ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses case study of late-nineteenth-century psychopathologists' record. Cesare Romano revisits Dora's clinical case in light of Freud's own seduction theory. Thirty-two years after Freud had taken Dora into treatment, Ferenczi presented a paper at the 12th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association with the title The Passions of Adults and Their Influence on the Sexual and Character Development of Children. In this essay, Ferenczi emphasises the traumatic factors in the pathogenesis of the neuroses which had been unjustly neglected. The points in common between Ferenczi's thesis on the traumatolytic function of the dream, and the author's reading of Dora's dreams, are rather apparent. Both imply an effort to bring to light events that are more traumatic than those highlighted by Freud, the same events that would have emerged had Freud kept his initial promise. Dora's two dreams took her to that infantile traumatic area that neurosciences acknowledge as belonging to the implicit memory and to the unrepressed unconscious.
