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Psychoanalytic conceptualizations of diagnosis, drives, resistance, development, conflict, and countertransference have expanded immensely since Freud analyzed Dora in 1900, almost 100 years ago. A reevaluation of Freud's understanding and treatment of Dora requires consideration of changes that have occurred.
Dora (Ida Bauer), daughter of Philipp and Katharina Bauer, was born on November 1, 1882, and died in 1945 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Freud analyzed her from early October until the end of December 1900, when he was near the beginning of his understanding of the complex workings of the mind. Dora would help him increase his knowledge even through treatment errors and omissions, which he acknowledged. While he treated Dora he did not appreciate the role of the transference; only as he wrote up the case did he realize that he had missed and failed to interpret it, and had not been aware of her preoedipal attachment to her mother.
At the time, Freud had recently come to relize that seduction by parents could not fully explain the development of neuroses. Neuroses occurred in patients who had not been seduced. Inner instinctual drives played an important role in determining fantasies of seduction and the effects of seduction when it occurred, he had recently discovered.
The drive theory of that time was quite different from current drive theory. Freud postulated a self-preservative and a sexual drive then. Aggression was a manifestation of sexuality, not a drive per se. Anxiety resulted from a transformation of suppressed sexuality and was not a reaction to danger.
Freud was writing the Dream Book (1900) when he analyzed Dora. He published “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” in 1905, the same