Sigmund Freud and Hysterical Dora

He probably did this since he believed that “a thorough investigation of the problems of dream is an indispensable prerequisite for any comprehension of the mental processes in hysteria and the other psychoneuroses.”  Since he had already diagnosed her with hysteria, dreams seemed to be for him the most significant tool for understanding Dora and, therefore, trying to find a cure for her. He assures that dreams express our wishes, and that is what he sees in Dora's dreams, which also confirm what he believes she is repressing: her love for Herr K.

Dora's sexuality was another point that Freud considered relevant in the treatment and therefore wanted to explore. He affirmed that he “should  consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable.” This is what he elucidates after Dora told him what she felt when Herr K kissed her, which was, as a matter of fact, an unpleasurable feeling or disgust. Moreover, Freud believes that Dora must have felt a displacement of sensation. When Herr K kissed her, Dora claimed to remember having felt his thorax on her chest, but Freud believes that what she really felt was his erect penis. Since she repressed that thought, she believes that what she really felt was his thorax, therefore displacing from the lower body to the upper body what actually happened.

Moreover, there was another displacement in that Dora instead of having felt a genital sensation as a response to the kiss, she experienced unpleasurable feelings. On a different subject, Freud derived that Dora had been in love with her father when she was a child and that she was now unwillingly pretending to be still in love with him in her unconscious. To Freud's mind, the love for her father was a reactive thought (like a mask) to the what she was really feeling, which for him was, as we have seen, love for Herr K. In addition, the love she felt for Frau K was also to conceal what she felt for Herr K. The problem was that when Herr K makes that proposition to Dora, she, after having heard from his former governess that he had made a certain proposition to her before, felt like he was putting her in the same position as a servant, and using her in the same way.

This was something her pride would not tolerate, and now she needed revenge. Freud could see that when in her second dream she refuses a man to accompany her, in a way in which mirrors what she did to Herr K at the time: she refuses him and hurts his feelings. Freud thinks that Dora regrets having slapped Herr K and not having accepted his offer (which she did not actually finished to hear), and that is why she had appendicitis exactly 9 months afterwards - the timing shows how her mind created a pain that might reflect childbirth. What is more, Freud adds, she must have felt disappointed when, after she told her parents about what Herr K had done, he did not come to her again as she must have expected but rather denied having done any such thing.

One last important point that Freud mentions is the appearance of transference in the treatment. Transference is something the patient does to the therapist, replacing him or her in her or his mind with another person. For example, Freud sees clearly that Dora was at the beginning replacing her father with him in her imagination. However, after hearing the first dream, he believed that she was making a transference from Herr K to himself, and that she took revenge on him as she would have done to Herr K, and “deserted [Freud] as she believed herself to have been deceived and deserted by [Herr K].”What Dora did to Freud was abandoning the treatment all of a sudden and prematurely to make sure she would demonstrate “upon her own person the helplessness and incapacity if the physician.”  Freud indeed could not finish the treatment and he therefore could not cure Dora. Until now we have seen Freud's perspective of Dora's case. Notwithstanding, there are different views about it, like Toril Moi described in her essay “Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud's Dora”. Moi sees some flaws in his treatment of Dora.

The most significant to her, besides the fact that she considers the whole treatment as a failure, was that Freud, even though he mentioned transference, failed for some reason to mention the existence of The opposite phenomenon, countertransference, which consists in the analyst's transferring his or her own unconscious emotions onto the patient.  According to Lacan, Freud unconsciously identifies with Herr K in his relationship to Dora, which makes him (Freud) far too interested in Dora's alleged love for Herr K and effectively blind to any other explanation of her problems. Thus the countertransference contributes decisively to the failure of Dora's analysis.”  Moi adds, then, that since Dora had already made a transference from Herr K to Freud, the fact that the latter keeps on insisting that Dora should admit she loves Herr K leads the girl to interpret it as a repetition of what had already happened to her with the actual Herr K. Therefore, this situation makes Dora reject Freud as she did Herr K.