Dora Case Research Articles

Purloining Freud: Dora's Letter to Posterity

The references to letters in Freud's dream of Irma's injection are utilized as a springboard for an examination of letters in the Dora case. Invoking the hypothesis that the outcome of an action can be heuristically regarded as having been its intended purpose, the author argues that Dora intended her parents to find the letter in which she threatened to commit suicide so that they would take her to a consultation with Freud, who would then write up her case in a manner that simultaneously exposed the sordid living arrangements of her family and inadvertently also incriminate himself as a domineering patriarch. Thus, the Dora case is not simply Freud's letter to Fliess, or even Freud's letter to posterity, but ultimately Dora's letter to posterity in which she purloins Freud and becomes the Other of his discourse.

Hysteria, Identification, and the Family: A Rereading of Freud's Dora Case

Hysteria, Identification, and the Family: A Rereading of Freud's Dora Case

Dora's Gift; Or, Lacan's Homage to Dora

Lacan reopened Dora's case in 1957. In his 1951 talk (published in 1952), transference was the key; in the 1957 seminar, he focused on hysteria. Dora loved by proxy and refused to be an object of heterosexual desire. Her object was homosexual because Mrs. K embodied Dora's essential question, femininity—a question that cannot be divorced from that of the lack of the phallus and her father's gift of nothing, which is the gift of love. There is no greater gift than the gift of what one does not have. Drawing from Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, Lacan concluded with an analysis of the cultural meaning of the gift.

Book reviews

Book reviewsJon G. Allen, James W. Lomax, Edward Poa, April Stein, Flynn O'Malley, Adrienne Munich, Jay Memmott, Jon G. Allen, W. W. Meissner, Susan Romanelli, Sanford E. Pomerantz, W. Walter Menninger, Joel Yager and Lisa LewisJon G. Allen1. The Menninger Clinic.Search for more papers by this author, James W. Lomax2. Associate Chairman and Director of Educational Programs, Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas.Search for more papers by this author, Edward Poa3. The Menninger Clinic.Search for more papers by this author, April Stein4. The Menninger Clinic, Houston, Texas.Search for more papers by this author, Flynn O'Malley5. Clinical Director, Menninger Clinic Adolescent Treatment Program; Assistant Professor, Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas.Search for more papers by this author, Adrienne Munich6. SUNY/Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York.Search for more papers by this author, Jay Memmott7. Department of Social Work, Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas.Search for more papers by this author, Jon G. Allen8. Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine.Search for more papers by this author, W. W. Meissner9. University Professor of Psychoanalysis, Boston College; Training and Supervising Analyst Emeritus, Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.Search for more papers by this author, Susan Romanelli10. The Menninger Clinic.Search for more papers by this author, Sanford E. Pomerantz11. Board Certified Psychiatrist, Past President of the Kansas Psychiatric Society, Topeka, Kansas.Search for more papers by this author, W. Walter Menninger12. Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Baylor College of MedicineSearch for more papers by this author, Joel Yager13. Professor of Psychiatry, University of New Mexico School of Medicine; Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles.Search for more papers by this author and Lisa Lewis14. The Menninger Clinic.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:June 2005https://doi.org/10.1521/bumc.68.3.260.40402PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutThe knotted subject: Hysteria and its discontentsBernheimer, C., & Kahane, C. (Eds.). (1985). In Dora's case: Freud, hysteria, feminism. New York: Columbia University Press. Google ScholarBezier, J. (1994). Ventriloquized bodies: Narratives of hysteria in nineteenth-century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Google ScholarBronfen, E. (1992). Over her dead body: Death, femininity, and the aesthetic. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Google ScholarEnder, E. (1995). Sexing the mind: Nineteenth-century fictions of hysteria. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Google ScholarGilman, S., King, H., Porter, R., Rousseau, G.S., & Showalter, E. (1993). Hysteria beyond Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press. Google ScholarKahane, C. (1995). Passions of the voice: Hysteria, narrative, and the figure of the speaking woman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Google ScholarKofman, S. (1980). The enigma of woman: Woman in Freud's writings. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Google ScholarMicale, M. (1990). Approaching hysteria: Disease and its interpretations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google ScholarFunny peculiar. Gershon Legman and the psychopathology of humor.Cousins, N. (1979). Anatomy of an illness as perceived by the patient: Reflections on healing and regeneration. New York: W.W. Norton. Google ScholarGrotjahn, M. (1957). Beyond laughter. New York: McGraw Hill. Google ScholarHelitzer, M. (1894). Comedy—Techniques for writers and performers. Athens, OH: Lawhead. Google ScholarMenninger , W. W. (1989). For the love of Murphy—Humor and mental health. BNI Quarterly, 5 (4):28–32. Google ScholarVaillant, G. E. (1977). Adaptation to life. Boston: Little Brown. Google Scholar Previous article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 68Issue 3Sep 2004 Information© The Menninger FoundationPDF download

