity, that pointed to the Jewish obsession with money or their high-strung, ‘overly civilized’ nature, stemming from generations of ‘cosmopolitan’ living. However, if nineteenth-century Jews felt themselves weaker and more susceptible to life’s risks – and certainly this was not true physically, Jews having a lower mortality rate than that from the surrounding peoples – such notions had to come in part from the sense of imminent danger Jewish parents continued to transmit, in countless small ways, to their children. It is a convergent conclusion of modern psychological, sociological, and historical literature that ethnic discrimination and the stresses of acculturation are sources of mental ill health, and experimental studies have buttressed this view.”

Homeland and Identity

Humans can be very self-critical and look for imperfections naturally, from years of critical upbringing and experiences in school. By the time a person who is a visible minority becomes an adult, there can be a habit of self-hatred. Criticisms from a ruling class can be absorbed into a masochism that emphasizes one’s weaknesses and ignores one’s strengths. A form of splitting against oneself, leading to neurosis. As a visible minority moves from location to location, only to be a minority again, but in a different location, it can bring up the same feelings of alienation. We need to seek approval from those in power to get our needs met, and stay stuck in helplessness.

Hannah describes this very well in her descriptions of Austria’s liberalization of immigration. The pattern of economic collapses, then followed by scapegoating and ostracism. “The old pattern – of the Jews raising their expectations only to be disappointed – reasserted itself.” One doesn’t have to look too deep to see the same pattern throughout history. Economic collapse, then blame and hostility aimed at an ethnic minority. The pattern existed before the NAZIS and the holocaust, and reactions towards immigrants today after the 2008 collapse, however mild compared to the massacres of the past, betray a certain human tendency to blame those who have less power, because they are accessible, and for frustrating the goals of the majority. A lot of the labels of inferiority aimed at immigrants cover another motivation, anti-competition from people who may not be so “inferior.”

Hannah describes the “Viennese artisans [who] reacted with anger and some desperation when faced with the lack of guild protection, encroachment by industrialization, depression following the 1873 crash, and, finally, competition from newly arrived Jews who peddled whatever and whenever they could. Traditionally anti-Jewish, the artisans now held the Jews responsible for the dislocations inflicted by the modern world. Moreover, an unending stream of Eastern Jews – either Austria’s own, seeking relief from the grinding poverty of Galicia, or Russia’s, fleeing for their lives from a czar set on destroying them – fired the native Viennese lower classes to action. By their language, dress, and distinctive customs, the new immigrants were highly visible on the streets of Vienna, and ‘the growth of the Jewish population of Vienna lent exaggerated emphasis to the impression of Jewish omnipotence.’ In 1882 the artisans’ groups amalgamated, forming the Austrian Reform Association, which became the main organ of the Viennese anti-semitism. Speeches at meetings of the Reform Association were highly inflammatory. At one rally in March 1882, the speaker urged the hundreds of workmen to “violence against the [Jewish] capitalists.” The meeting became rowdy, fights broke out, and furniture and beer glasses were smashed.”

Disturbing questions were asked, like “what would the Jewish ‘influence’ do to Austrian life? There was a feeling that a decisive struggle, which would have profound consequences, was taking place in all areas of society.” For the Jews there was a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation as described by Arthur Schnitzler. He said a jew “had the choice of being counted as insensitive, obtrusive and fresh; or of being oversensitive, shy and suffering from feelings of persecution. And even if you managed somehow to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched…An assimilated Jew could not avoid being pained.”

As people split hairs, blame got thrown around within the Jewish community. “The questioning of the Jewish right to exist freely often took crude forms. But it also expressed itself in polite Christian society as a condemnation of the Jews’ ‘bad manners.’ Soon Jews, especially youthful ones, were saying the same thing about themselves. Jews began to blame each other for the antisemitism that surrounded them. Assimilated Jews blamed Eastern Jews and vice versa. Intellectual Jews were embarrassed by both. Modern Jewish self-hatred raged.”

Loss of pride, envy and self-destruction

A curious example of self-hatred is described by Hanna, “one of these Jews was the disturbed and brilliant Otto Weininger (1880-1903), Dora’s contemporary. The son of a Jewish anti-Semite. Weininger secured his doctorate in philosophy by the age of twenty-two, immediately converted to Protestantism, achieved fame for his expanded dissertation,  Sex and Character , became depressed, and shot himself in the same house where Beethoven had died. Weininger’s bestseller was a diatribe between his self-hatred as a Jew and his misogyny. Weininger argued that a woman is pure sexuality, contaminating a man ‘in the paroxysm of orgasm.’ All women are prostitutes, even those who appear otherwise. Men could only elude women by avoiding sexual intercourse, and indeed, Weininger took a vow of sexual abstinence several months before he committed suicide. Weininger wrote that even the most superior woman was immeasurably below the most debased man, just as Judaism at its highest was immeasurably beneath even degraded Christianity. Judaism was so despicable because it was shot through with femininity. As women lacked souls, so too did Jews. Both were pimps, amoral and lascivious. Both sought to make other human beings suffer guilt. Women and Jews did not think logically, but rather intuitively, by association. Weininger declared his era to be not only the most feminine but the most Jewish of all eras. Jews were even worse than women; Jews were degenerate women.”

Fliess’ and Freud’s theories of human bisexuality, and even presaging Jung’s work on the Anima and Animus, showed the difficulty people back then had with expressing different sides of themselves. One is compelled by culture to pick a masculine or feminine side and repress the other side in oneself. It’s repressed but never really gone. Hannah describes, probably one of the best examples of psychological projection I’ve ever read. She says “Weininger killed himself because he felt he could not overcome the woman and Jew in him.” With projection one is disturbed by cultural influences found in oneself. One can see that one can live a life possibility that might be attractive, but that possibility may also be dangerous in a society that might punish it. Then the person who is projecting aims contempt at oneself at the same time aims contempt to those cultural influencers. If enough people are caught up in this ambivalence, then the same reaction of self-hatred and projection, with overt contempt, can motivate a cultural movement. A cleansing purge. To clean oneself, and then, if aggravated enough, ethnically cleanse the rest of society. Hannah says, “the truth is that Weininger had only expressed flamboyantly what many believed: that women were an inferior order of being and that all other inferior groups could be compared with women when one was trying to explain the essence of their deficiencies.” The self-hatred in this situation is to look at femininity as weakness and to have contempt towards weakness in part of oneself and blame others for their influence, and also the humiliation. Right here envy can be summed up as the pain of losing pride. In Weininger’s case, the pain was so large that suicide was his escape.

