A Girl of Intelligent and Engaging Looks

It is a tormented piece of work, as we well know. It was begun just after the interruption of treatment of the young patient called Dora, almost in a bid to quickly heal the insult and the wound that interruption had created. It had been written in less than a month, and described to his friend Fleiss as being the most subtle piece of work he had written, and one which would have distanced the public even more than others. Entitled Dreams and Hysteria, it was sent to the Editor of a neurology and psychiatry journal and was immediately accepted. It went back and forth quite a number of times (prior to the evident request for the manuscript to be returned). Then came the final publication with the publisher who had originally accepted it, but under a new title that was decidedly less ambitious, and four years on from the end of treatment. What can such a troubled journey be attributed to? Could there have been, together with the pleasure of ≪horrifying≫ his readers, an obscure crippling fear? Was there perhaps an almost compulsive need to go back to the failure in search of that ≪extra≫ awareness that could have explained it? Or maybe it was to do with the perception of the incomplete nature of the experience, and the theoretical gains that could be achieved? The definitive text bears traces of fears, beginning with the title Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1901-1905), that declares in advance the incomplete nature of the account.

It is incomplete for many reasons, as Freud explains throughout the text. First of all, due to the early interruption of treatment, only certain aspects of the illness could be dealt with, and others not. Moreover, Freud is aware that even an analysis carried through to the end can only be incomplete: he wrote again about this limit towards the end of his life, asking that it be accepted as inevitable since he believed it was not possible, with regard to the ethics of treatment, to anticipate or propose themes that are not pres