Psychoanalytic interpretations: Word‐music and translation

A perspective on psychoanalytic interpretations as a special case of artistic translations (i.e. translations of both content and formal aspects of discourse) is proposed. Mutative interpretations are seen as creative endeavours that always presuppose a prior text, which is itself already a translation. Freud's main uses of the metaphor of translation as an intrapsychic as well as an intersubjective phenomena, their resonance among later psychoanalytic thinkers and their convergence with classic theories of translation are presented. A perspective on psychoanalytic interpretations as an evolving self‐other dialect is developed within the framework of Borges's theory of translation and Bakhtin's concept of exotopy. This framework questions the possibility of an original source, proposes the translator's inevitable implication in translation and underscores intersubjectivity as a necessary way towards the translation of absent meanings. The work of translation also highlights the relevance of space and time contexts, as well as the necessary role of a different other for the interpretation of unconscious processes. Differences between theories of translation reiterate contemporary psychoanalytic controversies about the preeminence of the analysand's subjectivity and the intersubjective approach to treatment. Borges's ‘The Aleph’ and an excerpt of Dora's case offer paradigmatic demonstrations of the limits and possibilities of understanding through translation.

Psychoanalytic interpretations: word-music and translation.

A perspective on psychoanalytic interpretations as a special case of artistic translations (i.e. translations of both content and formal aspects of discourse) is proposed. Mutative interpretations are seen as creative endeavours that always presuppose a prior text, which is itself already a translation. Freud's main uses of the metaphor of translation as an intrapsychic as well as an intersubjective phenomena, their resonance among later psychoanalytic thinkers and their convergence with classic theories of translation are presented. A perspective on psychoanalytic interpretations as an evolving self-other dialect is developed within the framework of Borges's theory of translation and Bakhtin's concept of exotopy. This framework questions the possibility of an original source, proposes the translator's inevitable implication in translation and underscores intersubjectivity as a necessary way towards the translation of absent meanings. The work of translation also highlights the relevance of space and time contexts, as well as the necessary role of a different other for the interpretation of unconscious processes. Differences between theories of translation reiterate contemporary psychoanalytic controversies about the preeminence of the analysand's subjectivity and the intersubjective approach to treatment. Borges's 'The Aleph' and an excerpt of Dora's case offer paradigmatic demonstrations of the limits and possibilities of understanding through translation.

The Illusion of Parental Celibacy

The paper begins by reviewing Freud's case history of Dora and emphasizing her involvement in and overstimulation by her parents' sexual behavior. This markedly interfered with her ability to desexualize her relationship with them. As a result she was unable to develop the illusion of parental celibacy, which I postulate is an important and necessary defensive stage in normal adolescence. This illusion facilitates the desexualization of the adolescent's relationship to the parents and so contributes to separation from them and the seeking of non-incestuous sexual outlets. The disruption of this illusion of parental celibacy by parental sex education, or by the complications of parental divorce may contribute significantly to the development of adolescent psychopathology. Clinical vignettes are presented.

The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud's Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm

The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud’s Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm Ellie Ragland In recent literary studies of trauma, many critics postulate trauma as itself a limit on representation. In Shoshana Felman’s words, working with trauma in the literary classroom, whether through fiction, historical fiction, or poetry, has the pedagogical effect of “break[ing] the very framework of the class” (50). Yet what makes the study of trauma particularly germane to literary critique and analysis is not, as one might assume, some extra-linguistic component which would seem to belong to the field of History. Rather, what appears in narrative accounts of trauma are the pathetic, suffering, passionate and affective dimensions that literary language and genres have always sought to embody and recount. Relating the descriptive words used by her students on the occasion of their having viewed a videotaped session of Holocaust testimony, Felman finds commonality between the students’ words and those of various poets, such as Paul Célan and Mallarmé. Célan recalls “A strange lostness/Was palpably present,” while Mallarmé speaks of “the testimony of an accident.” But the larger point to come out of trauma studies is that art cannot be seen as separate from life, or as separable from a certain normal affectivity which is the very domain of literary language. The goal of this essay is to link the relation of trauma to memory (and forgetting) in terms of its speech, displaced in symptoms, passion, and affect; to unveil the nature of traumatic catastrophe as a concrete, historical event; to argue that the limits of representation in trauma tell us something new about the affects (as opposed to cognition) which Lacan tried to explain by his category of the real. Further on, I shall relate my argument to Freud’s Dora case, his “Fragment of a Little Hysteria” (1905), his study of “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), and his comments regarding the trauma undergone by his young nephew in the Fort! Da! paradigm. I shall reconsider these in light of Lacan’s interpretation of Freud’s theory of the object in reference to his Seminar IV: The Object Relation. Critics working in this new mode of literary study have isolated certain features marking a clear set of responses that arise from trauma material. Dori Laub, for example, speaks of the temporal delay that carries one beyond the shock of a first moment of trauma to what inevitably follows: a repeated suffering of the event. Traumatic memories—whether recounted by Holocaust survivors, incest victims, or survivors of rape or other abuse—have the characteristic of reappearing with a literal repetitiveness that reminds one of Freud’s arguments in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): at the point where one would expect the pleasure principle to function, one discovers, instead, a repetition whose fixities are on the side of the death drive.1 Lacan put forth the theory that what is repressed in the real—the order of trauma, of the unsayable, unspeakable, the impossible—will return in the symbolic order of language. A trauma, in other words, will not just disappear. It cannot simply be forgotten. Not only will it remain recorded in the real as a limit point to memory; it will reappear as a symptomatic enigma which opens onto a certain anxiety. In his Seminar X (1962–1963): L’angoisse, Lacan stresses that the anxiety accompanying a trauma is not doubt. Rather, its effects have remained inscribed as an unconscious system of knowledge which appears in conscious life as a concrete insistence, whose characteristic modes are repetition, passion, strong affect, or a suffering that one cannot simply and easily talk away or talk through. Trauma, in Lacan’s estimation, is not only not doubt; it is, rather, the cause of doubt. Lacan stresses an unfamiliar picture of the causality of trauma, then: it is a kind of certainty that can be known insofar as it is acted out. Put another way, behind an affect caused by trauma, one finds the movement of cause itself as a return of the real into the symbolic. Precise knowledge regarding the trauma’s cause...

Formulando uma Psicopatologia Fundamental, justificando-a e ilustrando-a a partir da psicanálise da adolescência de Dora

Trata-se de uma revisão da literatura em busca de fundamentos para uma "Psicopatologia Fundamental". Examinamos o Relatório de Atividades do primeiro Laboratório de Psicopatologia Fundamental brasileiro - situado na PUC-SP durante os dois primeiros anos de sua existência (1995-96), Em seguida, procuramos rela- cionar nossos achados com três pressupostos freudianos de uma Psicopatologia Fundamental extraídos da análise do caso Dora, Finalmente, concitamos dando destaque à noção de "neurose de transferência " como principal fundamento freudiano para uma "Psicopatologia Fundamental".

Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue, and: Skirting the Issue: Essays in Literary Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue, and: Skirting the Issue: Essays in Literary Theory Pascale Bécel Mary Gossy. Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. 112 pp. Mary Lydon. Skirting the Issue: Essays in Literary Theory. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995. xiii + 294 pp. Mary Gossy’s Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue is an informative, provocative, and enjoyable reading of one of Freud’s most popular studies, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In his text, Freud collected some two hundred anecdotes involving verbal slips in order to illustrate the presence of the unconscious in conscious discourse. Through close readings, Gossy shows that the majority of the anecdotes are written over female bodies, feminized texts, or foreign words. She argues that the men (including Freud) whose language slips [End Page 1060] in the anecdotes are actually repressing their experience of the body of a real woman, and that “the repression . . . returns to disrupt the masculine hegemony of their dialogues.” Gossy’s first chapter catches Freud’s language slipping as he misquotes Goethe’s Faust in his epigraph for The Psychopathology, and provides the argument for a politicized interpretation of the slip: its feminization and its threat to authority and intentionality. Freud’s borrowed epigraph inaugurates a book on the unwelcome manifestation of the repressed in language, and does so, as Gossy pointedly demonstrates, while performing a slip in gender, a slip which “is concretely engendered in the text as feminine.” Chapter 2 discusses an anecdote on another misquotation that a Jewish friend of Freud’s makes as the two men are travelling abroad. Meant to express his rage at the anti-Semitism of the times, the misquotation leads to understanding the friend’s repression of the idea that a foreign woman he met during his journey might be expecting his child. Gossy’s analysis again reveals the political implications of the slip: how it points to the friend’s cooptation with structures of domination that protect his male privileges while contradicting his conscious intent—namely, his rage at anti-Semitism. Chapters 3 and 4 prefigure a feminist psychoanalysis of Freudian psychoanalysis and highlight how a theory of the unconscious that is based on a fictionalized idea of femininity cannot contain and control women’s bodies, specifically the women’s pregnant and raped bodies favored in the anecdotes. In chapter 3, Gossy playfully asks if it is “possible that making a Freudian slip makes a man feel pregnant with unwelcome meanings.” She answers her question through a reinterpretation of three anecdotes on screen memories involving men who are narrating childhood memories about their mothers’ pregnant bodies and about learning the alphabet. In these examples, Gossy argues that the excessiveness of the female body upsets “the order of the alphabet of castration,” disrupts the grammar of patriarchy, and becomes a defining term of both femininity and masculinity. Chapter 4 further illustrates how the Freudian theory of the unconscious slips when Freud constructs a “hair-raising” analogy between the operation of the unconscious in the case of suicide and its operation in the case of rape. The last and fifth chapter of Freudian Slips is particularly insightful as it takes the reader back to the conditions of production of Freud’s [End Page 1061] The Psychopathology. According to Gossy, the proliferation of anecdotes with each new edition of the book emerges as compensation for what the Dora story is unable to tell. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” which records the famous Dora case and Freud’s failure at theorizing the meaning of her body, was written during the composition of The Psychopathology. Gossy convincingly infers that the meaning of Dora’s body, which Freud’s interpretations cannot contain, “returns as repressed content in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which is full of examples of how the bodies of women make the discourse of man slip.” But beyond writing about Freud’s narrative of the slip, Gossy judiciously underlines the productivity of a parapractic discourse in terms of a political practice—let us say, a feminist practice—and points to a new (slippery) pedagogy that undermines absolute...

The Lake of Seduction: Body, Acting, and Voice in Helene Cixous's Portrait de Dora

In Portrait de Dora (1976), Helene Cixous explores the possibility of feminine theater by rewriting Freud 's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria for stage performance. Anticipating her Nom d' Oedipe (1978), Portrait takes as a pretext the myth of Oedipus, which underlies Freud's analysis of the case history, as central to both psychoanalysis and classical drama. Indeed, Portrait de Dora along with her Nom d' Oedipe are innovative attempts to define feminist performance by placing psychoanalysis and classical drama under the scrutiny of the theatrical. By locating Freud's case-history within theater,' Cixous underscores the theatricality of psychoanalytical discourse as the "talking cure," using voice, gestures, staging, ritual, and myth, in order to scrutinize the relationship between the semiotics of symptoms as the "acting out" of the hysteric body and the Symbolic order that authorizes its meaning. Moreover, as Sharon Willis observes, Cixous's Portrait puts into question the theatrical frame itself, and the body staged within it, thereby becoming "exemplary of the critical operations of certain feminist performance practice[s]." Cixous, who takes hysteria as a key to both feminine sexuality and performance, stages Freud's failure with Dora as a disfunctional dramatic operation by depicting his insistence on reading his paternal Oedipal model into Dora's hysteria as ineffective in regard to the real performative throbbing of the hysteric stage. By confronting thereupon the symbolic order of the Oedipal stage with the imaginary theater of pain and seduction that the hysteric's body displays, Cixous challenges the phallocratic origins and prejudices of both classical theater and psychoanalysis. Indeed, if, as Jacqueline Rose observes, Dora's case opens "a dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism," then Cixous's Portrait not only places this dialogue within a theatrical space, it enlarges the dialogical frame by introducing also the question of the relationship between feminism and theater.

Dissolving the Myth of the Unified Self: The Fate of the Subject in Freudian Analysis

Employing Lacan's conception of desire, this paper explores the distinction between self and subjectivity as it emerges in the psychoanalytic situation. Challenging the notion of the self as a singular, coherent, and bounded entity, I demonstrate, through a review of Dora's case, that the "Freudian subject" is a cast of characters, a loose net of contextual, contradictory, and shifting identifications enveloping not a discrete core, but its very absence.

Dora’s Conversion Syndrome: A Contribution to the Prehistory of the Holocaust

The culture and society in which patient and analyst live and work may silently impinge upon the analytic situation. The Dora case exemplifies the influence of pervasive sociocultural anti-Semitism on the patient's personality development and psychological problems. Identifications with aggressor and victim were significant clinical and social issues. In its cultural and historical dimensions, the Dora case reflects some pathogenic roots of the Holocaust.