Hannah describes a warning by “Rosa Mayreder, the Austrian feminist, [who] gave a telling example of its widespread and authoritative existence [of these views]. “The Germans,” she pointed out, “ascribe womanly characteristics to the Slavs – a piece of national assumption expressed by Bismarck…in April, 1895. ‘I believe [he declared] that we Germans, by God’s grace, are fundamentally stronger; I mean, manlier in our character. God has established this dualism, this juxtaposition of manliness and womanliness, in every aspect of creation…It is not my wish to offend the Slavs, but they have many of the feminine advantages – they have grace and cleverness, subtlety and adroitness.'” Therefore, the Germans in Austria, Bismarck advised, should remember that they are the superior race and predominate, ‘just as in marriage the man ought to predominate.'”

Modern example of bigotry:   https://ktla.com/2017/09/07/lousy-speaking-immigrant-oklahoma-woman-records-racist-rant-at-goodwill/

David Duke:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Yx3c0i5Fyk

A reminder that everyone can be traced back as a descendant to someone who was originally an immigrant with the same struggles: White Stripes – Icky Thump:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OjTspCqvk8

Inferiority or superiority?

Yet if we go to that Bismarck quote extolling “might is always right”, there is an admission that femininity has advantages, meaning not inferior, but different. Since conflict is based on fighting over identities, identities being how well we can feed our pride, what people are complaining about is not inferiority, but superiority. If the Jews were considered “clever women”, then it was simply fear of competing with their cleverness, not their inferiority. Consciously or unconsciously, people want their competitors to be inferior. Going back to Bismarck’s quote one can also see the self-hatred of the feminine side of one self. If what Freud says is true, that most people have some bisexuality, that means this attitude requires a lot of internal and external repression.

Naturally Dora would have been affected by an environment like this and bring her frustrations towards men and aim them at Freud. Freud would also be transferring emotions towards Ida based on his upbringing and the contemporaneous understanding that women should know their place.

There were attempts to change this situation for the Jewish people by socialists. Otto, Ida’s brother, felt socialism was the method to help people integrate harmoniously in European society. By eliminating differences, exacerbated by the competition in capitalism, humanity would mix together in such a way as to make ethnic differences disappear. This motive led him to want to join politics. Yet Freud disagreed with Otto and “advised him to give up politics and become a teacher or university professor, a career better suited to his idealistic temperament than the volatile and hazardous arena of Austrian politics…[He] tried to talk Otto out of changing the world, warning him: ‘Don’t try to make people happy, people don’t want to be happy.'” This attitude would colour much of psychology all the way up to the beginning of positive psychology in the late 20th century. “Because his view that human nature was instinctive and not likely to be changed fundamentally by environmental manipulation, Freud believed that socialist and communist efforts to reform human society could not succeed,” as Otto had wished.

Yet this is partially disingenuous. Freud’s system is that of getting clients to accept the world as it is and to make changes to the environment, and to gain love. To repress the negative affect, and to be helpless, leads to self-destructive emotions. To deal with the world as it is, like a labour of love, or a laboured love in how it feels to make it happen, produces realistic positive emotions that can be achieved. Even if communism as tried, failed, a democratic socialism is accepted in most western countries. There is also generational socialist experiments that get partially accepted by conservative groups, when they are popular enough. If anything this is possibly the reason why there is ambivalence. People don’t actually know what a better future will be, and there will be experiments and failures along the way. There will also be some successes. People do want to be happy, but they are ambivalent on how to go about it, and may go down on paths they think are happiness, but end up being the opposite.

Blur – Tender:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaHrqKKFnSA

Economic influences

The pattern of ups and downs of life keep repeating throughout humanity, surprising new generations without the experience of loss. The typical pattern: Economic success, a following complacency, reckless investments, economic collapse, scarcity, a gathering together in groups of the same ethnic and cultural backgrounds for safety and pride. Then there’s scapegoating of people of weaker power with excuses that their habits or cultures are at fault, weak and contemptible, but in reality this is a disguise for a fear of competition. This is especially true if some of ethnic minorities manage to achieve status, despite being labeled with contempt, while some from an ethnic majority lose status. If they really were so contemptible, there would be nothing to fear from their competition. What used to be a downward comparison that gave special treatment for some, becomes a painful and humiliating upward comparison. A threat to an identity, is based on emotional feeding and addictions to stable sources of pride and pleasure. Pride needs a core identity that supports it, and when lost, makes people want to identify as a “superior” race, identify with “superior” past generations, a distorted “golden age” nostalgia. The hope to regain a lost identity, is the desire to step into the shoes of some kind of recognition of value. Pride.

Emotional Feeding: https://rumble.com/v1gqvl1-emotional-feeding-thanissaro-bhikkhu.html

Girardian Primers:

Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html

The Origin of Envy & Narcissism – René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html

Stalking: World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html

Love – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html

Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v3ub2sa-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-7.html

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html

Conflation of enemies

Now this isn’t to say that Jewish people are perfect, and that there shouldn’t be some assimilation to values, principles and laws of a country, I mean that’s why you want to move to that country, because it has values you like! Yet there’s a tendency to take bad apples, which exist in all cultures, and lump them together with their entire ethnicity. The embarrassment is described very well by Freud. He “attended the funeral of a friend, Nathan Weiss, who had committed suicide. Weiss’s family and friends publicly blamed his death on the family of his new wife. Freud described one censorious funeral orator who ‘spoke with the powerful voice of the fanatic, with the ardor of the savage, merciless Jew.’ The reaction of Freud and his medical colleagues was to be ‘petrified with horror and shame in the presence of the Christians who were among us. It seemed as though we had given them reason to believe that we worship the God of Revenge, not the God of Love.'”

