Зигмунд Фрейдтің пациенті – Дораның тарихы

Patient of Sigmund Freud

Dora is the pseudonym given by Sigmund Freud to a patient whom he diagnosed with hysteria, and treated for about eleven weeks in 1900. Her most manifest hysterical symptom was aphonia, or loss of voice. The patient's real name was Ida Bauer (1882–1945); her brother Otto Bauer was a leading member of the Austro Marxist movement. Freud published a case study about Dora, Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901], Standard Edition Vol. 7, pp. 1–122; Bruchstücke einer Hysterie Analyse).

Dora lived with her parents, who had a loveless marriage, but one which took place in close concert with another couple, Herr and Frau K, who were friends of Dora's parents. The crisis that led her father to bring Dora to Freud was her accusation that Herr K had made a sexual advance to her, at which she slapped his face—an accusation which Herr K denied and which her own father disbelieved. Freud himself reserved initial judgement on the matter, and was swiftly told by Dora that her father had a relationship with Frau K, and that she felt he was surreptitiously palming her off on Herr K in return. By initially accepting her reading of events, Freud was able to remove her cough symptom; but by pressing her to accept his theory of her own implication in the complex interfamily drama, and an attraction to Herr K, he alienated his patient, who abruptly finished the treatment after 11 weeks, producing, Freud reported bitterly, a therapeutic failure.

Through the analysis, Freud interprets Ida's hysteria as a manifestation of her jealousy toward the relationship between Frau K and her father, combined with the mixed feelings of Herr K's sexual approach to her. Although Freud was disappointed with the initial results of the case, he considered it important, as it raised his awareness of the phenomenon of transference, on which he blamed his seeming failures in the case. Freud gave her the name 'Dora', and he describes in detail in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life what his unconscious motivations for choosing such a name might have been. His sister's nursemaid had to give up her real name, Rosa, when she accepted the job because Freud's sister was also named Rosa—she took the name Dora instead. Thus, when Freud needed a name for someone who could not keep her real name (this time, in order to preserve his patient's anonymity), Dora was the name that occurred to him.

Freud's case study was condemned in its first review as a form of mental masturbation, an immoral misuse of his medical position. A British physician, Ernest Jones, was led by the study to become a psychoanalyst, gaining "a deep impression of there being a man in Vienna who actually listened to every word his patients said to him a true psychologist". Carl Jung also took up the study enthusiastically.

By mid century, Freud's study had gained general psychoanalytic acceptance. Otto Fenichel, for example, citing her cough as evidence of identification with Frau K and her mutism as a reaction to the loss of Herr K. Jacques Lacan singled out for technical praise Freud's stressing of Dora's implication in "the great disorder of her father's world she was in fact the mainspring of it". Erik Erikson, however, took issue with Freud's claim that Dora must necessarily have responded positively at some level to Herr K's advances: "I wonder how many of us can follow without protest today Freud's assertion that a healthy young girl would, under such circumstances, have considered Herr K's advances 'neither tactless nor offensive'."

Second wave feminism would develop Erikson's point, as part of a wider critique of Freud and psychoanalysis. Freud's comment that "This was surely just the situation to call up distinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen", in reference to Dora's being kissed by a "young man of prepossessing appearance", was seen as revealing a crass insensitivity to the realities of adolescent female sexuality. Toril Moi was speaking for many when she accused Freud of phallocentrism, and his study of being a "Representation of Patriarchy"; while Hélène Cixous would see Dora as a symbol of "silent revolt against male power over women's bodies and women's language a resistant heroine". (Catherine Clément, however, would argue that as a mute hysteric, in flight from therapy, Dora was surely far less of a feminist role model than the independent career woman Anna O.) Even those sympathetic to Freud took issue with his inquisitorial approach, Janet Malcolm describing him as "more like a police inspector interrogating a suspect than like a doctor helping a patient". Peter Gay, too, would question Freud's "insistent tone The rage to cure was upon him" and conclude that not only the transference but also his own countertransference needed more attention from Freud at this early stage of development of psychoanalytic technique.

Freud: The Secret Passion, director John Huston, 1962. Drama film with a heroine drawing from the Dora case. Sigmund Freud’s Dora, directors Anthony McCall, Andrew Tyndall, Jane Weinstock, and Claire Pajaczkowska, 1979. Experimental essayistic film putting the Dora case into debates about psychoanalysis and feminism. Nineteen Nineteen, director Hugh Brody, 1985. Dramatic fiction about a reunion of two patients of Freud, largely based on the Dora and Wolf Man cases. Hysterical Girl, 2020, director Kate Novack. A contemporary feminist interpretation of the study.