Sigmund Freud published a lot of theory,
but to test his theories in practice it
pushed those theories up against the
wall. His psychoanalysis was never more
controversial than in his published case
studies. His mistakes in this Dora case
made people take him less seriously, but
at the same time what was learned helped
to improve psychoanalysis, and generate
new theories on transference.
When Freud met a client "Dora" he thought
he had a typical case of hysteria that
he could solve, but what he didn't expect was the need to solve himself.
In 'Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,' Freud first published a
case study on Ida Bauer
under the pseudonym, Dora, a daughter of
parents in a loveless marriage. Her
father a merchant, and mother, immigrated
from Bohemia to Vienna. In Freud's case
study, the eighteen-year-old subject was
stuck in what could be called an
imbroglio, with a couple the family
befriended, under the pseudonym the K's:
Hans and Peppina Zellenka, also in a
loveless marriage.
Dora's mother was described by Freud as
having a...
Fights between the family led to Dora
supporting her father and her brother
supporting their mother. The typical Oedipus Complex pattern. Dora
was forced to enter analysis by her
father after failed hydro and
electro treatments with physicians. With nervous obsessive thoughts, difficulties
breathing, a shuffled step, a persistent
nervous cough, Freud put her under the
label of hysteria. Dora at the time would
introduce to Freud what he termed as
transference. Psychologists today are
readily aware of how their patients can
project emotions they have for other
significant people in their lives, on to
them. There's often a difficulty in finding
the concealed truth behind the patient's
resistance and transference, or even more
difficult, to be aware of one's own
countertransference response as an
analyst. Reacting with contempt towards
the patient naturally leads to them
becoming more hostile and quitting the
sessions early, but in the early days of
psychoanalysis it was something new to
investigate. Freud delved deeper into
Dora's resistance and eventually found
that transferences could be useful for
him, and future of therapists. Especially
to harvest information to make the
client aware of their unconscious
material, and defenses.
Freud's famous and controversial case
studies are considered by some critics a
fiction, and even to Freud himself, to a
smaller extent, simply incomplete.
Psychoanalysis has the tendency to over-analyze or under-analyze, manifesting as
a lack of resonance with the patient. On
the other hand, what these case studies
do well, is to show the reader the
different theories and how they might
apply. The problem with Freud and all
psychology, and even all science is
understanding the correct context, and
applying the right interpretation at the
right time. As science moves on and more
data is collected the theories are
forced to become more refined, though the
danger of throwing out a particular
psychologists entire bibliography,
because it's been surpassed, means
throwing out all the good insight
already found. This is the particular
problem with Freud's work. He conflates
experiences together from different
clients into theories and then tries to
interpret case studies in a way that can
be too general, and invites outright
dismissal. His insights hit the mark some
of the time, and at other times
individuals are put into boxes that
don't give the full picture, or are
misleading.
Also having notes on clients written
farther and farther away from the
session in question, can lead to errors
by the analyst. Freud did this to avoid
distracting the client, but this could
lead to forgetfulness and a conflation
of material from different patients.
Ultimately interpretations have to
predict behavior and allow others to
test their validity to gain wider
acceptance.
Even more difficult with Freud's work is
that some situations are untestable. For
example can we really test what was
running through the mind of a patient at
a particular time in the past, or how do
you test dreams? In those cases we are
only left with theories to rally around.
This is even more the case as later
critics and authors reread his case
studies with more facts than Freud had,
and also with new interpretations based
on data from later patients in similar
circumstances.
The opposite extreme of dumping
psychoanalysis, is believing patients who have
resistances, and needs for impression
management to avoid stigma and ostracism.
They will resist correct interpretations
because they hit the mark and are
threatening. In many cases the reader
will never really know which
interpretation is more correct, the
therapist's or the client's
interpretations. For example, Freud talks
about forgotten knowledge of the client.
Accounts from patients can seem
realistic, but still untrue.
For Freud this comes from clients being...
Recollections in the first
stage of repression are full of doubts
trying to disguise the memory. The second
stage of repression involves actual
forgetting or a falsification of memory.
