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In this essay, I imagine what Dora's second analysis would have been like had she come to see me many years after her first analysis with Freud. To contextualize Dora's "second" experience (aided by my knowledge of Freud's analysis and his ideas about the nature of Dora's problems), I picture what she would have presented to me and how my understanding of her selfobject transference would have guided me in listening to her subjective experience. Dora's manifold fears of rejection and the many ways in which these now reappeared in the transference guided the interpretive process. But the traumatic experience occasioned by the fact that Freud essentially dismissed her desperate efforts to gain acceptance for her version of what happened between her and Herr K at the lake seemed to have been put to rest. Having been listened to engaged Dora emotionally in this second analysis and appreciably eased her current difficulties.
FREUD'S 1905 REPORT OF DORA'S ANALYSIS-MORE THAN ANY OTHER of his famous clinical histories-has fascinated me ever since my days in psychoanalytic training. I have read all the case histories with several generations of residents in psychiatry and candidates in psychoanalytic training. Each reading gave me new bits of understanding of the problems as well as the treatment processes of each of Freud's patients-which is why I never tired of reading them with each new group of residents and candidates. My fascination with Dora's analysis has never ceased. A few years ago, when I finally set down in writing what I had learned from Dora over the years and surveyed what had been written about her in English (P. H. Ornstein, 1993), I thought I had "finished with her," but this was not to be. That Freud did not understand Dora but only "explained" her-and his explanations did not satisfy Dora and have not satisfied many generations of psychoanalysts-has sustained my interest in her analytic experience to this day. In addition, after completing my essay, I had so many unused ideas left over in my notebook that needing to write another essay seemed compelling even if not urgent.
The invitation to contribute an essay to this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry made writing suddenly "urgent." A gentle reminder about the deadline, coming when...