ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the case study of late-nineteenth-century psychopathologists' record. Cesare Romano revisits Dora's clinical case in light of Freud's own seduction theory. The dream occurs at a stage in the analysis when Dora herself had been raising a number of questions about the connection between some of her actions and the motives which presumably underlay them. At this stage, Dora was questioning why she had not spoken about the trauma immediately. Freud identifies in the dream allusions to the male and female genitalia, and a reference to her father's and her own death, which she threatened to bring about in a letter intended to alarm her father. Dora wanted to convince her father that had he persisted in his erotic relationship with Frau K. According to Freud, Dora's sexual knowledge would derive from Mantegazza's The Physiology of Love. Dora's sexual knowledge derived, rather, from experiences suffered on her skin, as is the case with abused children.
