Sigmund Freud and Hysterical Dora

So, in Moi’s view, that countertransference does not let Freud see that the hysteria Dora was experiencing could have been the cause of a repressed desire for Frau K and not her husband. Accordingly, her own doctor “joins the male team and untiringly tries to ascribe to her desires she does not have and to ignore the ones she does have.”  The team he joins is mainly formed by her father and Herr K. In addition to this, Moi sees yet another reason why the treatment failed. According to her, “Freud’s patriarchal prejudices force him to ignore relationships between women and instead center all his attention on relationships with men.

This grievous underestimation of the importance of other women for Dora’s psychic development contributes decisively to the failure of the analysis and the cure.”  Freud did not go deep in trying to determine the relationship between Dora and her own mother, on the one hand. And on the other hand, he did not explore so very much Dora’s relationship with Frau K and the two governesses. In the end, however, Moi explains that even though Dora dismissed Freud, he also took his revenge on her. Dora was the name of a maid of Freud’s own sister, Rosa, “So Ida Bauer, in a bitter historical irony, was made famous under the name of a servant after all.”  This way, Freud also did what Dora did: he took revenge.

In conclusion, like Freud assured, only one case history is not enough to find an answer to everything that hysteria involves. Consequently, we may conclude that only one point of view and analysis of a single case of hysteria, like Dora’s, will also not find an answer to everything that that case involves. And we can see it even clearly after considering, for example, the significant points that Toril Moi underlined.