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If a patient exhibits doubts in the course of his narrative, an empirical rule teaches us to disregard such expressions of his judgement entirely. If the narrative wavers between two versions, we should incline to regard the first one as correct and the second as a product of repression
In early October 1900, Freud started treating “a new patient, an eighteen-year-old girl” (Masson, 1985, p. 427) by the name of Ida Bauer (Decker, 1992, p. 14). She is perhaps better known as “Dora,” the pseudonym Freud christened her with when he subsequently wrote up her case history for publication. In the only extant (contemporaneous) comment on his analysis, Freud claimed that it “smoothly opened to the existing collection of picklocks” (Masson, 1985, p. 427), yet according to his subsequently printed account that patient suddenly broke off treatment several weeks later, on December 31 (Freud, 1905, p. 105, n. 12). Despite this brief and inconclusive therapeutic engagement Freud wrote up Ida's case history (Masson, 1985, p. 433), which he subsequently printed in 1905 under the title of Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (hereafter cited as Fragment).
In his “Prefatory Remarks” to that printed text, Freud offers his readers a shard of the history of the manuscript's production: “The case history itself was only committed to writing from memory after the treatment was at an end, but while my recollection of the case was still fresh and was heightened by my interest in its