Did Dora have an oedipus complex? A reexamination of the theoretical context of Freud's "fragment of an analysis".

A careful review of the Dora case refutes the commonly held view that it reflects Freud's adoption of his classical oedipal model. Through Dora, Freud examined some of the theoretical and emotional underpinnings of the seduction theory and began a complex and very gradual move toward an oedipal model, never reaching his classical formulation. The transitional nature of this case allows for an understanding of some of Freud's difficulties in adopting the oedipal model and the considerations that, nevertheless, eventually determined the move. How and why this was overlooked in all later studies of the case has important implications for the process of development of psychoanalytic theory and the writing of its history.

Fifty years after Freud: Dora, the Rat Man, and the Wolf-Man.

Three of Freud's case histories are reviewed and reexamined from the perspective of modern psychodynamic thinking. The Dora case illuminates advances in our understanding of adolescent psychology and countertransference. The cases of the Rat Man and the Wolf-Man draw attention to our increased awareness since Freud of the importance of the therapeutic relationship and the recognition that a two-person psychology is at work in the psychotherapeutic situation. The heuristic value of such comprehensive case reports is emphasized.

In Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism. Charles Bernheimer , Claire Kahane

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsIn Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism. Charles Bernheimer , Claire Kahane Lillian S. RobinsonLillian S. Robinson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 13, Number 3Spring, 1988 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494450 Views: 8Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1988 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: John Neu One Hundred Thirteenth Critical Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences, Isis 79, no.55 (Oct 2015): 5–273.https://doi.org/10.1086/354915

In Dora's Case

In Dora's Case

The revival of "Dora": advances in psychoanalytic theory and technique.

For nearly six decades after its publication in 1905, Freud's remarkable case of Dora remained untouched by critical comment. However, beginning in the early 1970's, an abundance of articles began to appear, which focused exclusively on the Dora case. The present paper reviews the literature of this so-called "Dora revival" in order to explain the historical and theoretical reasons leading to this extraordinary burst of research. Above all, two vital developments in the psychoanalytic discipline created the climate that fostered the Dora revival. First, there was a revolutionary change in attitude toward the phenomenon of countertransference: in contrast to the classical view of countertransference as a disruptive interference in treatment, analysts increasingly regarded countertransference as a pervasive and natural process, which could be potentially utilized to enhance understanding of the patient's unconscious conflicts and defenses. Second, there was enormous and rapid growth of a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory of adolescence and its treatment. Thus, based on a more favorable attitude toward countertransference, and a much improved understanding of the unique problems of adolescence, psychoanalysts could reexamine and better understand the decisive events that contributed to Freud's abortive analytic treatment of Dora.

Psychoanalysis and family therapy: Freud's Dora case reconsidered

Freud's Dora case is considered from the perspective of family therapy. Her illness is homeostatic; it holds two disturbed fractured families together. Freud considered his analysis a failure; from a systems point of view it was a partial success. His challenging technique is similar to that of modern family therapists. The theories of change underlying family therapy and psychoanalysis are compared. There are many similarities. They are mutually compatible disciplines, working at different levels.

The nature of the Oedipus complex in the Dora case.

In this paper we sought to study, through a detailed review of Dora's analytic material, the specific nature of her oedipal conflict and its expression in her treatment with Freud as manifested in her dreams, associations, and transference. We found that while Freud was surely correct in considering Dora's positive oedipal conflict as an important source of her psychopathology, the implication of her early regression to a phallic-oedipal position was not fully appreciated or interpreted, leading to her eventual premature termination. While Freud analyzed, largely following the end of the treatment, Dora's erotic love for Frau K., he did not see this love as deriving from an integrated phallic-oedipal complex which included competitive and castrative strivings toward men as well as wishes to love a woman from a phallic position. Thus we sought to extend Freud's analysis of the case by delineating the specific form of Dora's homosexual love, the genetic sources for it, and the aggressive wish toward men as they derive from a particular substage of the oedipal phase for females, the phallic-oedipal phase. We conclude that Dora's hostility toward Freud, her father and Herr. K. resulted not only from injured pride but, more basically, from her jealousy and rivalry with father for mother's love. In her treatment Dora's phallic-oedipal wishes became increasingly dominant. They were manifested in the transference with her first acting to engage Freud's interest and then thwarting his interpretive efforts, ultimately by leaving the treatment altogether. The case well illustrates the importance of understanding the role of the phallic-oedipal phase in female hysterical patients.