Self-respect

Yet this need for revenge, or at least an assertive response to bigotry, seems to be extremely hard to avoid, and also a qualification for healthy self-respect. This is something that Freud eventually came around to. Freud had to decide what his response to antisemitism would be. When Freud’s father told the story of being told to get off the sidewalk because he was a Jew, and his response to do just that and walk away, was too submissive of a response for him. Freud said,  “I never understood why I should be ashamed of my descent or, as one was beginning to say, my race.” 

“Freud’s son Martin recalled that in 1901, in the Bavarian summer resort of Thumsee, Freud routed a gang of about ten men, and some female supporters, who had been shouting antisemitic abuse at Martin and his brother Oliver, by charging furiously at them with his walking stick. Freud must have found these moments gratifying contrasts to his father’s passive submission to being bullied.”

One doesn’t have to start something with people to feel safe, but if agitated and provoked over and over again, it only stops if there is an assertive response. We have to respect the rights of others, be we also have to respect our own rights. This way we avoid being passive or aggressive, which all involve boundaries being violated.

Assertiveness – An Introduction: https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/assertiveness.html

The cycle of disappointment

Freud was right that communism wouldn’t work to eliminate conflict and racism, but he wasn’t able to see much further than that. The 2008 economic crash, as bad as it was, proved that a form of democratic socialism was something that people couldn’t do without. It prevented the fallout on the poor from being as bad as it was in prior generations, vindicating some of Otto’s idealism for a future with more stability. 

Freud’s advice, based on his patient’s inability to deal with reality, and make healthy changes to the environment, was prophetic with his result with Ida. In Hannah’s book, accounts of Ida’s outcome identified her as being similar to her mother, with her “excessive cleanliness. She and her mother saw the dirt not only in their surroundings, but also on and within themselves. Both suffered from genital discharges.” Richie Robertson in the introduction of the Oxford World Classics version, hints that Ida’s mother, instead of having a psychosis of cleaning, was performing a form of revenge, since “you have made me a housewife; very well, I’ll be a perfect housewife and make you suffer for it.” Some of these feminist interpretations are quite modern. Another interpretation was that Ida’s mother wanted revenge for getting syphilis or gonorrhea from her husband. My interpretation is that the obsession to clean is more about cleaning a person’s self-esteem, to avoid rejection from others.

“Nothing is good enough to join us!”

Hannah’s book goes further into Dora’s Christian conversion, and her, and Freud’s escape from the NAZIS. Again the pattern repeated of destroyed hopes for the Jewish. Even when deliberate attempts to imitate the culture of the ruling ethnic groups, her brother Otto said that “assimilated Jews [were] still obviously Jews according to their facial characteristics. Race instincts and race prejudices live on after assimilation.” Otto felt that Christian conversion wasn’t going to work, and only intermarriage with Christians would solve the problem. This differed at the time with the Zionists who felt that the only solution would ultimately be to live in a Jewish nation.

This is a great lesson for all people who want to immigrate to another country. The lesson is that if you compete with the status and identities that others have already claimed, they will split hairs in every way to put you down. “You’re too Jewish! Oh you’re Christian now, but you still look Semitic. Not good enough!”  This goes more into my influences from René Girard’s Judeo-Christian works, but to enter into any new society, even if you are not that different from the culture you are joining, because you are a HUMAN, you have to be different in a way that is useful to others. This means creating new businesses, new products, and have something new to trade with the established identities of others.

Blue Ocean Strategy – W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781625274496/

If one can’t create those situations, then filling positions that are needed as opposed to competing for the most alluring hierarchies everyone else wants, creates the harmony that Otto was so desperately trying to seek. There will always be competition for pride and social rewards that leads to conflict, especially in economic crashes and the resulting scarcity of opportunities. People are forced to step on each other’s toes to hold onto an identity in a recession.

Circling around, zeroing in – Thanissaro Bhikkhu:  https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2018/181116_Circling_Around,_Zeroing_In.mp3

I remember coming out of the Spike Lee movie BlacKkKlansman , and seeing an interracial couple walking out with looks of relief of validation. They were obviously maintaining their identities and going to mind their own business and live their lives, which looks the same as everyone else’s lives. 

But a society where people are trading their advantageous differences with each other means people can see value in those differences, and therefore less bigotry, and if there is intermarriage, it’s more authentic because the marriage isn’t a means to an end, to gain an identity. They have a healthy identity beforehand and appreciate each other’s. There’s always a commonality that can be found if people are willing to look for it. In my travels, most people are worried about the same things. Getting a good job, having their kids find success in school, and trying to gain a good marriage. After a period of culture shock, people eventually find new cultural habits to graft onto the ones they want to keep. Sometimes this takes a couple of generations, but it happens.

Flexible goals

With the help of her son, Ida was able to move to New York. She lived with the same physical problems as before and died of colon cancer in 1945. One can imagine that Dora would have loved to have lived long enough to see how things had changed for women, or visible minorities, but I think she would still notice the same cycles of dissatisfaction in modern people as in the past. As long as people are struggling with identities that have mutual claims, they will be stuck in the same conflicts, regardless of what their success looks like from afar to those followers outside their milieu. “Control of consciousness determines the quality of life,” as Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi reminds. A lot of people at the top of the pyramid feel they don’t have as much control over their life as they think they do. Having to make appearances, networking, dealing with politics and keeping allies satisfied, reduces a lot of that sense of control. René Girard, also noticed the intensity of the desire, and how it dissipates when the desired object is obtained, or how it intensifies again when the object is lost. The freedom of knowing this is that I can always look for a new object when there’s a rivalry, because ultimately, I will be bored with any possession, because no possession can make you eternally satisfied like an omnipotent God. New objects will always be desired. I can instead look at objects for their actual value, not whether the object will add to social proof that I’m a human deity. I also don’t have to worship an idol, like a missing parent, or pretend to be a God and all the effort at impression management that narcissists go through. The great value of this knowledge is that it doesn’t have to be hidden. I don’t need to hide this knowledge to one-up someone else. The knowledge is flexible, no matter how many people know it, and having more people know this, the better. Much like Galadriel’s “I pass the test” speech in Lord of the rings, we have to see this in ourselves. It’s not so much the ambition, which can be noble, but how aggressively we look at “Others”, as Girard emphasizes, with this ambition. It’s actually hard to let go of the sadomasochism of bullying and revenge. But for the one who does, narcissistic neurosis cools off into a beautiful peace and self-acceptance.

