ABSTRACT
After three months of treatment, Dora delivered a metaphorical slap at Freud. She announced abruptly that she was going to end the treatment. ‘I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time,’ Freud explains. He was aware that Dora was treating him like her father, but that blinded him to an association she was making between him and Herr K. ‘In this way the transference took me unawares, and, because of the unknown quantity in me which reminded Dora of Herr K, she took her revenge on me as she wanted to take her revenge on him, and deserted me as she believed herself to have been deceived and deserted by him. Thus she acted out an essential part of her recollections and phantasies instead of reproducing them in the treatment.’9 Freud is describing a situation in which he was unable to see Dora’s imaginative activity unfolding in the here-and-now of the analytic situation.
