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"FRAGMENT OF AN ANALYSIS OF A
CASE OF HYSTERIA" (DORA/IDA
BAUER)
Freud's case history for Ida Bauer, alias Dora (1905), covers approximately seventy hours of
treatment. The eighteen-year-old adolescent was forced to go to Freud by her father, Philip
Bauer, who was allegedly most concerned by her fainting spells and recent suicide note. Her
presenting symptoms included dysponoea, tussis, nervosa, aphonia, depression, and hysterical
unsociability. Combining anamnestic data, reconstruction, and an extensive analysis of two
dreams, Freud portrays his patient as a young child observing the primal scene and falling sick
from related masturbation. Her subsequent psychic disorder was directly related to her father's
liaison with Frau K. (Peppina Zellenka). Philip denied the liaison and, in his own version of
Dora's analysis, wanted Freud "to talk Dora out" of her belief. Furthermore, Dora had been
traumatized twice by Herr K. (Hans Zellenka). Until therapy she had kept the first traumatic
occasion to herself, and the second was denied by Hans, who, with his wife and Philip, accused
Dora of fabrication. Mrs. Bauer's "housewife psychosis" and self-absorption further increased
Dora's alienation and desperation.

Freud attempted to demonstrate to Dora that her reproaches toward her adulterous father were
self-reproaches, rooted in her unacknowledged love for Hans, who continued to solicit her.
Surprisingly, Freud also wanted Dora to stop resisting and to accept Hans, for it "would have
been the only possible solution for all parties concerned." Dora, however, abruptly terminated
treatment—an action Freud considered as another manifestation of her vengeance. Freud pointed
out two other shortcomings of his handling of the case: he neglected Dora's transference, and he
overlooked Dora's homosexual strivings, found at her deepest unconscious level.

Freud's case history was an organizing clinical experience for him and for the psychoanalytic
movement and stands as a paradigmatic record of both psychoanalysis and contemporary culture.
It is Freud's longest text on a female patient and also one of Freud's memorable trilogy including
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) and Three Essays on Sexuality (1905d). It is the first of
Freud's great analytic cases and the first involving an adolescent. Ernest Jones called the case "a
model for students of psychoanalysis," and for Erik Erikson, it was "the classical analysis of the
structure and the genesis of a hysteria." Other critics have described the case as a canonical
specimen of conversion hysteria, as Freud's most graphic demonstration of psychosomatics, and
as the case of Freud's most discussed in psychiatry and psychoanalysis as well as in sociology,
anthropology, history, and literary criticism.

Granted, Freud's various theoretical discoveries in the Dora case, from a practical point of view,
must be reevaluated. Freud either downplayed or entirely disregarded Dora's triple burden of
being a woman, a Jew, and an adolescent victimized by two pairs of adults. In his quest to
genetically reconstruct the psychic truth, Freud dismissed Dora's concern about current historical
truth and her need to validate her experience. The case lacks indispensable desiderata of
psychoanalysis in that there is virtually no interpretation involving transference and in that
indoctrination and forced association replace free association.

Even as a case of therapy, Freud's treatment of Dora was disastrous. By bullying his patient and
even wanting her to return to the middle-aged adulterous pedophile who twice traumatized her,
Freud subjected her to a third, iatrogenic trauma. There are further indications of Freud's counter-
transferential perturbation: he lied twice and misdated the case twice in his prefatory remarks; he
repeatedly errs about Dora's age and refers to her at different developmental levels ("girl,"
"child," "woman," "female person," "lady"); he confusedly traces Dora's coughing and aphonia
to ages eight and twelve; he attributes to Dora an adult-like love of Hans during her "first years"
in Merano, Italy (she was there from age six to age seventeen); and he grossly misinterprets
Dora's silence as agreement when he mistakenly tells her that at age seventeen (she was really
fifteen), she was committed to her traumatizing seducer, much like her mother at the age of
seventeen.

According to his own words, he wrote up the case "during the two weeks immediately
following" termination; his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess contains explicit statements that
he was writing the case history between January 10 and 24, a two-week period in 1901. The
implications of the duration of Freud's composition have gone completely unnoticed. When Dora
decided to quit therapy two weeks before she actually did, Freud irritably charged that she was
reacting like a maid who gives a two-week notice before leaving her employer. But Freud
himself unconsciously behaved immaturely during his composition of the case, which partially
took on the character of an acting out, or better yet, a writing out. His two weeks of writing up
the case was a way of dismissing it and of trying to rid himself of Dora.

As a follow-up to Dora's treatment, Freud proceeded to write up her case history. Pertinently,
Freud never considered Dora's bisexuality and transference together; his defensive typographic
separation of these two dynamics enabled him to ward off any notion of maternal transference.
However, far from dissolving his countransference toward Dora, Freud re-enacted it with the
reader, whom he tried to seduce into agreement.

Patrick Mahony