Finding personal meaning

Another solution to a lack of personal meaning and identity in life comes from Viktor Frankl, in  Man’s Search for Meaning .  He emphasized the need for people to actively find their own meanings in their current lives. His message was similar to Freud’s of actively using ingenuity and realistic choices and actions that have personal meaning, to reduce that sense of helplessness that makes people neurotic or violent. These negative feelings come from chasing activities to “be somebody important”, while at the same time putting oneself down for not being there already. Yet there are many important things in our lives we are doing now that should allow us to be as we are, without shame and envy. We remind ourselves what we are trying to achieve when we are taking care of someone who is sick, or serving a customer, or communicating important values. It doesn’t mean we let go of healthy ambitions, but we know that it’s okay to just start somewhere, and all these early activities are important stepping stones to where you want to go.

If we can’t control our consciousness all the time, if we have to change objects of desire, if we choose to see the meaning and importance of our current mundane activities, they become intrinsically satisfying, and then the self-hatred disappears. This meaning doesn’t require imitating a narcissistic idol providing a parental meaning for us. We don’t have to gather into the safety of ethnic groups and scapegoat others for our problems. A lot of Viktor’s message resonates with me, because meaning is found in those overlooked opportunities that are available to us right now. We shouldn’t get locked into objects that we are not ready for or are not available to us. ◊

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A Case of Hysteria – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780199639861/

Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 – Hannah S. Decker: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780029072127/

Physiology of Love and Other Writings – Paolo Mantegazza: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781442691728/

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780061339202/

Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780671023379/

Ellis, A. W. & Raitmayr, O. & Herbst, C. (2016). The Ks: The Other Couple in the Case of Freud’s “Dora”.   Journal of Austrian Studies  48(4), 1-26. University of Nebraska Press.

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning – René Girard: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781570753190/

René Girard and Creative Mimesis – Thomas Ryba: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781498550574/

René Girard and Creative Reconciliation – Thomas Ryba: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780739169001/

The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780261103207/

A Survey of the Woman Problem – Rosa Mayreder: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781330999349/

Psychology:   https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

By sigmund freud.

• Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria Summary

Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria is a case study that Freud writes about an eighteen-year-old girl. Dora , whose actual name Freud keeps secret, suffers from a variety of hysterical symptoms, including dysponea (difficulty breathing), aphonia (loss of voice), nervous coughing and migraine headaches. Her father brings her to receive Freud's psychotherapeutic treatment, four years after going to Freud himself for a paralytic attack. Freud believes that Dora's case is rather ordinary as far of cases of hysteria are concerned. Dora suffers from the most common physical symptoms (difficulty breathing, nervous coughing, loss of voice, and migraines) along with the most common mental symptoms (depression and antisocial behavior). Although Freud considers the case to be unexciting, he asserts that the analysis of an ordinary case of hysteria will be most useful to furthering knowledge of the disorder.

Freud theorizes that hysterical symptoms stem from either psychological trauma or problems in the patient’s sexual life. During psychotherapy, Freud listens to stories about Dora's past and her family situation to get to the cause of her hysterical symptoms. Dora's immediate family consists of her two parents and older brother. As a child, she was particularly fond of her father who had been responsible for her education, and she grew more attached to him as he struggled with tuberculosis. To alleviate his lung trouble, the family moved to a small town with a mild climate, which Freud calls "B—" to protect the identity of his patient. During his time in the town, Dora’s father became close friends with a married couple, Herr and Frau K. Dora developed a close friendship with Herr K. who often accompanied her on walks and occasionally gave her gifts. However, their relationship became strained after Dora alleged that Herr K. made an indecent proposal to her on one of their walks. Dora told her father about the incident, but Herr K. denied that this ever happened. To Dora's distress, her father agreed with his assessment that Dora imagined the event.

Freud believes that this experience was sufficiently traumatic to have influenced Dora’s hysteria, but not to explain it completely. Dora tells Freud of an earlier episode with Herr K. Once Herr K. arranged for Dora to meet him alone in his office and then kissed her by surprise. Dora felt disgusted by what Herr K. had done, and Freud finds it odd that Dora was repulsed by an experience that, in his opinion, should have elicited sexual excitement. Freud argues that this reversal of affect proves Dora's hysteria. Because of her encounters with Herr K., Dora urged her father to break off relations with him and his wife. However, Dora’s father felt particularly indebted to Frau K., who helped to take care of him during his sickness, and refused to end his friendship with her. Dora became embittered by her father’s relationship with Frau K., which she suspected of being a love affair.

After discussing Dora's past, Freud focuses on two dreams that Dora has had. According to Freud, dreams are the realization of unconscious wishes. Because of repression, the content of the dream is disguised and must be interpreted to gain its meaning. In her first dream, Dora’s father wakes her up because the house is on fire. Dora gets dressed quickly to leave the house, but her mother wants to look for her jewel-case before going. Dora’s father exclaims that he will not let himself and his two children die to save his wife’s jewel case. Freud points out that "jewel-case" is also a common slang word for vagina and starts his interpretation from this observation. In Freud's opinion, Dora was worried that her “jewel-case” was in danger because of Herr K. and that if anything happened it would be her father’s fault. In the dream, she expressed all of her feelings in their opposite. She created a situation in which her father was saving her from danger. Her father standing beside her bed mimics Herr K. Freud believes that the dream is really about her attraction to Herr K. Whereas her mother refused to accept her father’s gift of jewelry, Dora was repressing the feeling that she needed to give Herr K a return present for the “jewel-case.” In other words, Dora was repressing her sexual attraction to Herr K.

Another significant aspect of Dora's dream is that she smelt smoke when she woke up. Freud believes that the smoke represents Dora’s longing to kiss a man, which in the case of a smoker would involve the smell of smoke. Freud, Herr K. and Dora’s father are all “passionate smokers." Freud believes that Dora has thought about kissing him and during her psychotherapy, she has begun to develop feelings for him. He refers to the concept of transference, the unconscious redirection of feelings held for one person to another, in this case the therapist.

