Dora, Freud’s case study on Ida Bauer, is an account of the three months he spent treating a young woman said to be suffering from "hysteria" (hee hee). The case study, however, reads not like a dry account of therapeutic interactions between doctor and patient but rather more like a story full of foreshadowing and satisfactory (if not frustrating) connections drawn between disparate details. Even Freud admits that he wrote with hope of publication in mind and made alterations to “the order in which the explanations are given…for the sake of presenting the case in a more connected form” (Freud, 1905, p. 4). In other words, though Freud claimed he altered “nothing of any importance,” the impetus behind his alterations was to create a more readable, more accessible – but not necessarily more accurate – case history.
A critical reader will likely walk away with the impression that Freud is less concerned with how well his methods work than he is that they seem to work -- a self-serving desire certainly not unique to Freud. Freud delights in drawing connections and making inferences based on seemingly insignificant details that later, based on his careful presentation, appear at least somewhat logical. Knowing Freud as most who would read him likely do, readers may occasionally laugh/grumble/curse at Freud’s predictable tendency to attribute everything seemingly pathological to unconscious drives of sex and aggression. Even Dora herself rolls her eyes at this consistent tendency when Freud attempts to analyze one of her dreams – when he draws an analogy between the jewelry box in Dora’s dream and female genitalia, Dora responds, “I knew you would say that” (p. 61).
Freud is also quite careful, in that crafty analyst way, to cover his backside at every turn, criticizing the critics before they criticize him and reminding us that this treatment was cut short and would probably have been successful had it continued. Moreover, the very nature of Freudian analysis sometimes presents an unassailable façade of logistical traps such as Freud’s disappointing assertion that Dora’s “no” actually means “yes.” At another point, he actually writes, “I will pass over the details which showed how entirely correct all of this [earlier interpretation] was” (p. 35). Again and again, Freud attempts to silence both Dora and his readers by predicting and destroying her and our protestations before we have even had the opportunity to voice them. In theory, we as readers have already been primed by Freud to believe that Dora is virtually incapable of understanding her own motivations (hence the “no” means “yes” problem) and that when she disagrees with him she is merely cloaking the disturbing truth in more repression. After all, Dora is a woman suffering from life-long hysteria and so her opinion is therefore the unreliable one. Nicely played, Dr. Freud.
When it comes to Freud and contemporary readers, however, everyone’s a critic. It’s my feeling that the often under-informed, hypercritical perspective with which many approach Freud’s work blinds them to the essential and lasting contributions he has made to the field of psychology. While one can reasonably consider many of Freud’s notions arrogant, insulting, sexist, bigoted, and wholly without merit, certain others, such as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, and some elements of his psychosexual stages (on which others have developed more palatable explanations of development) are Freud’s contributions as well. I mean, don't you think your hatred of Freud seems a little, well, hysterical?
In your face, naysayers!