Freud's case of Dora, one that has served as cautionary tale on multiple fronts for psychoanalysts for years, demonstrates how fully Freud bought into this gender differential.
Every other year, a friend of mine in the philosophy department teaches a course on Freud. I inevitably guest lecture, and more often than not I teach about Dora, the first of Freud's five great case histories. The last time I taught it, my friend recommended that I read a book by Hannah Decker; Freud, Dora and Vienna, 1900, which I have just finished. Decker is a historian and a feminist, and I found her reading of Freud to be consistent with mine, though her knowledge of the family background of Dora, the cultural world that she shared with Freud - including the role of judaism and anti-semitism in the case, and a particular feminist reading of the interaction between Freud and Dora fleshed out my intuitive reading in ways that brought the case more vividly to life for me.
When Freud was a young physician, just beginning his practice of psychoanalysis, something that he had learned in rudimentary form from his mentor Joseph Breuer who, along with his patient Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheimer), had applied a prototypical form of the treatment; one that involved talking freely about symptoms and what had occurred when they first emerged led to the resolution of those symptoms; to the daughter of a patient of his, whom he referred to as Dora in the paper that he published about her. He treated her for five months before she summarily fired him (though he had promised that the treatment would take a year). Freud, who was eager to publish findings that supported his studies of dreams and that included examples of how dreams could be used therapeutically, knew very little about what he was doing. As a result of what he went on to learn, and what others after him have learned, we now have a much better idea of what was happening between Dora and Freud than he did at the time. We also know this because Freud, for all his faults in conceptualization and technique, clearly observed and reported the interaction between himself and Dora. He was perhaps the first scientific reporter of psychological data - particularly data related to the subjective experience - as a valid basis for drawing scientific conclusions, and we can still draw valid conclusions from those data.
Dora came to Freud, at her father's insistence, with a slew of symptoms. She was suicidal, she had a persistent nervous cough, various vague neurological problems, and a host of other problems. But mostly she was forced to come to Freud, Decker maintains (and it makes sense to me), because her father wanted to shut her up. You see, her father was having an affair with a family friend, Frau K. - who was also an important figure to Dora - and Dora was on to them. Herr K., Frau K.'s husband, meanwhile, had tried to force himself sexually and perhaps romantically on Dora, once when when she was thirteen and once shortly before the consultation, when Dora was 18. Dora's father would, apparently, have been fine trading his daughter to Herr K. in exchange for unfettered access to Frau K., but Dora objected to this on many levels, including that she found Herr K. to be disingenuous, and someone towards whom, as Freud pointed out to her, Dora felt affection, just as she did to Frau K - a confusing situation for an 18 year old, especially when each of these adults, from whom she expected to have support and direction, used her to their own ends.
Dora, then, was at the epicenter of multiple conflicting relationships. Her father, a wealthy industrialist - Phillip Bauer was his actual name - found no sexual satisfaction from his wife - a woman who was much more concerned with keeping her house clean than with connecting emotionally with those around her. Frau K., whose children Dora had cared for, and to whom Dora looked up, had taught Dora about sex. Freud - in what was a prescient leap from the more stereotypical positions he took elsewhere - sensed that Dora had a crush on Frau K.
[While this could have been offered and experienced as an empathic moment, Freud used it and other interpretations that he imposed on Dora more as a means of supporting his theories - in this case of the essential bisexuality of humans - than to help her have a better understanding of herself and the world around her - though I think that Freud intended to be enlightening Dora, he didn't yet get that just being told that something is the case by an authority is not the same as discovering it with a colleague or on one's own or when one is ready to get it in the context of a relationship with an empathic other (some of which Freud did get, in part through working through this case).]
Dora was also being pursued by Herr K., who, like her father, was not getting sexual satisfaction from his wife. Freud was puzzled that Dora didn't take the attentions of this middle aged man to heart - that she wasn't smitten by his interest in her. Ask my 18 year old daughter about being hit on by a married thirty-something year old man and you will be enlightened. But also, Herr K. had hit on and had an affair with his maid - wooing her with the same words he "wooed" Dora, and Dora resented being treated as a mere servant - a servant Herr K. discarded when he was finished with her. Freud, on one level, didn't get all of this. He was even more blind to the ways in which he himself was a player in this drama - that he was an older man (who wasn't getting sexual satisfaction from his wife) who was listening to a young girl and talking with her about intimate things, including sexual things. He hid his own feelings, and potential feelings that Dora might have had towards him behind a veil of duty and medical/scientific objectivity.
When I teach students about this case, I use Dora's dreams as a means of understanding the complexities of the situation from her perspective, including the role that Freud plays in her life, but following Decker's lead, I will think in this essay more about the ways in which Dora is caught in a gender role trap of her (and more than we like to admit it, our) generation. Dora wants to be emancipated in ways that Freud can't comprehend. She wants to be free to go to school - to think her own thoughts - and, I think, to be loved by someone who can appreciate her. Despite having been disappointed by her mother, her father, Frau K., and Herr K., she still, at least at the beginning, pins her hopes on Herr Professor Dr. Freud.
