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Freud published six lengthy case histories, all in the years at present under consideration. No complete account of an analysed case can be published; it would occupy many volumes and would be quite unreadable. But these six essays of Freud's far excel, both in presentation and in original content, anything any other analyst has attempted. They are in the first rank of the classics of psycho-analytical literature.
The first of them has already been mentioned in another connection2 and some account given of the circumstances under which it was completed. It was the well-known ‘Case of Dora’, as it is generally called. The essay was rightly termed ‘A Fragment’, since the imperfect analysis lasted only eleven weeks—at the end of 1900.3 But there is no analyst who would not be proud to have unravelled so much of a difficult case in that short time.
To the unusual story of its publication I related earlier,4 which has since been described in fuller detail by James Strachey,5 I can now add a curious detail which has just come to light. In 1909 Freud told Ferenczi that Brodmann, the editor of the Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie, had refused to publish the Dora case.6 We know that when in January, 1901, he offered the paper to Ziehen and Wernicke, the editors of the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie in which it was ultimately published, it was immediately accepted, and when Freud sent them the manuscript in the following June it was with the expectation it would appear that autumn. He must then have asked for it back and kept it for another four years before he