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“She had been…one of the most repulsive hysterics he had ever met.” —Felix Deutsch, A footnote to Freud's fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 26, 1957.
Those were, until the feminist movement, the last words on Dora, the first of Freud's famous five case histories. (The quote implies some sense of retributive justice.) What else could have happened to someone who walked out on Sigmund Freud?
However, in the last three decades, with a new perspective on the societal roots of female hysterical conversion syndromes and the effect of dysfunctional family interactions on children, a flurry of articles and at least one book have come to Dora's defense, directly or indirectly indicting Freud for his handling of the case. While Hanna S. Decker's book Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 joins these new perspectives, it is much more than a revision or critique of Freud's original case history. Instead, the book sets Dora's illness, the mere episode of her treatment by Freud, and indeed her and her family's life stories in a socio/historical context. This setting transforms our understanding of the Dora case, while adding a new appreciation for the historical, geographical and cultural frames in which Freud created and developed psychoanalysis.
In Decker's hands, the Dora story becomes the story of the fate of a promising, intelligent, Jewish middle-class woman who spent her developmental years in a dysfunctional family in misogynistic