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| Maslow's Hierarchy from Cheung et al. 2015 |
I think Dora is disappointed by Dr. Freud because she has a high stakes model of marriage in mind - one that won't be invented until years later and one that has been recently written about. A 2015 article summarizing, in laymen's terms, research on The Suffocation Model of Marriage by Eli Finkel, Elaine Cheung and others (see a link here, though you made need to reference this link through your library if you don't have an account with the publisher of the journal - my apologies), describes three eras of marriage in the US. The first, which they see as spanning 1776-1850, is what they call the institutional era - where marriage was primarily focused on filling Maslow's physiological and social needs. These marriages were, from the perspective of these authors, primarily economic means of forging a utilitarian team effort to manage the challenges of the world around the pair. During the companionate era (1850-1965), marriage met increasingly "sentimental" needs - needs like being loved, loving, and engaging in romantic relationships.
I think Freud was operating, as he was thinking about Dora, primarily from the institutional perspective with a dash of the companionate. My guess is that Dora was operating partly from the companionate, but also from the self-expressive era perspective (1965-present) - one in which marriage is used to support self-discovery, self-expression, and personal growth - something that Freud felt totally supported by his family and his wife in doing - in part because he was a male - but one that he was not yet willing to support Dora or his wife in - not realizing that this was an innate human desire, not just a masculine one (and Decker would go on to point out that any empowered group would not recognize the right of a disempowered group - the Jews in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century for instance - to exercise their autonomy needs).
What Finkel and Cheung point out is that engaging in this higher form of relationship is one that requires a huge investment of time and emotional energy, at a time when there is tons of competition for our time from other entities and thus our marriages and families are frequently last on our priority list rather than first. They suggest, then, that while this newest marital model affords the possibility of much greater satisfaction than earlier models - there is also a huge risk - we may fail to support each other in the ways that we expect - indeed, feel entitled to - and this may lead us to feel suffocated in our marriages rather than supported. The metaphor they use is that climbing the mountain of Maslow's hierarchy of needs results in less available oxygen, and therefore we need more interaction to counteract the suffocation that can take place when less oxygen is available.
In fact, I think that all three models have always been available, particularly for privileged couples, which Dora and all of her potential partners certainly were, despite their gender and religious limitations to that privilege. Her own (and their) physiological, affiliative, and aspirational needs were always potentially in play in the relationship. Freud chose to ignore the affiliative and the aspirational in his relationship with Dora, famously wondering whether he could have helped Dora by playing a part - pretending that he cared for her. Freud recoiled from this possibility, dismissing the cure that could have arisen as false - dependent on the relationship with the therapist rather than something that belonged to the patient. In fact, though, it may be that we need the support of others to achieve that which is most particularly our own (Harper Lee's new/old book Go Set a Watchman nicely illustrates this). We may have buried this realization in the fabric of our received lives, where inequality is hidden from all but the oppressed, who are cautioned not to speak of it.
Decker, while acknowledging that Freud helped Dora in small ways that her other treatments, mild electroshocks and hydrotherapy did not, points out that Freud and Dora - and the entire Jewish population of the European continent - were swept by much bigger forces than psychotherapy can address - the institutional racism that led to the holocaust and forced them into parallel harrowed lives. In this the reader might conclude that the needs of Dora - the needs to be accepted, to be loved, to be supported so that she could achieve the kind of psychological autonomy that would allow a woman like her, in the person of Ruth Bader Ginsberg a century later (and four other individuals including two more women empowered in ways unforeseeable when Freud was practicing) to see that, despite inherited beliefs, people can be conceived in radically different ways than we have previously done and, through doing that, we can reverse tides as powerful as those that swept through Europe and destroyed so many lives. In other words, Decker does not seem to understand that the kind of listening that Freud engaged in with Dora - imperfect as it was and in many ways still is - opened up our inner lives to scientific study. Not just the artists but the scientists could explore and validate the subjective experience of all people, including the oppressed, and these could become the basis for sweeping change.
We are not done. Racism, classism and homophobia may always be with us. But isn't it ironic that a man's efforts to help his fellow man suppress his daughter's concerns should play a part, and not a small part, through listening to the subjective experience of that daughter - while suppressing her - and reporting her thoughts, along with his prejudices, that this might be one of many streams that join to form rivers -- well, my metaphor will break down because rivers don't turn tides, but there is a flow that is working counter to the powers that Decker cites, powers that are still very much alive - the people at the beach house across the way raised, saluted and took pictures of a Confederate flag today, one they are now flying underneath the American flag - and that the flow is towards having more of those days when Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream - and that of Dora - can be realized: that we are judged by the content of our character, not by the form that our character inhabits.
Ironically, as Finkel and Cheung point out, the closer we get to this goal, the rarer the air. The more we will feel suffocated by our failures. The more we will need to rely on each other to be engaged with each other - to hear each other out - to achieve what feels more and more possible but further and further away the closer that it gets. Finkel and Cheung note that as marriage has become potentially more fulfilling, the rate of divorce has increased. We will likely see more, not less, difficulties in engagement the closer we get to the summit. We are likely to be more, not less, disappointed in each other as we fail to live up to each other's expectations. Finkel and Cheung - and Freud - and Decker would all have us engage more fully especially at the times when we feel most disappointed, a tall order indeed.
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