ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1900, a 17-year-old girl was brought by her father to see Sigmund Freud. Her real name was Ida Bauer, but she has passed into history as Dora, the pseudonym that Freud gave to her (Freud, 1905). Dora was the daughter of a wealthy, ailing textile-manufacturer whom Freud had treated for syphilis six years previously. Her elder brother, Otto Bauer, was to become a socialist theoretician and, briefly, Foreign Minister of Austria. Dora’s father told Freud that his daughter had been suffering from recurrent neurotic symptoms since the age of 8-depression, a recurrent limp, a nervous cough, loss of voice-and had been treated unsuccessfully by many doctors, to whom she had been sent against her will. He had insisted that his daughter accompany him to see Freud after he had found a suicide-note inside her desk, and, following an argument with him, she had had some kind of hysterical seizure.
