ABSTRACT
Dora is Freud’s famous case history of hysteria. Entitled ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, this clinical case study is also a late Victorian melodrama dramatising all the politics and power relationships of the heterosexual romance implicit in the family, feminism, medicine and science. Studies in Hysteria is the acknowledged origins of psychoanalysis. It is a study of the hysterical symptoms and romantic longings of Victorian women, whom Freud originally thought were suffering from real sexual traumas. He then replaced this seduction theory with his famous discovery of infantile fantasy and the unconscious Oedipal Complex.
