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At the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud
lived and worked in Karl Lueger's recently renovated, virulently
anti-Semitic Vienna, but despite this- or perhaps because of
it-, he turned his attention inward, away from the public world
of politics and architecture, the private and the primal: the
archaeology of the human soul. Freud was the first to write
about the centrality of human sexual experience. Early in his
career, he believed that childhood sexual abuse was the root
cause of hysteria. Later, around the time of the Dora analysis,
he changed his mind. What he called "the great secret"
had "gradually dawned" on Freud: most of the childhood
seductions his patients had described to him, accounts upon
which he had based his theory of hysteria, were imaginary and
had never actually occurred. Was Dora abused?
When Dora's father brought her, a Jewish girl "of intelligent
and engaging good looks" to Freud, several physicians had
already failed to cure Dora of her hysterical symptoms. These
symptoms and Dora's threatened suicide concerned Dora's father.
He hoped that perhaps Freud would be able to cure her hysteria
and discourage her disobedience. Although she knew it displeased
him when she did so, Dora repeatedly asked her father to break
off relations with his mistress, Frau K.
Dora told Freud that she had been propositioned many times by
Frau K's husband, Herr K, and that although she had told her
father about this, he had refused to believe her. Freud believed
her; at least, he believed Dora's account of the events, but
he did not believe her interpretation of the events.
He explained to her that she was, in fact, passionately in love
with her father, passionately in love with Herr K, and, "the
strongest unconscious current in her mental life", passionately
in love with Frau K. Dora resisted this interpretation of her
experience. She broke off the analysis. Freud was disappointed
and angry. He had not understood or explained all of the symbols
in Dora's second dream, and although he had afforded her some
relief from the most troublesome of her symptoms, he felt that
her future mental integrity was by no means assured.
All this is recounted in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case
of Hysteria, published in 1905. |
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