In 1900 a young woman called Ida Bauer -‘Dora’-was brought by her father to see Sigmund Freud. Her father was Freud's patient; he had treated him for syphilis with which he had infected his wife. The husband of his mistress had recently claimed that Dora had falsely accused him of making sexual advances to her. For this and other reasons, her hysterical symptoms had intensified. Freud took her into treatment. It was not a success.

Freud strove to persuade Dora that if she could acknowledge her sexual attraction to her father, his mistress and her husband, her hysterical symptoms would disappear, as, indeed, some of them did. However, to the modern eye, he overlooked the extent to