PARTISAN REVIEW
15
them and a couple named K. Dora's father was deeply unhappy in
his marriage and apparently made no bones about it. The K.'s too
were unhappily married, as it later turned out. Frau K. took to
nursing Dora's father during these years of his illness. She also
befriended Dora, and they behaved toward one another in the
most familiar way and talked together about the most intimate
subjects. Herr K., her husband, also made himself a close friend of
Dora's -- going regularly for walks with her and giving her
presents. Dora in her tum befriended the K.'s two small children,
"and had been almost a mother to them." What begins to be
slowly if unmistakably disclosed is that Dora's father and Frau
K.
had established a sexual liaison and ' that this relation had by the
time of Dora's entering into treatment endured for many years. At
the same time Dora's father and Frau K, had tacitly connived at
turning Dora over to Herr K., just as years later her father "handed
her over to me [Freud] for psychotherapeutic treatment." In
some sense everyone was conspiring to conceal what was going on;
and in some
~ret
further sense everyone was conspiring to deny
that anything was going on at all. What we have here, on one of its
sides, is a classical Victorian domestic drama, that is at the same
time a sexual and emotional can of worms.
Matters were brought to a crisis by two events that occurred
to Dora at two
diff~rent
periods of her adolescence. When she was
fourteen, Herr K. contrived one day to be alone with her in his
place of business; in a state of sexual excitement, he "suddenly
clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss on her lips." Dora
responded with a "violent feeling of disgust," and hurried away.
This experience, like those referred to in the foregoing paragraph,
was never discussed with or mentioned to anyone, and relations
continued as before. The second scene took place two years later
in
the summer when Dora was sixteen (it was just after she had
seen Freud for the first time). She and Herr K. were taking a walk
by a lake in the Alps, In Dora's words, as they come filtered to us
through Freud, Herr K. "had the audacity to make her a pro–
posal." Apparently he had begun to declare his love for this girl
whom he had known so well for so long. "No sooner had she
grasped HelT K.'s intention than, without letting him finish what
he had to say, she had given him a slap in the face and hurried
