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Now that Dora is dead, Deutsch reveals that 'the well-informed colleague' whom Freud reports as having recognized the case many years later was himself. He was called in twenty-four years after her analysis with Freud to see if he could explain an attack of Ménière's syndrome.
Her fate had been as Freud feared it might be. Her disgust with men was unchanged. She was frigid, and she now reproached her husband and her son with lack of consideration and infidelity as earlier she had reproached her father. Her aural disturbances were connected with listening for the return of the son who had become 'interested in girls' as her dyspnoea had been connected with listening to the sounds of the parental bedroom. She still had her cough (attributed to smoking); she still dragged her foot, as she had done, according to herself, since childhood; and she and her mother both had a vaginal discharge, as when Freud treated her. She was now quite identified with her mother's cleaning obsession, though this was directed towards her own body.
Like her mother she suffered from chronic constipation. Her brother as before was her only comfort. Deutsch's informant on her later life in America called her 'one of the most repulsive hysterics' he had ever met. She died of a carcinoma of the colon.
Deutsch enumerates the sensory elements involved in Dora's defence of conversion and asks to what extent the concept of conversion as Freud