In the second dream, Dora was walking in a strange town when she suddenly arrived at place where she lived. She went to her room and found a letter from her mother. Her mother wrote telling her that her father was dead and that she could come to the funeral if she liked. Dora then went looking for the train station, asking people on the way for its location. She asked a hundred times and received the same answer that the station was five minutes away. She then walked into a forest and asked a man she saw there. The man tells her that the station was two and half hours more. Dora continues and can see the station in front of her but cannot reach it. Suddenly, Dora is at home and she cannot remember traveling from the station to her house. When she arrives, the maid tells her that her mother has already left for the cemetery. Freud argues that Dora’s dream sprang from a fantasy of revenge, directed against her father. In her fantasy, Dora had left home and in her absence, her father had died from grief.

As Freud wishes to analyze Dora’s case of hysteria in more depth, she unexpectedly decides to end her treatment. Freud regrets that just as he thought he would successfully resolve her case, she decided to end her therapy. He asserts that Dora’s decision was an act of vengeance on her part and wonders if he could not have persuaded her to stay on, had he used her feelings of transference and exaggerated the importance of her therapy to him.

Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

beyond the sky and the earth : a journey into bhutan

In what ways does the author use language and structure to convey the history of Bhutan?

Explain on what points was the freudian discovery got confirmed and on which points did his analysis failed

Gradesaver's short summary should have the information you need to answer this question. There are also detailed summaries of each section available.

http://www.gradesaver.com/dora-an-analysis-of-a-case-of-hysteria/study-guide/short-summary/

In Freud's "Dora" his interpretation of her dreams is incomplete why?

The case study "Dora" is a controversial one. Freud interprets "Dora's" (this is not actually the name of the actual patient, of course) dreams as symptomatic of her jealousy for her mother's sexual relationship with...

Study Guide for Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria study guide contains a biography of Sigmund Freud, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
• Character List

Essays for Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.

• It Ain't No Sin: Carter's Response to Freud's Views of Sex
• The Relationship Between Freud and Dora: Insight into the Workings of a Daughter's Mind

Wikipedia Entries for Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

• Introduction

We’re fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books in court this week. Join us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Dora : an analysis of a case of hysteria

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

462 Previews

13 Favorites

Better World Books

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station42.cebu on February 4, 2020

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Find anything you save across the site in your account

“Hysterical Girl,” Reviewed: An Extraordinary Look at a Case of Freudian Gaslighting

In 1981, the director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, caused a conniption in the field of psychoanalysis when, during a talk at Yale, he accused Freud of a moral crime. In the eighteen-nineties, Masson held, Freud heard from multiple female patients about their experiences of childhood abuse (and even published a related paper). But, unwilling to believe that abuse could be so prevalent, he came to ascribe his patients’ recollections to fantasies stemming from repressed desires. (Masson got fired from the Freud Archives as a result; in 1984, he expanded his thesis in the book “ The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory .”) This backstory foreshadows Kate Novack’s extraordinary documentary “Hysterical Girl” ( streaming on the Web site of the New York Times , which produced it), one of ten films that are on the shortlist for the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. Neither Masson nor the controversy surrounding his work are specifically referenced—because Novack goes back to the source herself, to one of Freud’s most famous works, “ Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ,” which was originally published in 1905.

“Hysterical Girl” is both a documentary and a work of metafiction, in which Freud’s view of Dora, as reported in his book, is contrasted with Dora’s view of herself. But because there’s no extant document in Dora’s own words, no unmediated account of her experience, Novack (who also wrote the film) has to create one herself—and she does so, throughout the film, with a fictionalized version of Dora, dressed and styled in today’s manner. Dora is portrayed onscreen by Tommy Vines, an actor who’s seen with a makeup artist and then a cinematographer as she prepares to be filmed. By overtly fabricating Dora’s voice, Novack comments on the covert fabrication at the heart of the story—namely, Freud’s own grossly distorted interpretation of Dora’s experience. Archives themselves are another of Novack’s subjects, and her approach to them is as original as her historical insights. She meshes Freud’s texts—which are excerpted in voice-overs (read by Brian Kelly)—with archival film footage and still images of Freud and the Vienna of his time, evoking the era of Dora’s sessions with Freud and his writing the study of her “case.”

Dora’s father, after finding a note in which Dora threatens suicide, took her to see Freud. The story that Freud tells of her in his case study, and the response that Dora gives onscreen, in her own voice, involves a summer with her parents at a seaside resort town, when she was thirteen. A male friend of her father’s, named Hans, groomed her with flowers and courtesies. He invited her to his upstairs office, for a view of a parade, and there he tried to kiss her. (Freud expresses surprise that, instead of feeling “sexual desire,” Dora responded with “disgust.”) Using animated graphics, Novack connects Dora’s escape from the office with footage of Christine Blasey Ford describing, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, her escape from the room where, she alleged, Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. When Freud wonders why Dora continued to see Hans, Novack shows testimony by Anita Hill, at hearings for the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, expressing her fear of retaliation, and Leigh Corfman’s account, in her accusations against Roy Moore, saying, “At fourteen, I was not able to make those kind of choices.”

One of the things that I thrill to see in short films is density—an intense and rapid profusion of information, events, and images, at a pace and with a detailed compression that might be hard to sustain in a feature. “Hysterical Girl” is, in effect, a feature’s worth of ideas, emotions, allusions, references, and associations condensed into a mere thirteen minutes. The kaleidoscopic montage includes a wide range of classic and recent movies (among them “Last Tango in Paris,” “Jeanne Dielman,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “Black Swan”), vintage photography, vintage pornography, celebrity TV clips, stills of paintings, print ads, and news footage, which mercurially hook the main subject of the film—the denial of women’s accounts of sexual abuse—into the wider history of civic life and culture at large.

Hill, in a clip from her testimony, says she learned that her reactions were common in cases of harassment, but that it would take “an expert in psychology to explain how that can happen.” Here Novack shows an image of Freud—the expert who could have helped Dora by, for starters, believing her, but instead accused her of fantasy. In that moment, Novack strikes at the very foundations of the field of psychology, and the historical failure to believe victims which has not yet been righted. Confronted in her bedroom by Hans, Dora reacted sharply—and Freud called her behavior “completely hysterical.” Novack dramatizes Hans’s response to Dora’s accusations with a quote by Clarence Thomas from one of his hearings—“I cannot imagine anything that I said or did that could have been mistaken for sexual harassment”—and the response of Dora’s father with a quote, from the same hearing, by Senator Arlen Specter: “I find the references to the alleged sexual harassment the product of fantasy.” Novack paraphrases a horrific line from Freud’s case study: “Her ‘no’ was only a sign of the severity of the repression.” She follows this quote with a clip of Joe Biden, at the Thomas hearings, saying, to Hill, “You indicated that you repressed a lot.”

