Freud provided a particularly detailed analysis of two dreams in his Dora case. In the Dora case Freud moves primarily from theory to interpretation in his analysis of Dora's symptoms. In section 2, with the first dream, the sequence is reversed. He starts by presenting the manifest content of the dream. He then discusses its recurrent quality and delineates the day residue both recent and remote. He next establishes the connection between the dream's manifest content and the important events that occurred at L., the place on the lake where the scene with Herr K. had taken place. The first three “playings of the dream” had to do with Dora's response to Herr K.‘s overtures, her efforts to fend off his advances, to lock the room while she was asleep until she had the opportunity to leave the house and sleep without fear of Herr K.‘s intrusions. Through the analysis of the dream Freud was able to establish motivation and reconstruct some past events, and it is only after this bit of analytic detective work that Freud turns to theory as laid out in his dream book.
Freud accepts the possibility that the analysis of Dora's dream, which had revealed “the continuation into sleep of an intention formed during the day,” might also reveal the operation of the presence of a wish represented as fulfilled. The road into the interior is the jewel case. Her mother is fond of jewelry and her father gives her mother a lot of it. Her mother didn't want a particular gift but she, Dora, would have accepted it with pleasure. From the technical 'point of view this is a direct interpretation. Freud makes an interpretive leap, without Dora's associations. The inference is based partly on Freud's conviction about the validity of his theory of the Oedipus complex: every little girl would like to get from father the same thing he gives mother. To strengthen his case, he refers to
his theory of symbolism. The jewel case is the symbol for the female genital. The oedipal protagonists, Dora's father and mother, are stand-ins for the current life protagonists, Herr K. and his wife. Herr K. is represented in the dream as wanting in on Dora's jewel case.
Freud evokes the rule of opposites. Negative becomes positive, the oedipal fear becomes the oedipal wish, and the oedipal wish defends upward against her wish for her current day admirer. Freud finds in the dream Dora's struggle with her sexual drives. Freud pays the price for his directness and his failure to elicit more of the patient's associations. “Dora would not follow me in this part of the interpretation.” Freud, rebuffed. turns to his theory, the theory of dream formation lined out in The Interpretation of Dreams. “The dream sets up a connection between these two factors, the event during childhood and the event of the present day. And it endeavors to reshape the present on the model of the remote past…. The wish that creates the dream always springs from the period of childhood and it is continually trying to summon childhood back into reality and to correct the present day by the measure of childhood.”
Freud reports in a footnote that at the end of this last session, the reappearance of the dream forced him to conclude that Dora intended to leave treatment. Freud does not tell us why he decides the next time he sees Dora not to bring up his concern about her departure, but instead decides to pursue a line of exploration that he tells us is “indispensable both for the amnesia of the case and for the theory of dreams.” But, we might add, not felicitous for the continuation of the treatment. Freud seems not to be listening to his patient. He moves the analysis off the verbal mode and instead decides to conduct a “little experiment.” He forces her attention away from her own thoughts and from the dream and onto an object in the room, a match stand on the table that, even when asked, Dora does not notice particularly. Freud knows that he must somehow get to a childhood event to demonstrate that his theory about the centrality of repressed childhood sexual wishes in the formation of the dream is valid and can be demonstrated in the case of Dora's dream, like in any other.
In order to reach this goal, Freud has to provide the rails for his theoretical train and finds it in symbolic and linguistic connections of fire and water, leading to love and bedwetting, and Freud's journey stops when
he reaches the sought for reconstruction. Dora was “addicted to bedwetting” up to a later age than is usual for children. This was also true for her brother and her father woke her up in the middle of the night to take her to the bathroom to prevent her from wetting her bed. And “Dora,” says Freud, “what have your recollections to say to this?” Dora obliges Freud by confirming both her brother's bedwetting and her own. Freud ends this session satisfied with his analytic efforts. “The interpretation of the dream now seems to be complete. The latent content is “the temptation is so strong, dear father, protect me again as you used to in my childhood and prevent my bed from being wetted.“
It is striking that Freud does not tell us whether or not he conveyed this interpretation directly to Dora or how she responded. This may be why in the very next session Dora tells Freud about something that she had forgotten to relate about the dream, in an effort, perhaps, to return Freud to the text of her dream; to move him from his theory to her experience. Dora had forgotten to relate that each time after waking up she had smelled smoke. Freud correctly refers to the transference; he is a smoker. But, says Dora, she smelled smoke before she met Freud. Freud makes a theoretical/technical point. The smell of smoke comes as an addendum to the drama. This suggests that it “had to overcome a particularly strong effort on the part of repression.” The temptation had to do with the dream wish, the wish to yield to Herr K., or more properly, to Dora's forbidden trinity—father, Herr K., and Freud.
