Three Examples of Countertransference in Freud's Dora Case

The story of Freud's involvement with his patient Dora is well-known. Freud and Dora met together from mid-October through December 31 of 1900. The young and intelligent patient caught on quickly to her doctor's method and opened herself “smoothly,” Freud said to his “collection of picklocks.” Insights into Dora's case flowed profusely from Freud and fill his written account of the work. Just when Freud's hopes for a cure were at their highest, however, Dora “deserted” him, as he said, and brought his hopes “to nothing.” Of his feelings Freud wrote “No one who, like me, raises those most evil of demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to do battle with them, can expect to emerge from the struggle unscathed.”

In this paper I will describe three episodes in the Dora case that indicate unconscious involvement of Freud with his patient. These episodes are of intrinsic interest within the history of psychoanalysis since each bears upon the concept of transference. The notion of transference, which, loosely speaking, refers to the configuration of a patient's feelings toward the analyst, received its first systematic formulation in the Dora case. The three episodes to be described together constitute some of the earliest observations of transference in the Freudian literature. I will suggest that each of the observations of Dora's transference reveals the stamp of Freud's subjective involvement, or of what is termed his “countertransference.”

The special words “transference” and “countertransference” are meant to imply that the manifest emotional involvement is based not so much upon feelings appropriate to the treatment interaction as upon feelings and memories that derive from important infantile relationships in the patient's or analyst's life. Nevertheless, according to Freud's first formulation of countertransference in 1910, both the treatment situation and the analyst's inner life were felt to be factors in the development of countertransference which arose,