| Abstract: | I have suggested that Freud's choice of the pseudonym Dora for his eighteen-year-old hysterical patient, Ida Bauer, was over-determined. Dora, it seems likely, was named not only after Freud's sister's nursemaid, as Freud himself explained, but also after Dora Breuer, Josef Breuer's youngest daughter. This theory is based on an examination of the similarities in the lives and symptoms of Anna O. (Breuer's famous hysterical patient of 1880-1882) and Dora; on an analysis of the transferences and countertransferences in the cases of these two young women; and on evidences of the persistent significance of Josef Breuer in Freud's life after 1895. These specific inquiries also call attention to the nature of hysteria at the end of the nineteenth century and to the ever-present complexities of the physician-patient relationship. |