Here is where screen memories can fill
in the blanks. These are narratives from
a later period in adolescence which can
include justifications or disguises
caused by displacement and condensation,
that are believed by the subject to be
situations that actually occurred. See my
review of Dreams for more on those
mechanisms. Freud favors the
recollections that are being attacked by
doubt over the later censored ones that
are comfortable for the client. This is
also keeping in mind there is another
goal of the analyst.
In Freud's narrative, Dora was
emotionally attached to her father,
especially during his illnesses. Her
mother's constant attention to domestic
affairs plus her father's illnesses led
to their estrangement. As Dora continued
being dissatisfied with her family life,
she left a suicide letter in a desk for
her parents to find. For many people who
run away from friendships and romantic
relationships, or family, it's often
because of the unexpected and unwanted
entanglements, and expectations.
Dora's family connected with the K's,
and like in many situations, friends
start helping each other. Over time the
family roles get interchanged.
For example, Freud says of Dora that she
had taken...
Dora had private
conversations and influences from
governesses, Frau K., Herr K., on top
of her own family's influence. As the
different values are imitated, an
ambivalence is already starting. When
friends exchange help, they naturally
think of utility, and how these friends
can help in other ways. As emotional
claims are made unconsciously, some of
those claims conflict with the claims of
others. This is especially true when
values are different, and are violated.
Dora's example was when she was 14,
possibly 13 in reality. She was
approached by Herr K. alone in his
workplace, and forced into an embrace and
a kiss. She ran away and disgust. Later
on she was approached again for a kiss
by Herr K. at a lake.
She rejected him and complained to her
father. Herr K. said that she was reading...
When denials like this happen,
the result is neurosis for the victim
when they can't find anyone to believe them.
Dora's father brought her
to Freud, a man who helped him with his
syphilis in prior appointments, to kind
of sort her out.
During their sessions Freud found out that...
Freud concurred...
These were the early days in psychoanalysis and
Freud was bound to make some big
mistakes, including not seeing his own
sexism. It was the year was 1900,
and his attitude towards women was
irritating Dora. He said that...
Yet Freud is
conscious enough to see...
That pattern as can be
seen in the Irma Injection dream in the
Interpretation of Dreams, shows a
willingness for men to collude together
and ignore each other's actions while
also having an opposite attitude of
increased scanning of women, and their
foibles. Freud emphasizes in the illicit
kisses how this could arouse sexual
feelings in the girl and be hysterical
if rejected. His point was that she
should have been more flattered at these
attentions.
Naturally an
adolescent would, even in 1900, find this
invalidating.
Freud admitted that he...
This was his reason for the failure of
the treatment. He recounts....
Freud also had trouble seeing his own transferences
of sexual interest in Dora, calling her...
and his being titillated with the sexual
conversation similar to the position of
Frau K. talking to Dora about sexuality.
he also had trouble seeing has low
attitude towards her by using the
pseudonym Dora, a name given to a
nursemaid of his sister. Freud goes on
describing the phenomenon of
transference...
It becomes difficult to
develop rapport if the therapist is
dealing with negative transferences but...
In particular Freud was trying to detect
a form of projection originating in Dora.
One of the clues for Freud is how the
person who accuses another person of an
indiscretion seems to know every detail
about it, and this may in fact tell about
similar situations in the accuser that
they also know a lot about, but are
repressing. Freud uses the example of her
accusations towards her father's
infidelity.
Just like the ambivalence that Freud often describes, people have similar goals, like romantic
love, and it's easy to point out what
others are doing, while ignoring that we
have the same goals and similar
approaches to them. Our consciousness is
like a spotlight, and when it's on
someone else, it's not on ourselves. Freud
says...
It's a kind of
"I feel better if other people are doing it
too."
Pride is maintained if everyone else is
guilty. Also if two people make the same
claim for another individual, based on an
interest like love, they usually have
reasons that are justifiable only to
themselves.
Behind his reproaches there is also another
layer of unconscious material. Freud says...
The partially conscious, or unconscious agreements happen when a person's self-interest becomes front and center. 
evidence
Freud used as evidence, Dora's past attitude, of leaving her father and Frau K alone, and taking the
K's children for a walk since, they
would have been sent out anyways.
The scene at the lake was when she realized that she was being passed off on to
Herr K., to make it convenient for her
father and Frau K. Being slighted in that
way enraged her, Dora described similar
behavior in her governess.
