Transference and the Dora Case

Transference and the Dora Case

Introduction

In order to study the genealogy of the concept of transference, Freud returned to Vienna in 1882, when the physician Joseph Breuer Freud recounts the history of a patient falling in love with him. Breuer, without knowing how to deal with such a problem left Freud puzzled about the fact that, being so impressed so that, at the time he goes to Paris three years later to study.

Freud is interested in the method used by Breuer to treat hysterical at the time. The hypnotic suggestion that made possible the expression of affection connected to hysterical symptom and thus could happen the disappearance of the symptom, which no longer needed to be converted into somatic arousal (Soler, 1996).

Freud, unlike Breuer, was attracted more by the operation than by symptom resolution, and thanks to this, will give birth to psychoanalysis. This marked the starting point of psychoanalysis, and seeking to trace the construction of the concept of transference in the analytic clinic (O'Donnell, 2006).

In The Psychotherapy of Hysteria, Freud considers the difficulties and disadvantages of the therapeutic process created in partnership with Breuer's cathartic method. Freud talks about the relationship problems that can appear in the encounter between doctor and patient, in the treatment of hysteria and assures that requires, on the part of the doctor and the patient also, some criteria for the smooth progress of the work, as the investigation into the events psychological is a laborious process that requires time.

The Dora Case

A year after the publication of “The Interpretation of Dreams” in 1901, Freud writes the Dora case, which was published in 1905. This is a work entitled “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”, in which Freud focuses primarily on two dreams occurring during the period of analysis to explain the hysteria patient. Freud sought to show how the interpretation of dreams falls in job analysis (Melman, 1999).

This case appears materially in this work because it took Freud to have his first really negative experience with the materiality of the transfer (Freud, 1905/2001). In the afterword of this publication, written years later Freud does not shy to acknowledge that the premature termination of the short treatment was caused by the fact that he has not been able to address the transfer time and recognize the transfer as the most difficult part of clinical management (Loose, 2002).

Freud explains that the transfers are reprints, reproductions of motions and fantasies during the progress of the analysis seem sto wake up and become conscious, but with the characteristic to replace some earlier person by the person's doctor. Freud adds that psychic experiences are revived, not as something of the past, but as a current relationship with the person of the physician.

In the analysis of Dora, the patient leaves the doctor with a vengeance, as he had done with an old love. The patient gives signs that will do this, but Freud does not identify the time his intention and that led to his ...