ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1900 a wealthy Austrian industrialist, Philip Bauer, brought his eighteen-year-old daughter to Sigmund Freud for treatment. She came reluctantly. She suffered from severe coughing attacks that often took her voice away entirely. In addition, she was chronically depressed and had threatened suicide. She had long been on bad terms with her mother, but recently she had become hostile toward her father as well. She insisted that he break off relations with a married couple, the K’s, with whom he and his family had been close friends for years. Philip Bauer told Freud that he suspected his daughter’s changed character and intensified nervous symptoms had some connection with an event she insisted had occurred one summer, two years earlier, when they had joined the K’s at a lake in the Alps for a brief vacation. Although his daughter had intended to stay with the K’s for several weeks, she insisted on accompanying him when 73he departed a few days after their arrival. Shortly afterwards, she told her mother that Herr K had “had the audacity to make a proposal” to her while alone on a walk by the lake, pleading, “You know I get nothing out of my wife.” She said that she had slapped his face and fled. When he met her again on the way back to the house, Herr K “begged her to forgive him and not to mention the incident.” Philip Bauer had been assured by Herr K, however, that she no doubt “fancied the whole scene,” most likely as a result of becoming overexcited by erotic books which Frau K said she was in the habit of reading. He was sure his daughter’s “tale of the man’s immoral suggestions” was “a phantasy.” Taking his leave, hoping that Freud would “please try and bring her to reason,” Bauer left Freud to face a young woman of “intelligent and engaging looks” and “independent judgment,” one “who had grown accustomed to laugh at the efforts of doctors.” Later, betraying his own phantasy, Freud called her Dora. 2
