Dolores and Dora

By giving us clinical detail from his patient's analysis over a period of some years, which followed two previous treatments, Dr Quinodoz offers us rich pickings. Furthermore, the patient talks of feeling able to recover “my stolen past”;1 and, in the last session described, she demonstrates a developing capacity to mourn objects previously experienced as withholding, “the fact is I'm not a little girl any more and she [mother] is no longer there … [but] after having called her, I didn't feel distressed any more …”. So any formulations or thoughts herein can safely be expressed in the context of a mutative analysis. They are offered too with the caveat concerning the inevitable injustice that is done to an account of a process which relies fundamentally on the capacity of the psychoanalyst ‘to catch the drift of the patient's unconscious with his unconscious’ (Freud, 1923, p. 239), but can only be passed on through the unsatisfactory medium of the written word.

Dr Quinodoz has chosen an evocative name for his patient, Dolores—evocative of course in the link to dolour, but how psychoanalytically evocative in the chosen name's proximity to Dora whose history of ‘depression, irritability and suicidal ideas’ (Freud, 1905, p. 26) matches this patient's presentation. The first description of the patient is puzzling and enigmatic: she is “sad and resigned” yet “rather wild and unappealing”. This is the contradictory presentation of the hysteric who creates scenes, “slams doors”, indulges in “incessant volte-faces”, “furious outbursts” and shouts at her analyst. Her likeness to Dora is uncanny: she dreams of handbags/ reticules; she feels “betwixt and between”; she is unable to sustain an enduring relationship; she knows and does not know at the same time; she lives her life in a perpetual state of “grudge against her parents”; and she ‘suffers from reminiscences’ (Freud and Breuer, 1895). But most important of all the “child's experience has been trivialized”: she is the ce