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Decker's researches provide a great deal of information, much of it new, about Ida Bauer (Dora), her family, and their friends the Zellenka (K.) family, and she describes and discusses aspects of the social and cultural milieu in which they lived. Decker also proposes that societal mysogyny and anti-Semitism had important effects on Ida Bauer's personal development, discusses aspects of psychoanalysis by, and since, Freud, and evaluates Freud's work in the Dora case. Decker thus emphasizes social influences in the Dora case rather than the intrapsychic and family-oriented approach that has usually been of most interest to analysts.
Analysts have valued the paper which came to be known as the Dora case for several reasons, but the main ones are that in it Freud (1905) enunciated some basic discoveries. He proposed that symptoms "represent several processes simultaneously" and have more than one meaning (p. 47). A second point was, "The causes of hysterical disorders are to be found in the intimacies of the patient's psychosexual life and are the expression of their most secret and repressed wishes"