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concerned Freud when writing
Studies on Hysteria
and would occupy
his attention in later case studies.
The dubious "objectivity" of his observations was prominent in
Freud's mind when he wrote his account of Dora's hysteria. He notes
that it was awkward "to publish the results of my inquiries without
there being any possibility of other specialists testing and checking
them." But confidentiality was in fact a feature of medical ethics
generally, and only the special nature of the materials under
investigation in Freud's work made this problematic. We must,
therefore, look beyond what Freud called the prurience of his
readers into the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge itself, if we are
to appreciate the special problems of intersubjectivity presented by
psychoanalysis.
Freud made two other observations suggesting that the material
he was presenting in his study of Dora could not be appreciated by
readers unfamiliar with his earlier work. Pointing out that his
analysis of Dora was largely an interpretation of two dreams, he said
he expected his readers to study
The Interpretation of Dreams
before
reading his
Fragment
of
an Ana(ysis of a Case
of
Hysteria.
For although it
was true that no other observer could check the veracity of his report
of Dora's dreams, the general principles of dream interpretation
were accessible to every reader in his earlier book, and "everyone
can submit his own dreams to analytic examination." This was
tantamount to suggesting that his readers undergo psychoanalysis,
or "self-analysis," before they read his account of Dora.
In
another
passage, Freud suggested that familiarity with the ideas in
The
Interpretation
of
Dreams
was not quite enough - one must agree with
them to appreciate his study of Dora. Freud also linked the problem
of Dora's being a single case with the difficulty of checking his
observations and suggested that these obstacles to the inter–
subjectivity of his insights could be overcome if the reader were
sufficiently initiated into psychoanalysis. He did not, however, go
beyond the implication that psychoanalysis is a specialized branch of
knowledge that cannot be appreciated immediately by a n!=>vice,
something that can be said about almost any scientific discipline.
Later he would acknowledge that psychoanalytic knowledge had its
own peculiar difficulties intimately related to its unique value.
Of the significance of the Dora case, Ernest Jones notes in his
biography of Freud that "it is hard to convey what an amazing event
it"Was for anyone to-take the data of psychology so seriously. Yet that
it should less than half a century after seem a commonplace is a
