This research examines Freud's case study of a patient he calls "Dora." The research will set forth the cultural context in which the case study appeared and then discuss ways in which a feminist reading of Freud's text has the effect of interrogating, without necessarily entirely discrediting, the theory, methodology, and analysis employed, as well as conclusions reached, by Freud in treatment of Dora.
It is impossible to address the content of Dora's case without some reference to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis that Freud was developing. Freud's theory of personality is constructed out of three principal components (ego, superego, and id), plus one ancillary component (libido). In what is commonly referred to as the structural hypothesis, Freud defines each component operationally, explaining how each functions to build an individual's psychoemotional sense of self and place in the world. In his monograph Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud refers to the ego as the "immediate feeling" of self, "as something autonomous and unitary" (12-13). The superego, meanwhile, represents the ego's internalization of and trade-offs with external influences, or "objects," whether conscience, family, or society (74). Complicating interplay of ego and superego is the id, or unconscious drives that are the energy source "for which [the ego] serves as a kind of façade" (13). Two additional instincts--the libido, or eros or sexual instinct, and its opposite the death instinct--are also at work (and at cross-purposes) in the unconscious (68).
Neurosis, or hysteria, as Freud and others were wont to call it, and not only in Dora's case, was held to be a product of the inability of the ego to sort out the tension between itself and the superego on one hand, and the failure to acknowledge, let alone resolve, the tension between ego and the competing unconscious instinctive drives on the other. Such failure takes the form of repression o...