PARTISAN REVIEW
17
between her father and his wife." Nevertheless, the cause of her
greatest embitterment seems to have been her father's "readiness
to consider the scene by the lake as a product of her imagination."
And although Freud was in his customary way skeptical about
such impassioned protestations and repudiations -- and surmised
that something in the way of
aI:t
opposite series of thoughts or
self-reproaches lay behind them -- he was forced to come to "the
conclusion that Dora's story must correspond to the facts in every
respect."
If
we try to put ourselves in the place of this girl
between her sixteenth and eighteenth years, we can at once
recognize that her situation was a desperate one. The three adults
to whom she was closest, whom she loved the most in the world,
were apparently conspiring - - separately, in tandem, or in con–
cert -- to deny her the reality of her experience. They were
conspiring to deny Dora her reality and reality itself. This betrayal
touched upon matters that might easily unhinge the mind of a
young person; for the three adults were not betraying Dora's love
and trust alone; they were betraying the structure of the actual
world. And indeed when Dora's father handed her over to Freud
with the parting injunction "Please try and bring her to reason,"
there were no two ways of taking what he meant. Naturally he had
no idea of the mind and character of the physician to whom he
had dealt this leading remark.
II.
Dora began treatment with Freud some time in October
1900. Freud wrote to Fliess that "the case has opened smoothly
to my collection of picklocks," but the analysis was not pro–
ceeding well. The material produced was very rich, but Dora was
there more or less against her will. Moreover, she was more than
usually amnesic about events in her remote past and about her
inner and mental life. The analysis found its focus and climax in
two dreams. The first of these was the production by Dora of a
dream that in the past she had dreamed recurrently. Among the
many messages concealed by it, Freud made out one that he
conveyed to his patient: "'You have decided to give up the
treatment,' " he told her, adding, " 'to which, after all, it is only
your father who makes you come.' " It was a self-fulfilling inter-