Whereas Freud considered Dora’s “hysteria” a symptom of repression, Novack powerfully portrays Dora’s vehemence, confusion, and emotional instability as a bewildered and outraged response to having her reality dismissed as fantasy. What Freud took for “hysteria,” Novack indicates, was Dora’s ever more frustrated response to her widespread and unchallenged gaslighting, just as current-day derision of sexual-abuse victims as “hysterical” or “shrill” or “unhinged” reflect the same cold and cavalier denial. “One does not write only for one’s time,” Freud enthused of his book. Novack agrees, and presents a focussed and intensifying set of clips to prove that point—of Kavanaugh again (claiming to be the victim of a “witch hunt”), followed by Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein , Charlie Rose, Louis C.K., Les Moonves , Jeffrey Epstein, Matt Lauer, and media personalities and politicians who have minimized or dismissed their misdeeds. In so doing, Novack links Dora to a vast number of women through the present day, and connects those who enabled Dora’s assailant to men (and some women, too) throughout history—including Freud.

Freud's Case of Dora: Wellspring of Discovery and Discourse

• January 2022
• Open Journal of Social Sciences 10(01):290-314
• 10(01):290-314

• Liberty Healthcare Corporation

Abstract and Figures

Discover the world's research

• 25+ million members
• 160+ million publication pages
• 2.3+ billion citations

• J HIST BEHAV SCI
• Keren ZHANG
• Ilka Quindeau
• Jeanne Wolff Bernstein
• Ulrike Kadi
• Esther Hutfless
• Cesare Romano

• Rachel B. Blass
• Beatriz Santos

• Recruit researchers
• Join for free
• Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

Are you a qualified therapist?

Search Counselling Directory

'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ('Dora')'

