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The great Freud and the psycho-analytical revolution really begin at the inception of the self-analysis in 1897, after the collapse of the ‘seduction’ theory of hysteria, the ‘specific aetiology’. We may safely assume that the writing of the ‘Traumdeutung’ , ‘Wit’ and ‘Everyday Life’, belong to the epoch of the ‘Cathartic method’ in which Freud's interest in the working of the mind was beginning to separate itself from the neurophysiologist's interest in the brain. He was working with new ideas: splitting of consciousness, retention of affects, mental pain due to unacceptable ideas, psychic trauma, etc., applied essentially to old data available to psychiatrists. In his isolation, he still hoped for a fair hearing and scientific interest in his findings. Even in the introduction to ‘Dora’, where he both pleads for a hearing and defends himself against foreseen criticism, he is of the opinion that the data is available to any psychiatrist who will take the trouble to collect it. It seems naive and amusing for Freud to suggest that anyone who follows the directions in the recipe book, the ‘Traumdeutung’, can analyse dreams. And we know in fact that as late as 1910 he said that anyone who would analyse his own dreams could practise the new science.
We must conclude that the clinical work revealed in the case of ‘Dora’, done in 1900, shows a development of technical virtuosity in Freud which he did not recognize himself. How it should have arisen in the five short years since the publication of the ‘Studies’, or rather in the three short years since the collapse of the ‘seduction’ theory (for this is when the method changed), we can hardly imagine. We must simply take as given, that Freud's genius was in full spate for the first time and the outpouring between 1900 and 1905 is incredible. More incredible still is the fact that, as you will see later on, this spate was repeated in the period 1920-26 - from ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ to ‘Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiet