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Freud's major case histories, long touted as exemplary, received little but praise until recent years. No small part of the revisionist literature of the past couple of decades has been devoted to a newly skeptical and critical reexamination of this most clinical part of Freud's output.
Patrick Mahony, a training analyst of the Canadian Society of Psychoanalysis, has now published brief books about three of the case histories, as well as two more general discussions of Psychoanalysis and Discourse (1986) and of Freud as a Writer (1987). Since he is also Professor of English at the University of Montreal, he would seem to be unusually well qualified to appraise Freud's case histories from both a clinical and a textual perspective, which is what he undertakes to do.
The result is mixed. In his reappraisal of the much-discussed “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (Freud, 1905), Mahony retells the familiar stories of Dora (Ida Bauer), her parents (Philip and Käthe), and the K's (Hans and Peppina Zellenka), and of the brief and abortive analysis, drawing on much of the psychoanalytic and historical commentary of the past three decades to fill in the factual background. There is no evidence that Mahony has done any research in primary sources himself, but he presents a useful compendium of recent discoveries about who all the dramatis personae really were, what kinds of people they were, and what became of them. Not content merely to summarize Felix Deutsch's (1957) report of a 1923 interview with Dora, which Mahony (appropriately, I believe) criticizes as biased and pejorative, he uses a couple of other sources (notably Decker, 1991) to complete her story: she ended up as a bridge master, with “Frau K” as her partner!