Dora commenced an analysis with Freud at her father’s instigation in October 1900. She abruptly ended treatment 11 weeks later. Freud wrote up the case study soon afterwards, but did not publish it until 1905. Before considering the conclusions Freud drew from this case, I will summarize the facts relating to Dora’s personal history, her social and family circumstances and her symptoms, as set out by Freud. Freud informs the reader that Dora was the second of two children, having a brother some 18 months older, that her father had a “dominant” personality, and that her mother was a “foolish, uncultivated woman” who had “housewife’s psychosis”, being obsessed with cleanliness. We also learn that the family was divided, with, on the one hand, father and daughter being in alliance, and on the other, mother and son. Dora’s father was said to have been proud of her precocious growth and intelligence and to have used her as a “companion and confidante”, even allowing her to nurse him on occasion. Dora’s father contracted TB when she was six and the family therefore moved to the country where they formed an intimate friendship with Herr and Frau K. Frau K, like Dora’s father, was unhappily married and the two of them embarked on an extra-marital affair. Freud tells us that Frau K, in a similar way to Dora’s father, came to rely on Dora as a confidante and adviser in connection to “all her marital difficulties”. We also learn that Dora’s father suffered a detached retina when Dora was 10, being treated in a darkened room, and that two years later he experienced symptoms of “paralysis and slight mental disturbance”. Freud also informs us that Frau K nursed Dora’s father through these various illnesses, apparently at one point talking him out of committing suicide. In the meantime, Herr K was spending an increasing amount of time with Dora. Indeed, while Frau K was caring for Dora’s father, Dora was with Herr K caring for the couple’s two small children, “almost becoming a mother to them”. Freud tells us that Dora came to learn that her father had contracted VD in the past and, seemingly, had infected her mother. In terms of Dora’s symptomatology, we learn that she had wet the bed until about the age of eight, at which time this symptom seems to have been substituted for that of chronic asthma. By the age of 12, Dora suffered attacks of migraine and nervous coughing. The migraine attacks grew rarer, but the coughing continued, lasting for several weeks at a time. In later years, Dora suffered complete loss of voice, as well as vaginal discharge. Freud describes Dora as being “entirely and completely hysterical” by the age of 14, asserting that she was “a source of heavy trials to her parents” by the time she was 17. At this stage, Dora was said to be on bad terms with her parents, socially withdrawn, and spending much of her time studying and attending “lectures for women”. The case study reveals that Herr K set out to seduce Dora from an early age and that he persisted in this endeavour, presenting her with flowers and valuable gifts as she grew older. Moreover, we learn that he forced a kiss on her when she was 14, and attempted to have sex with her some three years later. Dora told her mother about the latter incident. Herr K denied Dora’s accusation and, with the support of Frau K, accused Dora, in turn, of being overly interested in “sexual matters” and of having “fancied” the whole scene. Dora’s father colluded with the K’s, telling Dora that her suggestions were a prurient phantasy. Following these denials, Dora wrote a suicide note bidding her parents farewell and saying that she could “no longer endure her life”. Dora entered analysis aged 18 and was described by Freud as being a “mature woman of independent judgement”. He accepted that her story “corresponded to the facts in every respect”. He also concurred with Dora’s view that her father had handed her over to Herr K, using her as currency in his sexual barter with the latter so that his liaison with Frau K could continue undisturbed. Freud was also of the opinion that Herr K’s seductive behaviour towards Dora had caused the “psychical trauma prerequisite for the production of a hysterical disorder”. * * * * * The theoretical premises informing Freud’s work with Dora hold that hysterical symptoms are an expression of a forbidden wish - that hysterical symptoms arise either as a compromise between two opposite affective and instinctual impulses: a wish and a defence against the wish, or because of ambivalent feelings of love and hate. Moreover, Freud maintained that hysterical symptoms represented a return to primary sexual satisfaction that is, to masturbation. For Freud, such activity indicated that sublimation was incomplete and that the repressed residues of once conscious masturbatory fantasies had returned in the form of psychopathology. It may be seen, then, that although Freud appeared to be fully aware of the significance of Dora’s personal history and family circumstances, his theoretical frame led him to focus on intra-psychic neurotic conflict. Thus, the root of the problem for Freud was Dora’s unconscious infantile sexual fantasies and impulses towards her father. He concluded that these instinctual, repressed wishes had returned and that Dora was defending against the knowledge that she loved and desired her father and Herr K and harboured homosexual longings for Frau K. Freud went on to suggest to Dora that her childhood masturbation was the reason why she had fallen ill, and he interpreted her hysterical cough as representing her wish to have sexual intercourse with her father. For Freud, Dora’s cure was dependent on her awareness and acceptance of her infantile sexual and aggressive fantasies and impulses. Once these childhood amnesias had become conscious, they could be made subject to rational, realistic control. Freud tells us that Dora’s refusal to accept his interpretations was “an indication of the strength of her repressed love and sexual desire for her father”. Furthermore, following Dora’s resistance, Freud described her as being “incapable of impartial judgement”, and suggested that her “No” signified “Yes”. Freud contended that part of the reason why Dora ended treatment precipitously was because she had become disturbed and excited by thoughts of wanting to be kissed by him. * * * * * Mitchell (1993), in looking at Dora’s case from the vantage point of contemporary relational psychoanalysis, articulates our surprise at the lack of acknowledgement Freud accorded Dora’s subjective experience - her need to relate to her own experiences as real, meaningful, valued and valuable. She was, after all, profoundly betrayed by those she trusted most deeply. Mitchell (1993) contends that, to this extent, Dora’s analysis may be seen as a perpetuation of her victimization by the men in her life. As Gay (1995) reminds us, Freud’s original title of the case study was “Dreams and Hysteria”. Mitchell (1993) therefore questions the degree to which Freud acted out the countertransference, unconsciously exploiting Dora for the sake of obtaining confirmation of his new and controversial theories. Mitchell (1993), however, makes the valid point that it is easy to criticize the case study when taken out of its own conceptual context. He argues that Freud’s model of the analytic process and set of theoretical premises concerning human knowledge and subjectivity made sense in his day. Indeed, as we have seen, Freud was well aware of the fact that Dora had been mistreated and seduced but, as Mitchell (1993) emphasises, he (Freud) did not think this mattered as far as the analytic process was concerned. * * * * * What, then, might a contemporary psychotherapist make of Dora’s case? To begin with, greater weight would be given to the cumulative trauma Dora experienced as a result of her protracted, eroticized relationship with Herr K, and the lack of love, concern and protection she was afforded by her parents. As Herman (1992) argues, traumatic events shatter the construction of self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. The lack of a sensitive, attuned response to Dora’s trauma was, therefore, likely to have left her with a pervasive sense of alienation and disconnection in her primary relationships. Thus, today traumatic affect would be perceived not only as playing a part in organizing intra-psychic functioning, but also arising out of a specific interpersonal and intersubjective context. Dora’s painful affect and unresolved trauma would, therefore, be viewed as significantly motivating her neurotic symptoms and pathological reactions, such as attempts at self-soothing through masturbation, promiscuity, and self-harm (Tyson and Tyson, 1997). The contemporary psychotherapist would see Dora as requiring a process of mourning within a secure environment (Bowlby, 1988). The therapeutic process would seek to facilitate the gradual integration of Dora’s split off affect and cognitions, and of the verbal and mental representations associated symbolically with her traumatic experiences (Davies and Frawley, 1994). As part of this overall process, the therapist would need to be alive to various clinical issues relating to Dora’s security of attachment, sense of basic trust, quality of object relations, process of separation-individuation, tie to an internal saboteur, constellation of mental defences, identification with victim, aggressor, rescuer or comforter, fear of death, and the use made of her as a parental child. Recognition may need to be accorded to the effect of the trauma and abuse on Dora’s latency and pre-adolescent sense of self, her tendency to carry guilt for parental transgressions, her self-organization in terms of activity/passivity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and body image. From a relational perspective, the therapeutic process would be inherently interactive and thus require the active participation of both Dora and her therapist. Dora’s individual meaning would be understood by reference to her relational matrix and the context within which interaction takes place. These theoretical premises are based on infancy and attachment theory and research which indicate that the inner world developes through a process of intersubjectivity, and that mind or the sense of self is composed of relational configurations. It follows, therefore, that Dora’s relationships assume primary motivational status. Though issues of sexuality and aggression retain their significance, they would be understood as powerful physiological responses generated within Dora’s interpersonal field from which their individual meaning is derived (Mitchell, 1988, 1997). The therapeutic process would focus on Dora’s subjective experience in the here-and-now which would be explored with the purpose of helping her to deal more objectively with “reality”. Reality would be viewed in terms of narrative intelligibility, rather than historical veracity, and be validated consensually. The relational therapist would openly acknowledge that his or her theories, patterns of thought and systems of ideas have an important influence on the therapeutic process, in that these would play a significant part in organizing and integrating Dora’s material, thereby providing shape and structure to her inner world (Mitchell, 1997). From an intersubjective perspective, the therapist’s work with Dora would consist of a subtle intertwining of both interpersonal and intra-psychic processes leading to the creation of a shared reality. By these means, Dora’s personal history, particularly with regard to the focus on her traumatic childhood experiences, would be co-created, being constructed and given meaning in the here-and-now of the therapeutic relationship. The intersubjective therapist would see Dora’s personal growth and change as occurring not in moments of perfect empathy, but in moments of empathic failure – a process involving inevitable re-enactments and the repair of disruptions in emotional connectedness (Benjamin, 1992). At such times, the therapist’s task would be to survive Dora’s omnipotent destructive fantasies without collapsing or retaliating (Winnicott, 1988). The significance of this form of “holding” response is that it may help Dora recognize the therapist’s existence as a separate person available to be used and related to intersubjectively (Benjamin, 1992). As seen from a more overtly hermeneutic perspective, the therapeutic process would require active engagement with Dora’s dissociated experience which, once represented symbolically by means of language, may be reflected upon, creatively interpreted and given a new and more resonant meaning (Stern, 1997). In terms of technique, the major difference between Freud and a contemporary relational therapist would consist in the degree to which each interacted and participated with Dora in the therapeutic process. Interaction is manifested both in affective terms and by means of the transference-countertransference process. Freud subsequently came to view countertransference as consisting of the therapist’s unanalyzed unconscious conflict and, therefore, as an obstacle to the analytic process. He therefore advocated adopting an attitude of abstinence, anonymity and neutrality in relation to the patient, believing that this technique would prevent the analytic process from becoming contaminated with the countertransference. By contrast, a contemporary relational psychotherapist would presuppose that countertransference is an inevitable and integral aspect of the whole therapeutic process, consisting not only of unresolved experiences and conflicts from his or her own past or current life, but also as containing important information about Dora’s material that may provide clues about her unconscious inner conflicts (Mitchell, 1997). The relational therapist would also expect clues and information of this sort to be communicated through an interactional process consisting of repeated cycles of projective and introjective identification. Thus, Dora may unconsciously induce states of mind in her therapist as a means of communicating aspects of her mental state that have been denied, repressed, split off or dissociated (Bion, 1990). Here, the therapeutic task would be to contain, transform and give meaning to the raw emotional pain associated with Dora’s childhood trauma. In this way, Dora’s untransformed psychic pain, dread and terror (beta elements) may become available for mental work, being reflected upon and symbolically transformed by means of thinking, imagining, dreaming and remembering (alpha elements) (Bion, 1984). With regard to such unconscious interactional forms of communication, given the fact that Dora had been sexually abused, the therapist would need to be aware of any tendency by Dora to eroticize the transference (Blum, 1994). Moreover, in the light of the pain, neglect and disappointment that Dora has experienced, she may experience difficulty in trusting a more benign relationship and, instead, defensively rely upon old, malign but familiar internal working models of self-other attachment relationships. However, concomitant to Dora’s defensive need to repeat such negative patterns, the transference may carry an unconscious wish for change and the hope that the therapist would act as developmental rather than transference object (Hurry, 1998). Thus, in unconsciously asking the therapist to contradict transference expectations, Dora would be seeking an appropriate developmental object. Indeed, this search may be her real agenda and form the basis for a genuine, though predominantly unconscious, therapeutic alliance (Hurry, 1998). In respect of the countertransference, the therapist should guard against enacting or re-enacting aspects of the original abusive relationship by blaming, victimizing or, indeed, seducing Dora. Seductive behaviour by the therapist may include a countertransferential wish to rescue or parent Dora, thereby encouraging a regressive dependency (Blum, 1994). Mitchell (1997) emphasises that awareness of countertransference tendencies of these kinds require continual self-reflective responsiveness to the material being presented. He suggests that the question for the contemporary therapist is not whether to share countertransferential thoughts and feelings, but when and to what extent. Selective disclosure of the countertransference may function to help Dora and her therapist connect on an emotional level and, thereby, open up and vitalize Dora’s subjective experience, providing her with a sense of being valued and understood. Handled insensitively, however, disclosure may close down and deaden her experience. Clearly, then, the decision to disclose requires a responsible, sensitive and judicious approach by the therapist that takes full account of the need to protect Dora’s personal integrity and boundaries. A delicate balance would need to be achieved, therefore, whereby the therapist is neither excessively emotionally detached from Dora nor excessively intimate and intrusive (Mitchell, 1997). * * * * * REFERENCES Benjamin, J. (1992). Recovery and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity. In Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, N. Skolnick and S. Warshaw (Eds.). Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Bion, W. (1990). Second Thoughts. London: Routledge. Bion, W. (1984). Elements of Psycho-Analysis. London: Routledge. Blum, H. P. (1994). Reconstruction in Psychoanalysis: Childhood Revisited and Recreated. Connecticut: International Universities Press. Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory. Bristol: Arrowsmith. Davies, J. M. and Frawley, M. G. (1994). Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse. New York: Basic Books. Freud, S. (1905). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (“Dora”). In The Freud Reader, P. Gay, (Ed). London: Vintage. Gay, P. ed. (1995). The Freud Reader. London: Vintage. Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Hurry, A. (1998). Psychoanalysis and Developmental Therapy. In A. Hurry, (Ed.), Psychoanalysis and Developmental Therapy. London: Karnac Books. Mitchell, S. A. (1993). Hope and Dread in Psycho-Analysis. New York: Basic Books. Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational Concepts in Psycho-Analysis: An Integration. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Mitchell, S. A. (1997). Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis. New York: The Analytic Press. Tyson, P. and Tyson, R. L. (1990). Psychoanalytic Theories of Development: An Integration. New York: Yale University. Stern, D. B. (1997). Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation To Imagination In Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, N J: The Analytic Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1988). Playing and Reality. London: Penguin.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author. All articles published on Counselling Directory are reviewed by our editorial team .