Freud said...
Freud at this point offered the
conclusion that she was in love with
Herr K. more than she let on. This Dora did
not assent to, yet later on...
Freud then gets caught in a bind he asks...
As expected Freud brought up the Oedipus complex
and how Dora missed her father. The way Freud describes it, it's a form of envy where
the subject is putting themselves in the
place of others, imitating their desires
and therefore their identity, and not
recognizing the influence. In particular
it's a fear of losing social rewards.
Each time you find an object or person
to desire, you step into a similar
identity of all the people who want the
same things, causing rivalry. This is
where you see in the case study, people
playing people off each other,
and are only nice to people because they
get something out of it, like her
governess. There was also another
governess, but she worked for the K's.
She had a relationship with Herr K. but
he never left his wife, and the governess
eventually left. She told Dora about the
line he gave her saying...
That was the same line given to Dora at the
lake. This is the reason for her
rejection of Herr K. What was not
expected was Dora's possible attraction
to Frau K. Freud recounts...
Yet Frau K. betrayed Dora when she let Herr K. know of her reading of Mantegazza’s Physiology of Love,
without disclosing her influence on Dora.
Freud says...
Like an Agatha Christie style extra
twist at the end,
Freud adds the deeper layer...
So Dora is now implicated in the desire for her Father, Herr K. and now Frau K., albeit in a more
unconscious attitude. The ambivalence is very typical Freud and is
maddening for critics who want something
that is more testable and clear. Freud says...
I think Freud's statement that...
is the key to how he views the desire. Once desires latches
on to a target, but has too many
obstacles, it can be repressed,
and a new target is chosen. Yet when
given the opportunity to be satisfied,
the old desire can resurface. In a way
the Oedipus complex is simply because a
child has a lack of objects to pursue,
and is around parents most of the time.
As soon as other people enter the
child's life, new influences are pursued.
Freud describes how this bisexual fluid
desire can become convoluted...
This being one of the famous Freud cases,
there are other books written about it.
One of the great books on the subject
belongs to Hannah Decker, Freud Dora and
Vienna 1900. It gives the necessary
background to Dora's life, and the life
of Jewish immigrants, and their ordeals
in assimilating in Europe. A lot of
psychological problems are in fact
cultural problems. Survival fears of
ostracism and abandonment wreak havoc on the psyche. Hannah says...
The ups and downs of life take their toll on people who feel constant insecurity, and these
can lead to all kinds of desperate
behavior to regain that feeling of
security. Learning the backgrounds of
clients and their ordeals
helps to explain why they behave the way
they do. This is often the weakness of
psychotherapy. The therapists only have a
small window of time to work in, and the
client's lies and resistances keep back
important information.
Hannah describes the life of the Jews in
Bohemia where the Bauer's had come from.
"Although characterized by cruel social
and economic and injustices, that readily
slipped into extremes of murder and
massacre, the history of the Jews in
Bohemia was not one of unbroken misery.
Its particular curse was eternal
uncertainty. Frequent expulsions were
usually followed by some limited
permission to resettle and life would once
more resume, but never with ordinary
surety. The legacy bequeathed to Phillip
and Katarina Bauer and their two children,
by centuries of state-decreed
inferiority, familial upheava,l and spasms
of dubious quiet, was the trauma of hopes
raised only to be brutally dashed.
This pattern appeared yet again once the Jews were firmly emancipated and it colored the
background of Freud and Dora's encounter.
The result of many generations
precarious existence was an inherent
sense of vulnerability. Although this
psychological state accurately reflected
their history and led to the Jews
readily agreeing with anti-semitic
explanations of why they were more
disposed to neurosis than the non-jewish
population. Evidence of the Jews belief
in their own hereditary taint is rife..."
Humans can be very self-critical and
look for imperfections naturally. From
years of critical upbringing and
experiences in school, by the time a
person who is a visible minority becomes
an adult, there can be a habit of
self-hatred. Criticisms from a ruling
class can be absorbed into a masochism
that emphasizes one's weaknesses and
ignores one strengths. A form of
splitting against oneself leading to
neurosis. As a visible minority moves
from a location to location only to be a
minority again, but in a different
location, it can bring up the same
feelings of alienation. We need to seek
approval from those in power to get our
needs met, and stay stuck in helplessness.
Hannah describes this very well in her
descriptions of Austria's liberalization
of immigration. The pattern of economic
collapses then followed by scapegoating
and ostracism.
One doesn't have to look too deep to see the
same pattern throughout history. Economic
collapse, then blame hostility
aimed at an ethnic minority. The pattern
existed before the NAZIS and the
Holocaust. Reactions towards
immigrants today after the 2008 collapse,
however mild compared to the massacres
of the past, betray a certain human
tendency to blame those who have less
power, because they are accessible and
for frustrating the goals of the majority.
A lot of the labels of inferiority aimed
at immigrants cover another motivation,
anti-competition from people who may not
be so inferior. Hannah describes the...
Disturbing questions were asked like...
For the Jews there was a damned if you
do and damned if you don't situation as
described by Arthur Schnitzler he said...
As people split hairs, blame got
thrown around within the Jewish
community.
a curious example of self-hatred is described by Hannah.
Wow! Fliess's and Freud's theories
of human bisexuality even resaging
Jung's work on the Anima and Animus,
showed the difficulty people had back
then with expressing different sides of
themselves. One is compelled by culture
to pick a masculine or feminine side and
repress the other side in oneself.
It's repressed but never really gone. Hannah describes probably one of the best
examples of psychological projection
I've ever read.
She says...
With projection one is disturbed by the cultural
influences found in oneself. One can see
that one can live a life possibility
that might be attractive, but that
possibility may also be dangerous in a
society that might punish it. Then the
person who is projecting aims contempt
at oneself at the same time aims
contempt to those cultural influencers.
If enough people are caught up in this
ambivalence then the same reaction of
self-hatred and projection, with overt
contempt, can motivate a cultural
movement. A cleansing purge to clean
oneself, and then if aggravated enough
ethnically cleanse the rest of the
society. Hannah says...
The self hatred in the situation is to
look at femininity as weakness, and to
have contempt towards weakness in part
of oneself, and blame others for their
influence, and also the humiliation.
Right here envy can be summed up as the pain of losing pride. In Weininger's case the
pain was so large that suicide was his
escape. Hannah describes a warning by...
yet if we go to that Bismarck
quote, "might is always right," there's an
admission that femininity has advantages,
meaning not inferior, but different.
Since conflict is based on fighting over
identities, identities being how well we
can feed our pride, what people are
complaining about is not inferiority, but
superiority. If the Jews were considered
"clever women" then it was simply fear of
competing with their cleverness, not
their inferiority. Consciously or
unconsciously, people want their
competitors to be inferior. Going back to
Bismarck's quote, one can also see the
self-hatred of the feminine side of
oneself. If what Freud says is true, that
most people have some bisexuality, that
means this attitude requires a lot of
internal and external repression.
Naturally Dora would have been affected
by an environment like this and bring
her frustrations towards men and aim
them at Freud. Freud would also be
transferring emotions towards Ida based
on his upbringing, and the
contemporaneous understanding that women should know their place.
There were attempts to change the
situation
for people by socialists. Otto Ida's
brother, thought socialism was the method
to help people integrate harmoniously in
European society, by eliminating
differences exacerbated by the
competition in capitalism. Humanity would
mix together in such a way as to make
ethnic differences disappear. This motive
led him to want to join politics, yet
Freud disagreed with Otto...
This attitude would colour much of psychology all the way up to the beginning of positive psychology in the late 20th century.
partially disingenuous. Freud's system is
that of getting clients to accept the
world as it is and to make changes to
the environment, and to gain love.
To repress the negative affect, and to be
helpless, leads to self destructive
emotions. To deal with the world as it is,
like a labor of love, or a laboured love,
in how it feels to make it happen,
produces realistic positive emotions
that can be achieved. Even if communism,
as tried, failed, a democratic socialism
is accepted in most Western countries.
There's also a generational socialist
experiments that get partially accepted
by conservative groups when they are
popular enough. If anything this is
possibly the reason why there is
ambivalence. People don't actually know what a better
future will be, and there will be
experiments and failures along the way.
There will also be some successes. People
do want to be happy, but they are
ambivalent on how to go about it, and may
go down on paths they think are
happiness, but end up being the opposite.
The pattern of ups and downs of life keep repeating throughout humanity, surprising new generations
without the experience of loss. The
typical pattern: economic success,
a following complacency, reckless
investments, economic collapse, scarcity,
a gathering together in groups of the same
ethnic and cultural backgrounds for
safety and pride. Then there's
scapegoating of people of weaker power
with excuses that their habits or
cultures are at fault, weak and
contemptible, but in reality this is a
disguise for a fear of competition. This
is especially true if some of the ethnic
minorities manage to achieve status
despite being labeled with contempt,
while some from an ethnic majority lose
status. If they really were so
contemptible there would be nothing to
fear from their competition. What used to
be a downward comparison that gave
special treatment for some, becomes a
painful and humiliating upward
comparison. A threat to an identity, is
based on emotional feeding and
addictions to stable sources of pride
and pleasure. Pride needs a core identity
that supports it, and when lost, makes
people want to identify as a superior
race, identify with superior past
generations. A distorted Golden Age
nostalgia. The hope to regain a lost
identity is the desire to step into the
shoes of some kind of recognition of
value. Pride
Now this isn't to say that Jewish people
are perfect, and that there shouldn't be
some assimilation to values principles
and laws of a country. I mean that's why
you want to move to that country, right?
Because it has values you like.
Yet there's a tendency to take bad apples
which exist in all cultures and lump
them together with their entire
ethnicity. The embarrassment is described
very well by Freud. He...
Yet this need for a revenge or at least an assertive response to bigotry, seems to be
extremely hard to avoid, and also a
qualification for healthy self respect.
This is something that Freud eventually
came around to. Freud had to decide what
his response to antisemitism would be
when Freud's father told the story of
being told to get off the sidewalk
because he was a Jew, and his response to
do just that and walk away, was to
submissive of a response for Freud.
Freud said...
One doesn't have to start something with people to feel safe, but if agitated and
provoked over and over again it only
stops if there's an assertive response.
We have to respect the rights of others
but we also have to respect our own
rights. This way we avoid being passive
or aggressive, which all involve
boundaries being violated.
Freud was right that communism wouldn't
work to eliminate conflict and racism
but he wasn't able to see much farther
than that. The 2008 economic crash as bad
as it was, proved that a form of
democratic socialism was something that
people couldn't do without. It prevented
the fallout on the poor from being as
bad as it was in prior generations,
vindicating some of Otto's idealism for
a future with more stability. Freud's
advice based on his patient's inability
to deal with reality and make healthy
changes to the environment, was prophetic
with his result with Ida. In Hannah's
book, accounts of Ida's outcome
identified her as being similar to her
mother, with her...
Richie Robertson in
the introduction of the Oxford World
Classics version, hints that Ida's mother
instead of having a psychosis of
cleaning, was performing a form of
revenge. Since...
Some of these feminist interpretations
are quite modern. Another interpretation
was that she wanted revenge
for getting syphilis or gonorrhea from her husband.
My interpretation is that the obsession to
clean is more about cleaning a person's
self-esteem, and trying to avoid
rejection from others.
Hannah's book goes further into Dora's
Christian conversion, and Freud's escape from the
NAZIS. again the pattern repeated of
destroyed hopes for the Jewish. Even when
deliberate attempts to imitate the
culture of the ruling ethnic groups, her
brother Otto said that...
Otto felt that Christian conversion wasn't going to
work and only intermarriage with
Christians would solve the problem.
This differed at the time with the Zionists
who felt that the only solution would
ultimately be to live in a Jewish nation.
This is a great lesson for all people
who want to immigrate to another country.
The lesson is that if you compete with
the status and identities that others
have already claimed, they will split
hairs in every way to put you down.
"You're too Jewish! Oh you're Christian
now, but you still look Semitic! Not good
enough!" This goes more into my influences
from René Girard's Judeo-Christian works,
but to enter into any new society, even
if you're not that different from the
culture you're joining, because you're a
human, you have to be different in a way
that is useful to others. This means
creating new businesses, new products, and having something new to trade with the
established identities of others. If one can't create
those situations, then filling positions
that are needed, as opposed to competing
for the most alluring hierarchies
everyone else wants, creates the harmony
that Otto was so desperately trying to
seek. There'll always be competition for
pride and social rewards that leads to
conflict, especially in economic crashes
and the resulting scarcity of
opportunities. People are forced to step
on each other's toes to hold on to an
identity in a recession. I remember
coming out of the Spike Lee movie BlacKkKlansman, and seeing an interracial couple
walking out with looks of relief of
validation. They were obviously
maintaining their identities
and going to mind their own business and
live their lives, which looks the same as
everyone else's lives, but a society
where people are trading their
advantageous differences with each other
means people can see value in those
differences, and therefore less bigotry.
And if there's intermarriage it's more
authentic because the marriage isn't a
means to an end, to gain an identity. They
have a healthy identity beforehand and
appreciate each other's. There's always a
commonality that can be found if people
are willing to look for it.
In my travels most people are worried
about the same things, getting a good job,
having their kids find success in school,
and trying to gain and maintain a good
marriage. After a period of culture shock
people eventually find new cultural
habits to graft on to the ones they want
to keep. Sometimes this takes a couple of
generations but it happens.
With the help of her son, Ida was able to
move to New York. She lived with the same
physical problems as before and died of
colon cancer in 1945. One can imagine
that Dora would have loved to have lived
long enough to see how things had
changed for women or visible minorities
but I think she would still notice the
same cycles of dissatisfaction in modern
people as in the past. As long as people
are struggling with identities that have
mutual claims, they'll be stuck in the
same conflicts, regardless of what their
success looks like from afar to those
outside their milieu...
as Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
reminds. A lot of people at the top of
the pyramid feel they don't have as much
control over their life as they think
they do. Having to make appearances, and
networking, dealing with politics, and
keeping allies satisfied, reduces a lot of
that sense of control. René Girard also
noticed the intensity of the desire and
how it dissipates when the desired
object is obtained, or how it intensifies
again when the object is lost.
The freedom of knowing this is that I can
always look for a new object when
there's a rivalry, because ultimately I
will be bored with any possession,
because no possession can make you
eternally satisfied like an omnipotent
God. New objects will always be desired. I
can instead look at objects for their
actual value, not whether the object will
add to social proof that I'm a human
deity. I also don't have to worship an
idol like a missing parent, or pretend to
be a God, and all the effort of
impression management that narcissists
go through. The great value of this
knowledge is that it doesn't have to be
hidden. I don't need to hide this
knowledge to one-up someone else.
The knowledge is flexible no matter how many people know it and having more people
know this the better.
Much like Galadriel's "I passed the
test" speech in Lord of the Rings,
we have to see this in ourselves.
It's not so much the ambition, which can be
noble, but how aggressively we look at
"Others" as Girard emphasizes. With this
ambition it's actually hard to let go of
the sadomasochism of bullying and
revenge, but for the one who does,
narcissistic neurosis cools off into a
beautiful peace and self-acceptance.
Another solution to a lack of personal
meaning and identity in life comes from
Viktor Frankl's Man's search for
Meaning. He emphasized the need for
people to actively find their own
meanings in their current lives. His
message was similar to Freud's of
actively using ingenuity and realistic
choices and actions that have personal
meaning to reduce that sense of
helplessness that makes people neurotic
or violent. These negative feelings come
from chasing activities to "be somebody"
important while at the same time putting
oneself down for not being there already,
yet there are many important things in
our lives we are doing now that should
allow us to be as we are without shame
and envy. We remind ourselves what we are trying to achieve when we are taking
care of someone who is sick or serving a
customer or communicating important
values, it doesn't mean we let go of
healthy ambitions but we know that it's
okay to just start somewhere and all
these early activities are important
stepping stones to where you want to go.
If we can't control our consciousness
all the time, if we have to change
objects of desire, if we choose to see
the meaning and importance of our
current mundane activities, they become
intrinsically satisfying, and then the
self-hatred disappears. This meaning
doesn't require imitating a narcissistic
Idol, providing a parental meaning for us.
We don't have to gather into the safety
of ethnic groups and scapegoat others
for our problems. A lot of Viktor's
message resonates with me because
meaning is found in those overlooked
opportunities that are available to us right now.
We shouldn't get locked into
objects that we are not ready for, or
are not available to us.
