ABSTRACT
Nearly twenty years after the first of Sigmund Freud's six celebrated case histories, 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria', he wrote the final one — 'The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman'. Freud's failure to discover Dora's homosexual tendency, 'which he none the less tells us is so constant in hysterics that its subjective role cannot be overestimated' — the exasperation is Lacan's — seems difficult to detach from his own involvement with his patient, his famous countertransference. In Freud's view this homosexual girl's idealization of an unavailable woman of ill repute corresponds 'to the smallest details' with that special type of masculine object choice discussed in his 1910 essay — the exclusive attraction to women who are both already attached and suffer from a dubious sexual reputation. In the final recapitulation of the psychogenesis of the girl's homosexuality, Freud notes the advantages of hindsight in tracing causation.