I am a relational psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author in private practice in central and southwest London (see below in 'Extra Information' for details of my practice addresses). I am accredited by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). I work with individuals, offer couples coun...

Find a therapist dealing with Abuse

For the most accurate results, please enter a full postcode. If you are searching for an online/phone Counsellor or Therapist, you don't need to enter your location, however, we recommend choosing a Counsellor or Therapist near you, so that you have the choice to see them in person in the future.

All therapists are verified professionals

Related Articles

Addressing the epidemic of violence against women and girls

The scale of violence against women and girls (VAWG) in England and Wales has reached epidemic proportions. As a th...

When good behaviour hides emotional struggles in children

As parents, carers, and teachers, we often feel proud of well-behaved children, thinking their good manners and obe...

Emotional parenting: Navigating anger and attachment

Parenting is an adventure filled with love, laughter, and learning but, sometimes, it's also a puzzle with pieces w...

Real Stories

Counselling gave me hope

For as long as I could remember I suffered with depression and anxiety before I even knew what that meant, I had suffere...

"I am not a victim. I am a survivor."

In 1981, I was sexually abused by the restaurant owner who had befriended my family on holiday. I was nine years old. I...

Understanding parental separation anxiety

What is parental separation anxiety, how does it feel and what can you do to manage it?

How we use cookies

We use cookies to run and improve our site. This includes cookies that are essential for the site to function as well as analytics cookies that help us understand how you use the site, security cookies to authenticate users and prevent fraud, and advertising cookies to help serve and personalise ads. By clicking "Accept all cookies" you are giving us consent to set these cookies .