f impulses--first and always sexual, in Freud's view--that the conscious individual does not want to express. Only in the unconscious, or in dreams, are they expressed, or fulfilled.
In laying the groundwork for reporting Dora's case, Freud cites his publication of The Interpretation of Dreams as a decisive explication of his theory of the psyche. In that text, he describes dreams as the "royal road" to the unconscious mind (Dreams 287). In the Dora text, he says that the dream "is one of the detours by which repression can be evaded" (Dora 9). Interpreting the content of dreams is at the core of psychoanalytic clinical practice because bringing repressed "mental material" into consciousness is meant to empower the individual to experience reality nonhysterically. Freud explains that his account of Dora's treatment is meant to "give an example . . . of the only practical application for which the art of interpreting dreams seems to admit" (8). He also makes the point that in every case of hysteria, he has found a link between psychic trauma and "a disturbance in the sphere of sexuality" (18). Thus Dora's case becomes an exercise in the clinical validation of both a theory developed in The Interpretation of Dreams and a method employed in the clinic to test that theory.
The facts of Dora's case are presented clinically, with reference to her family background; Freud links "the patien
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