106
PARTISAN REVIEW
because he failed to achieve his therapeutic ends, and Dora left him
after only three months in analysis. Her departure surprised him
and caused him to consider at length what had gone wrong. Despite
serious doubts, he eventually published the case for at least two
reasons. First, the case turned largely upon two dreams. Since
The
Interpretation
0/
Dreams
had been recently published (1900), he was
naturally inclined to take advantage of the opportunity to illustrate
"how an art, which would otherwise be useless, can be turned to
account for the discovery of hidden and repressed parts of mental
life." Second, he wanted to show how the general therapeutic
method he had outlined in the final chapter of
Studies on Hysteria
had
led him to a far more sophisticated understanding of that anomalous
disease of the mind than 'any other investigator had achieved.
Freud managed to convince himself that the difficulties inhering
in this case suited it to become "a first introductory publication" on
the question of hysteria. And this is precisely how it has been read by
several generations of psychoanalysts. Using a still rudimentary
notion of "transference," Freud argued that it was his failure to
"master" or dispel the transference Dora had formed with respect to
him that made for so short-lived a therapeutic encounter. He felt
that he had been distracted by the readiness with which Dora put
considerable quantities of pathological material at his disposal. Had
he been aware that the transference had already developed to shield
another portion of her pathology, he might have explained the
matter to Dora and their interpretations might have led to the
eventual resolution of her difficulties. As it was, he had the materials
of her two rich dreams; he had her dramatic departure as an
illustration of the transference; and he had grounds for inferring
what additional materials the transference had masked.
Freud was subsequently unconcerned about the suspension of
his therapy with Dora, but two other kinds of incompleteness
influenced his consideration in reporting the case. First, since he
wanted to focus upon hysteria rather than on his interpretive tech–
nique, he had not reported "the process of interpretation to which the
patient's associations and communications had been subjected, but
only the results of that process." And second, he reaffirmed the credo
of the science of his day by stating that "a single case history, even if
it were complete and open to no doubt, cannot provide the answer to
all the questions arising out of the problem of hysteria." We may
profitably reflect upon each of these additional senses of incom–
pleteness in the account of Dora's case, for both questions had
