Sigmund Freud and Hysterical Dora

At the beginning of the 20th century, in 1901 to be more precise, the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud, who is actually considered to be the father of psychology, wrote his “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” most commonly known as Dora's Case. This case history was based on the treatment of Ida Bauer, who received the pseudonym of Dora from Freud to preserve the secrecy of her identity. Dora was an eighteen-year-old girl who was sent to Freud for therapy by her father, who was at the time maintaining a secret love affair with a woman known as Frau K. The condition that Dora was suffering from, according to Freud, was hysteria.

The diagnosis of hysteria was reached at first due to everything that Dora was telling him about her life. Freud asserted that

If it is true that the causes of hysterical disorders are to be found in the intimacies of the patient's psycho-sexual life, and that hysterical symptoms are the expression of their most secret and repressed wishes, then the complete elucidation of a case of hysteria is bound to involve the revelation of those intimacies and the betrayal of those secrets. This is exactly the way in which he carries on with his treatment of Dora. He tries to discover the many secrets he is sure Dora is hiding not only from him but also from herself. He believes that her unconscious is keeping important issues from her knowledge for a reason he is unaware of, but desperately wants to find out.

When he believes he has found what the secret was, he concludes that she is repressing her love for Herr K. Herr K was the husband of the woman with whom Dora's father was having an affair with, a woman known as Frau K. Dora, at some point in time, used to feel deeply for Frau K, but then she spoke ill and false about her and her perspective on the woman changed. Meanwhile, Herr K is completely aware of the relationship between his wife and Dora's father and he is at the same time trying to court Dora apparently into being his mistress. Furthermore, Dora assures Freud that she is very angry that her father seems to be using her, by means of offering her as a gift to Herr K in return for the favor of letting Dora's father continue with the affair with Frau K. As a result, Dora holds a desire for revenge against her father.

Coincidentally, her father had sent her for treatment with Freud so that the latter would convince her that the former was not having an affair with Frau K, which can be interpreted as follows: he wanted Dora to leave him alone and let him have his affair in peace. Dora also mentions to Freud other issues about her life, such as her not having a close relationship to her mother who seems to be an obsessive woman. This point Freud does not explore any further. Furthermore, Dora also tells Freud about her many illnesses as well as her father's, which include, in her case, coughing, aphonia, appendicitis, an asthma attack, and the condition of bed-wetting in childhood, among others. Once Freud had heard the whole story of Dora, illnesses, worries and problems included, he then realizes that it was a case of hysteria “with the commonest of all somatic and mental symptoms: dyspnoea, tussis nervosa, aphonia, and possibly migraines, together with depression, hysterical unsociability, and a taedium vitae.” (Freud, 24) He then starts to connect the dots in the way which seems more logical to him, since the analysis was interrupted by the patient much too early and he did not have enough time to reach the exact conclusion.

Notwithstanding, he manages to realize that many if not every time she gets sick it is because of some disturbing episode that happened to her either recently or a long time ago, but that something for some reason reminded her of that episode bringing back to her the bad feelings she experienced at that specific time. This way, Freud believes that Dora was in love with Herr K because, for example, when he was away she would suffer from aphonia. That is to say, according to Freud, that she would get sick whenever he was away because she missed him and was miserable without him.

On a different spectrum, one of the main points that Freud wanted to show with this treatment and paper was that interpreting dreams “can be turned to account for the discovery of the hidden and repressed parts of mental life.” In fact, Dora's whole treatment was mostly based on her two dreams.