Freud points out in a masterful intuitive leap the idea that the transference, the wish to have him kiss her, must have served as the day residue, the recent instigator of the dream. Freud said, “This would have been the exciting cause which led her to repeat the warning dream and form her intention of stopping the treatment. Clearly, transference is resistance! Freud continues, “Everything fits together very satisfactorily upon this view, but owing to the characteristics of ‘transference,’ its validity is not susceptible of definite proof.” Freud makes us aware of a fundamental issue in regard to his new concept. The concept of transference is theoretical, abstract, experience-distant, and not susceptible to definitive proof. Transference was discovered by Freud and not simply observed. Transference is not a theory-free observation, Freud recognizes that he has to make up his mind as to whether he should focus on what his case illuminates about his theory of dreams or what his theory of
dreams illuminates about the case. He decides on the latter rather than the former. He puts practice before theory. But he begins by focusing on early history and development and on certain theoretical considerations rather than the dream's text.
The clinical phenomenon of the childhood disorder is the recurrence of bedwetting after Dora's sixth year. Bedwetting is connected with masturbation, and childhood masturbation is the pathogenetic smoking gun of hysteria. Freud views the case through the prism of his early theories, the pathogenic roles of hereditary disposition, childhood sexual trauma, and sexual “malpractice.” The constitutional factor is syphilis. Dora is aware of her father's illness. Dora relates her difficulty to her father's syphilis but confuses syphilis and gonorrhea; syphilis is congenital, gonorrhea is contagious. Dora identifies with her mother; her mother's medical condition (venereal disease), and her mother's personality, “peculiarities of manner,” and “intolerable behavior.”
Freud then shifts to psychology. He proposes that Dora's accusations about her father conceal a self-accusation. The mechanism is “I accuse you of being bad because I feel bad myself.” This is the melancholic defense. Guilt is central and guilt suggests masturbation. Freud expected that Dora would confess or otherwise confirm his speculation about her childhood masturbation, but “Dora denied flatly that she could remember any such thing.” But Freud doesn't give in. Seek and ye shall find. Freud finds his proof, Dora's “symptomatic act,” her reticule play. Dora wears the reticule because it is the fashion, she says. But Freud insists the reticule is the female genital and reticule playing is masturbation. Freud's evidence is his clinical experience. He has a “series of symptomatic acts.” He gives us one example from an analytic session.
Freud uses symbolism to interpret symptomatic acts and does not follow his own dictum that symbolic interpretations in dreams are the interpretations of last resort. He does not give Dora an opportunity to associate to her behavior, expecting that meaning will emerge. Freud interprets Dora's concealment of her letter as her wish to “play secrets.” Freud presses to proving his case against Dora without sufficient attention to the unwillingness of his patient to be enlightened. Dora's skepticism contrasts sharply with Freud's certainty. His case to him is “complete and without a flaw.” Freud is out of touch with his patient. Indicative is the
reference to Wilhelm Fliess and his gastric spot. Freud shifts to more solid clinical ground: the chronology of Dora's symptom picture. Dora reports that when her bedwetting stopped, her nervous asthma appeared. Freud invoked a general principle: hysterical symptoms and childhood masturbation are incompatible. They are mutually exclusive. Symptom involves drive gratification, some variant of masturbation. This idea is a part of the current compromise formation theory of neurosis. The relation between Freud's theory of actual neurosis and the inverse relation between sexual practice and symptomatology and our modern-day view of compromise formation should be noted. Inadequate sexual gratification in adulthood as in coitus interruptus is equivalent to masturbatory abstinence in childhood. Both lead to hysterical symptoms. “The libido flows back again into its old channel.”
