Dora (case study)

[2] Freud himself reserved initial judgement on the matter, and was swiftly told by Dora that her father had a relationship with Frau K, and that she felt he was surreptitiously palming her off on Herr K in return.

[3] By initially accepting her reading of events, Freud was able to remove her cough symptom; but by pressing her to accept his theory of her own implication in the complex interfamily drama, and an attraction to Herr K, he alienated his patient, who abruptly finished the treatment after 11 weeks, producing, Freud reported bitterly, a therapeutic failure.

[13] One year later (April 1902), Ida returned to see Freud for the last time, and explained that her symptoms had mostly cleared up; that she had confronted the Ks, who confessed that she had been right all along; but that she had recently developed pains in her face.

[15] Through the analysis, Freud interprets Ida's hysteria as a manifestation of her jealousy toward the relationship between Frau K and her father, combined with the mixed feelings of Herr K's sexual approach to her.

[17] Freud's case study was condemned in its first review as a form of mental masturbation, an immoral misuse of his medical position.

[18] A British physician, Ernest Jones, was led by the study to become a psychoanalyst, gaining "a deep impression of there being a man in Vienna who actually listened to every word his patients said to him...a true psychologist".

Otto Fenichel, for example, cited her cough as evidence of identification with Frau K and her mutism as a reaction to the loss of Herr K.[21] Jacques Lacan singled out for technical praise Freud's stressing of Dora's implication in "the great disorder of her father's world ... she was in fact the mainspring of it".

[22] Erik Erikson, however, took issue with Freud's claim that Dora must necessarily have responded positively at some level to Herr K's advances: "I wonder how many of us can follow without protest today Freud's assertion that a healthy young girl would, under such circumstances, have considered Herr K's advances 'neither tactless nor offensive'.

[26] (Catherine Clément, however, would argue that as a mute hysteric, in flight from therapy, Dora was surely far less of a feminist role model than the independent career woman Anna O.

)[27] Even those sympathetic to Freud took issue with his inquisitorial approach, Janet Malcolm describing him as "more like a police inspector interrogating a suspect than like a doctor helping a patient".

The rage to cure was upon him"[29] and conclude that not only the transference but also his own countertransference needed more attention from Freud at this early stage of development of psychoanalytic technique.