Everyone knows that Sigmund Freud was a great theoretician, and his teaching had a decisive influence on the development of psychology in the XNUMXth century. Little is known about how he worked with patients. The stories of six patients are collected in the book Famous Cases from the Practice of Sigmund Freud. We publish the first of them – the story of Dora.
Freud described the history of the analysis of this patient in his work “Fragment of the Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”. He originally called it “Dreaming and Hysteria,” which he thought was “particularly suited to show how the interpretation of dreams is woven into the history of treatment, and how it can be used to make up for amnesias and explain symptoms.”
18-year-old Dora was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. He possessed extraordinary abilities and energy and was the main figure in the family. Dora sharply criticized her mother, a narrow-minded woman, obsessively obsessed with maintaining cleanliness and order in the house. Her sister suffered from a severe form of psychoneurosis, her brother was a hypochondriacal bachelor.
At the age of eight, Dora began to experience shortness of breath of a nervous nature, at 12 – migraines, a nervous cough and aphonia (loss of sonority of the voice). Once, after an argument with her father, she had an attack with loss of consciousness, after which her father sent her to Freud for treatment.
During the sessions, it became clear why Dora was angry with her father (to whom she was strongly attached). He had a long and not very skillfully concealed affair with a certain Mrs. K., while the lady’s husband, Mr. K, made attempts to seduce Dora when she was still 14, and showed a not quite platonic interest in her later.
It seemed to Dora that her father “traded” her, giving her as a payment to Mr. K. for turning a blind eye to his wife’s adultery. Dora assured Freud that she did not like Mr. K. at all, but later in the course of therapy she was forced to admit that she was in fact in love with him. Until one day he made her an immodest proposal, and she gave him a slap in the face.
It turns out that she had a dream right after the scene with Mr. K., when he tried to seduce her.
It was obvious that now she wanted to get her father’s attention back, to distract him from Mrs. K., and Freud suggested that she was trying to achieve this by “creating” illnesses for herself. “I am fully convinced,” he writes, “that she will immediately recover if her father says that for the sake of her health he sacrifices Mrs. K.” At the same time, by her unspoken demand to her father “either she or I,” Dora put herself in the place not of her daughter, but of her mother. Freud suggested that she was unconsciously in love with her father.
He found confirmation of these hypotheses in her periodically recurring dream. “There’s a fire in the house! Dora said. My father is standing next to my bed and wakes me up. I dress quickly. Mom still wants to save my jewelry box, but dad says, “I don’t want me and both of my kids to get burned because of your jewelry box.” We hurry down, and as soon as I am in the yard, I wake up.
It turns out that she saw the dream immediately after the scene with Mr. K., when he tried to seduce her. And it was repeated three times after that, while Dora and her father were visiting the house of the K spouses. So, Freud concludes, the dream was a direct consequence of that scene that struck her.
Considering that the jewelry box is a designation of the female genitals, he offers Dora the following interpretation: “You said to yourself:“ A man is chasing me, he wants to enter my room, my “jewelry box” is in danger, and if trouble happens, then the fault there will be a dad.”
She was afraid of Mr. K., but she was even more afraid of herself, her temptation to give herself to him.
Nevertheless, the reverse situation arises in the dream: the father, on the contrary, saves Dora from danger – why? Because in the realm of dreams in general, everything turns into its opposite, explains Freud.
The dream confirms his earlier hypothesis, he says to the patient: “As I told you before this dream, and the dream confirms my words again, you awaken your former [infantile] love for the pope in order to protect yourself from love for Mr. K. But what do they prove these efforts? Not only that you are afraid of Mr. K., but that you are even more afraid of yourself, of your temptation to surrender to him.
The second dream, which Dora had a few days later, symbolically said that she regretted that she had rejected Mr. K.
After that, Dora suddenly announced that she was interrupting the treatment. During the last session, Freud explained to her his vision of the situation: Dora secretly hoped that Mr. K. would divorce and marry her. “Now I know what you don’t want to remember,” he told her. “You imagine that this courtship is serious and Mr. K. will not back down until you become his wife.”
Dora listened without her usual objections. She seemed flustered, graciously said goodbye with best wishes for the New Year, and did not reappear. Why did she leave so suddenly? Freud believed that something in him reminded Dora of Mr. K., “and she took revenge on me as she wanted to take revenge on Mr. K., left me because she believed that she had been deceived and abandoned by him.”
Patients with a neurosis, Freud comments, “are seized by the contradiction between reality and fantasy. From what they desire most in their fantasies, they run away if it actually occurs to them, and most willingly indulge in fantasies where they no longer need to be afraid of their realization.
She took revenge by telling her wife that she knew about her relationship with her father, and forced Mr. K. to confess that he had made her a love proposal.
After 15 months, Dora, having come up with a plausible pretext, reappeared with Freud. Apparently, she wanted to tell the continuation of her story. After completing the analysis, she, according to her, was “in a disassembled state” for another four or five weeks. Then misfortune happened in the K. family, in connection with which Dora met and reconciled with them. And at the same time, she took revenge by telling her wife that she knew about her connection with her father, and she forced Mr. K. himself to confess that he had made a love proposal to her (which he had previously ardently denied to her father and uncle). Her painful attacks had practically ceased.
Years later, she married, as Freud suggested, the young man who glimpsed in her second dream. “Thus, if her first dream meant a turn from a beloved man to her father, an escape from life into illness, then the second heralded that she was separated from her father and returned to life,” concludes Freud.
Source: Z. Freud “Famous cases from practice” (Cogito-center, 2016).