A brilliant tour-de-force analysis of a childhood symptom of Dora's dyspnia follows. Freud provides us with the detailed sequence of its development. His reconstruction was derived partly from material obtained directly from the analysis, but “the rest required supplementing.” Included here are references and connections based on the specific sequence of events in Dora's case as well as more general propositions about children's responses to primal scene exposure, valid for everyone. The mix of the universal and the particular and the interplay between the two is very nicely presented in this portion of Freud's exposition.
Freud, stressing the centrality of infantile masturbation as an etiological root of hysteria, indicates that he has replaced a seduction/actual neurosis view of neurosogenesis with one in which unconscious fantasy is central. Freud may be aware of the shakiness of his explanatory and expository ground. He refers to “a whole series of questions which arise concerning the etiology of hysteria.” Freud is at his theoretical worst and out of touch with his patient. But he gets back on track in the footnote on p. 82 in which he discusses the relationship between Dora and her brother and how that impacted on her own school performance. The shift from being wild to becoming quiet and well behaved and how that is related to the onset of asthma raises interesting issues.
Freud is on firmer ground when he uses lexical and psychological principles to analyze Dora's symptom, her catarrh/cough. He provides an intricate account of the etiologic layering in the symptom formation. Starting
at the bottom, first the organic factor (irritation of the throat), its susceptibility to fixation as an erotogenic zone; second the role of identification, specifically with her father; then determinants from the Herr K. object relation, and lastly the symbolic linkage of dyspnia and the sounds of sexual intercourse. The link between leucorrhea, vaginal discharge, and vaginal lubrication as excitement bears on the disgust Dora remembered as her affect on being kissed by Herr K. Freud is aware of the deficiencies in his formulation but offers the excuse that termination was premature. Other cases more thoroughly analyzed are more convincing.
When Freud returns to the dream after his neurosogenic detour, he offers us a Zeigarnic Effect theory of recurrent dreams. They have to do with an intention that needs to be carried out but isn't. The dream intention is “I must fly from this house for I see that my virginity is threatened here. I shall go away with my father, and I shall take precautions not to be surprised while I am dressing in the morning.” The conflict element in Dora's situation vis-a-vis Herr K., present in her conscious awareness and in the dream as well, is clear. This formulation illuminates Dora's clinical situation, but it does not demonstrate the validity of Freud's fundamental theory of dreams. According to that theory. “A dream is not an intention represented as having been carried out but a wish represented as having been fulfilled, and moreover in most cases a wish dating from childhood.” In this last section of the second part of the Dora case, “The First Dream,” Freud is intent on supporting his dream theory rather than understanding the case, so he states, but it seems that the latter is accomplished at least as well as the former. The infantile wish represented as fulfilled is Dora's oedipal wish. But Freud insists that the oedipal wish is a defense against Dora acknowledging her love for Herr K. Her love for Herr K. is the locus of her conflict. Freud writes, “She summoned up an infantile affection for her father so that it might protect her against her present” affection for a stranger. But for us Dora's interest in and involvement with Herr K., an older man, constitutes an inappropriate object choice. She has succumbed to the pressure in adolescence of the revival of childhood oedipal wishes.
It is useful to distinguish between a theory of dreams and a theory of dreaming. Freud's discussion about motive force, entrepreneur, and capitalist has to do more with the psychology of dreaming than the analysis of dreams, Clinically, what is important is not so much the motive
force for the dream but the motive force for the patient's neurosis; the conflicting forces that lead to the patient's symptomatology, character psychology, inhibitions, and maladaptiveness. The emphasis has to be on the “fabric of structures” of the neurosis rather than the “fabric of structures” of the dream.
When Freud refers to premature sexual enjoyment, he is again in a seduction theory mode rather on unconscious sexual fantasy and the role of dream analysis in theories as “pathogenically operative” than one that puts a stress on conflict. Freud refers to recovery of childhood memory events. “This function of dreams has withstood the test of time, with the proviso, of course, that events are not just events but also the attendant fantasies, affects, etc.”
