Dora's Theory Of Hysteria

Dora was an aspiring intellectual born in the wrong time to be a thinking woman. Labeling a girl hysterical for not aligning to the norms of her era already seems a bit unfair, but Freud takes it a bit further, he suggests that a part of Dora’s “hysteria” was due to repressed feelings for a man. This idea is based on nothing but conjecture and there are several possibilities as to what lead to this “abnormal” behavior. By Freud’s own standards in accordance with a gender/genital based theory of his, at the time of her therapy, Dora leaned toward becoming more of the educationally oriented type of woman than the more common baby-making kind, that’s not to say she didn’t like children as evidenced by the fact that she had an affection for the

Aspects of our parents become the foundation for who we could become later in life. Dora’s father was a powerful upper-class man who, despite being afflicted with tuberculosis and becoming weak, had connections to influential individuals such as the K’s and Freud himself. Her personal paragon of human achievement, her father, motivated her to chase that kind of prestige, however, Dora’s scholarly nature may not have been inspired by her father's insistence alone it could have been partially based on a desire to become powerful enough to become him. Her craving for the knowledge necessary for success festered enough to lead her to read works such as Paulo Mantegazza’s Physiology of Love, demonstrating that she was educated enough to be interested in works on the mind and human nature. Dora’s pursuit of what she thinks her father would approve of her drove her to not only becoming shrewd enough to catch on to her father’s intention to trade her to Herr K. in exchange for his wife, but sufficiently savvy in the study of the mind to see that Freud's questions of her were not of the empirical sort and leave her treatment prematurely. Her father’s status as an upper-class man and her above-bourgeois upbringing was the perfect rudiment for creating a girl with above average wit. One could say that Dora had an

When we are young we are usually given a choice between two archetypes of personality to choose from, the mother and the father, Dora would choose the alluring path of being less constrained by things like expectations and wifely duties. Her aversion to both wanting men and being like her mother go hand in hand as she wouldn’t have wanted to be some housewife living for the purpose of pleasing a man and cleaning the house, with her mother failing the former. She viewed her mother as just some useless thing in the background and may have had an innate fear of becoming like her. Just as the image her father inspired her to go after education and success, the image of her mother became a reason to not go after the waste of time that was a failing marriage. With her mother becoming a symbol to be afraid of if she were to ever stray from the path of independence and fall into the slot of a complacent unproductive woman as motivation, it made it easier for Dora to pursue the path of the intellectual. Additionally, her mother was also described as “uncultivated” by Freud, a remark he made without meeting her and with nothing but the accounts by Dora and her father, meaning their opinions of her were that she was uneducated. Her