Prologue

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE TO SAY ABOUT DORA? WE SHALL SOON SEE. One hundred years ago, Freud (1905) published “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” an account of a battle of wit and will between Freud and Dora that lasted but a few short months. Do all analysts remember their first encounter with the Dora case? I no longer remember mine. Was it in a doctoral seminar? In a college course? I know that I had read it long before I began analytic training and that it was not one of the assigned readings for that training. When I first read it, I was fascinated, as I suspect are most readers. Even as a young and inexperienced clinician, I knew that there was something fishy about this treatment. Dora did not seem to be the kind of neurotic patient Freud claimed to be curing. And yet I was seduced by the grandeur of Freud's intellect and was not yet able to understand the hubris that he also revealed in those pages. We do not need to engage in a canonization of St. Sigmund to respect and admire Freud's achievements. And we must be cognizant that Freud is the only eyewitness to the treatment with Dora whose account we possess. In that sense, Freud will always retain the power. Yet we are not defenseless against his rhetorical weapons, and the contributors to this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry are skilled interpreters of texts, both clinical and literary.

By our very questioning and search for understanding in these papers, we honor Freud's legacy of courage and curiosity as well as the tradition of intellectual inquiry that characterizes scholarship in the humanities—for the Dora case has always been a shared object, perhaps even more important in the academic and literary worlds than in the clinical one.

The idea for this issue emerged from a September 2000 symposium sponsored by the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Society and the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis (now joined as the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia); the Department of Psychiatry of