The final section of Part 2, “The First Dream” was printed as a footnote in editions earlier than 1924. Freud elsewhere has commented on the primary nature of the process of analysis and the secondary status of synthesis. Technically there is a general attitude that analysis is attended to directly; synthesis takes care of itself. But Freud's synthesis, his reconstruction of the dream process and retracing of the dream work is a tour-de-force. He starts at the beginning, the day after the scene in the woods, the day after Dora had noticed that she was no longer able to lock the door in her room. That is the precipitating danger. Freud infers that she must have said to herself, “I am threatened by a serious danger here,” and therefore formed the intention not to remain in the house because of the threat of Herr K.'s intrusions; she would go off with her father instead. The conscious wish to go off with her father was capable of forming a dream because, and only because, it found, as Freud puts it, “a continuation in the unconscious.” For Freud this is that fundamental day-to-day intentions, wishes, fears, desires cannot make dreams unless they can connect with unconscious childhood intentions. This is why it is said aphoristically that the scene of every dream is one's childhood. Freud continues, “Her intention of flying to her father which, as we have seen, reached down into the unconscious, was transformed by the dream into a situation which presented as fulfilled the wish that her father should save her from the danger.” Freud comments that the hostile feelings against her father had to be suppressed but saved for the second dream. The mind is ever alert for the possibility of using recent situations transformed into infantile situations to produce
dreams. Every time this can happen, according to Freud, “is a special triumph.” In the Dora case we have the felicitous similarity of the current scene of Herr K. at the bedside matched up with the childhood scene of her father at the bedside, waking her up to prevent her from wetting her bed. The dream work gets down into the unconscious. It picks up along the way the concepts of wet, water, wetness, and their opposites, fire and burning. They connect by chance with her father's recent expressed anxiety about the risk of fire. Lo and behold, the dream picture emerges like an image on a negative in developing solution. The power of the word “wet” as a switch word evolves as the connection is made from wet as in bedwetting to wet as in sexual intercourse.
“Wet” is also connected to dirty and includes within that set of ideas the gonorrheal infection, the catarrh, the wish to dirty and the reaction against it. The concern about cleanliness and dirtiness has a firm foothold in Dora's unconscious, given her mother's cleaning neurosis. And introducing mother into the associative nexus also fills out Dora's oedipal constellation: jealousy of mother complements love for father. Freud proposes that pictorial representation is sought for the conflictual constellation. The image that does service is jewelry, drops, schmuck. Drops now succeeds wet as the dream switch word. Now with two verbal bridges, Freud tells us, the dream can connect in Dora's mind ideas of her parents' sexual intercourse, her mother's gonorrhea, and her “tormenting passion for cleanliness.” But there is a slight hitch. The jewelry image is removed; it has unconscious representation but no day residue pull. A simple substitution of jewel case for jewelry does the trick. Herr K. had never given her jewelry, but he had given her a case.
That is the origin of the specific dream image, the jewel case. Freud conveys his sense of delight and marvel at the ingenuity of the dream work, which equates jewel case and female genital. “Jewel case,” says Freud, “is an innocent word but also one admirably calculated both to betray and to conceal the sexual thoughts that lie behind the dream.”
The jewel case is the crown jewel of Freud's interpretation of Dora's dream and of the understanding of her neurosis. The convergence of childhood and contemporary sources, the operation of the mechanisms of condensation and displacement and multiple function are all evident. The jewel case represents an oedipal conflict in both its childhood
and adolescent versions. Freud faults himself for not pursuing Dora's father's spoken words in the dream. “I refuse to let my children go to their destruction,” or to be more precise “I refuse to let myself and my children be burnt for the sake of your jewel case.” But it should be noted that Freud's principle about spoken words in dreams, that they always come from actual speeches, is not universally supported at this time. Freud may have been aware of this when he states, “The result of my inquiry would no doubt have shown that the structure of the dream was still more complicated.” He implies that behind the remembrance of an actual speech in a voiced unconscious fantasy might lurk.
Freud concludes this section by considering why Dora's dream recurred at this point in the treatment. Freud is at the edge of recognizing the contribution of the transference to the dream repetition. The dream was a premature termination dream. Dora was getting ready to flee Freud just as she had fled from Herr K. The extent to which Freud was a seducer like Herr K. is something that will require further discussion.
