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Ida Bauer (1882 – 1945) was a patient of Sigmund Freud who he diagnosed with hysteria. He wrote a famous case study about her using the pseudonym 'Dora'. This Study is published in "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905 [1901], Standard Edition Vol.7, pp1-122.) Bauer's most manifested hysterical symptom was aphonia (loss of voice). Ida's brother Otto Bauer was a leading member of the Austromarxism movement.
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Case History
Dreams
Ida recounted two dreams to Freud. In the first:
[a] house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said: 'I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.' We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up (Freud 1905, 64).
After only 11 weeks of therapy, she broke off her therapy much to Freud's disappointment. Freud saw this as his failure as an analyst and decided the whole treatment had failed. After some time, Ida returned to see Freud and explained how her symptoms had mostly cleared. Freud had been the only person to believe her in regard to the situations with 'Herr K' and her father and after the analysis, she had chosen to confront her tormentors (her father, his lover and his lover's husband). When confronted, her tormentors confessed that she had been right all along and following this, most of her symptoms had cleared.
Freud's interpretation
Freud, though he believed that Ida had been approached by Herr K., believed that Ida's hysteria was a manifestion of her jealously toward her father and Frau K.. [1] Though Freud was disappointed with the initial results of the case, he considered it important, as it raised his awareness of the phenomenon of transference, which he blamed for his seeming failures in the case. Freud gave her the name 'Dora' after a maid working in the Freud house by the same name.
Criticisms of interpretation
'Dora' remains one of Freud's most famous cases, and is often discussed in feminist circles because of Freud's comments in relation to this case, especially comments like This was surely just the situation to call up destinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen in reference to Dora being kissed by a 'young man of preposessing appearance' (S.E. 7. pp28) implying the passivity of female sexuality and his statement I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable (ibid)
Literature
- Charles Bernheimer, Claire Kahane, In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, Second Edition, Columbia University Press, 1990
- Hannah S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, The Free Press, 1991
- Robin Tolmach Lakoff, James C. Coyne, Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Power in Freud's Case of Dora, Teachers' College Press, 1993
- Patrick Mahoney, Freud's Dora: A Psychoanalytic, Historical, and Textual Study, Yale University Press 1996, ISBN 0300066228
See also
References
- ^ Akavia, Naamah (2005). "Hysteria, identification, and the Family: A Rereading of Freud's Dora Case". American Imago 62 (2): 193-216. Retrieved on 2007-11-18.