This section of the paper provides us with illustrations of two uses of the dream in clinical practice. The first has to do with its role in the analysis of a symptom; the second its role in the recovery of forgotten memories. These two “successes,” psychoanalytically speaking, are presented in the context of analytic failure, as Freud tells us that as soon as the second dream is made intelligible, the analysis is broken off. This outcome is not expected. Freud does not describe his patient at this point as being in a state of significant resistance; in fact, to the contrary, he describes her as being self-reflective. “For some time, Dora herself had been raising a number of questions about the connection between some of her actions and the motives which presumably underlay them.” Freud says that he will present the material produced in the analysis of the dream in a somewhat haphazard order, although in actuality he begins with the analysis of the first part of the dream.
He is able very readily to elucidate the day residue and to transform the dream images from indifferent pictures into a scenario in which his patient has a clear role. The subject matter is elevated from a trivial concern with difficulties encountered by a sightseer and a tourist in
a strange town to a concern of higher human import, man's quest for woman. Additionally, Freud is able to move the dream from geography to anatomy. The chain is from station to box to women. The pattern of working together that Dora and Freud establish is for Dora to provide the day residue and associations and for Freud to make the symbolic leap from box to female genital, from key to male genital. Should we fault Freud in regard to this aspect of his technique? I think this question can only be answered in context.
One does get the impression that Freud is as intent on analyzing the dream and unlocking its secrets as he is on understanding his patient. There is a means/end issue here. However, at least at this point in the narrative, Dora does not seem to be feeling misunderstood because of Freud's symbolic leaps. On the contrary, she brings forward more material, her associations, recollections, her thoughts, concerns about her father's illness, etc. Perhaps Freud is a little too quick when he “at once” reminds Dora of the farewell letter he had written to her parents, his association to the letter in the dream. Perhaps he might have put it more tentatively or asked her whether or not the letter in the dream called to her mind some other letter. A little bit more tentativeness or hesitation on Freud's part is perhaps in order here, especially in consideration of the fact that Freud moves very rapidly from the letter and its associations and connotations to a core affectively loaded fantasy: Dora's craving for revenge directed against her father. Freud notes that the revenge motif is a new element that has to be taken into account in any “synthesis of her dream thoughts.” However, Freud does shift from synthesis back to analysis and with close textual attention, in fact, from a single question mark added after the first telling of the dream, a sign of its importance, as Freud had noted earlier. Freud moves his patient from dream to memory and shifts the scene of the dream from its uncertain location to the by now famous or infamous lake and “the problems connected with it.” Freud's approach now is to have Dora give more details about the memory rather than for more associations to the dream. Freud presses on in his inquiry, always looking for specific details and actual words. This is a point of technique that can never be emphasized too strongly. Dora indicates to Freud that he is right in pursuing this particular memory when she recognizes that the wood in the memory, the wood by the shore of the lake, is just like the wood in her dream and
is related as well to a recent memory, a picture at an exhibition, and the recent picture, the exhibition picture, includes new elements. Freud is then able in a brilliant leap to translate dream geography into sexual anatomy, or as he puts it, “the symbolic geography of sex.” And the geography of sex is the locale for the second fantasy that emerges for Freud in his patient's dreams, namely the fantasy of defloration. To recapitulate, we have uncovered for us by Freud two fantasies: (1) the fantasy of revenge against father and (2) the fantasy of a man forcefully entering a woman's genital. The question as to whether or not these two fantasies are related and whether the man is father and the revenge motif is for such a sexual action is not addressed at this point, but Freud does tell us that he informed Dora of his conclusions at this point and was that a forced entry, we would ask? But Freud offers us another pun, “The impression made upon her must have been forceable,” Dora remembers another piece of the dream, “She went calmly to her room and began reading a big book that lay on her writing table,” and the last addendum to the dream is, “She saw herself particularly distinctly going up the stairs.” Freud tells us that those pieces of her dream that were first forgotten and are only subtly remembered are invariably the most important from the point of view of understanding the dream. So we therefore have to expect that these final addenda will bring us to new and most significant understandings. However, the path that Freud takes us on following Dora is not to further elucidation of the dream but rather to the analysis of a symptom. Freud reconstructs that Dora had read about sexual matters in an encyclopedia, felt guilty about this activity, and gave herself an illness like one she had also read about in its pages. But what about the particular symptom picture and particularly perityphlitis and foot-dragging? Freud is stymied for a little bit but then gets back on track by focusing on details and in this case specifically periods of time. Dora's attack of appendicitis took place nine months after the scene at the lake. The meaning is clear, the symptom is a fulfilled fantasy of childbirth.
This is then fantasy number three, and again one that can also be connected to the first two, childbirth follows defloration and father is revenged upon either for being the perpetrator or for not. The second symptom, foot-dragging, can be easily connected to the first, the connection is linguistic between false step and unplanned-for conception. Freud at this point is not satisfied with what might seem to us to be a credible
piece of analytic work. His theory reminds him that he must find some infantile prototype to account for the symptom because, “Recollections derived from the impressions of later years do not possess sufficient force to enable them to establish themselves as symptoms.” However, the infantile prototypes that he comes up with are more of an example of somatic compliance than childhood fantasy. Dora obliges him with a memory of having twisted her foot once when she was a child. Freud then gives Dora his “big interpretation,” relating the fantasy uncovered by the dream to her feelings and motivations following the scene at the lake.
In this interpretation, which goes on for 14 lines, Freud fulfills the topographic therapeutic dictum, “Where the unconscious was, the conscious shall be,” and he indicates that his interpretation is convincing, “and Dora disputed the fact no longer,” although he also adds in a long footnote a few “supplementary interpretations” without telling us whether or not these were also offered to Dora at this point. However, Freud tells us that Dora adds a “so what?” to her acknowledgment of the validity of his interpretation, depreciating its significance. Her comment is: “Why has anything so very remarkable come out of it?” We are somewhat prepared but are still surprised by Dora's termination announcement at the beginning of the next session. Freud's response to Dora's termination announcement is to proceed with the analysis and again he focuses on a temporal detail. Dora decided to terminate a fortnight ago. Freud connects “fortnight” to governesses, a “fortnight's warning,” and Dora follows along Freud's line of inquiry. One would anticipate that this would not get Freud very far but, lo and behold, Dora's recollection of the governess who had been another lover of Herr K. leads to “a piece of material information coming to light in the middle of the analysis” that helps solve problems that had been previously raised. We have to wonder about Freud's reference to the “middle of the analysis” since this is, as he has told us, the last session, the end of the analysis. However, this provides him with the information he needs to offer to Dora another long interpretation and reconstruction, one in fact that takes 22 lines. Freud tells Dora what she really felt, contrary to what she has maintained. “It was not that you were offended at his suggestion, you were actuated by jealousy and revenge.”
Dora does not seem to fight Freud's interpretation but rather just quibbles about one detail. “Then why did I not tell my parents at once?” And, of course, Freud's answer to her question further stresses the point he is trying to make about her wishes in regard to Herr K. Freud unmasks Dora's wish to marry Herr K, Freud puts it all together for Dora in an interpretation that lasts a page. Dora listens to him “without any of her usual contradictions” and says goodbye. Freud finishes his analytic work in the amount of time Dora provides for him, this one last session, and Freud's analytic efforts in this regard seem to leave very little time or room for him to explore his patient's feelings about and feelings at termination. Freud viewed his alternatives in regard to Dora at this point as either to have continued with the analysis as he did or attempted to keep his patient under treatment by “acting a part.”
For Freud there was only analytic abstinence or transference gratification and, Freud stresses, Dora's termination at this point was “an unmistakable act of vengeance” just when his hopes of therapeutic success were at their highest. Freud does not consider the possibility that interpretation of this transference might be a third option in regard to this premature termination scenario. Freud ends this third section and the main part of his discussion of his case with a meditation on human conflict and the limitation of the capacity of reality to tame the “demons that inhabit the human breast.” And finally, in Freud's final footnote on p. 110, Freud lists all the fantasies that he has implicated in the structure of the dream, including the oedipal one with its aggressive and libidinal components and the negative oedipal constellation (her love for Frau K.).