Dora 1

I believe Freud's case study of Dora can be compared to literature because he focuses on a subject, the girl and her psychoanalysis. He is telling us readers a story of a person who is dealing with her own issues, but also seeking treatment. In a way this one story is like several separate stories because we are not only hearing it from Freud, but we are also being informed by Dora. He is the one questioning her and providing her the treatment, so she is telling him of what is going on with her, and then he is telling us of her problems. The story focuses on Dora and everything she is going through, but at the same time we are learning about other characters who play huge roles in her story. There is the father, the mother, and the couple who seem to cause a lot of trouble by having affairs. So we are being involved with Freud's version of Dora's story, the real story from Dora herself, and also the story as seen through the other characters' eyes. Both literature and psychoanalysis have conflict in common, especially "internal conflict." Literature revolves around storytelling, while psychoanalysis deals with dream interpretation, theory, exploring, revealing, and investigating. A story reveals itself through a variety of subjects and interests, so does psychoanalysis. Both involve stories being understood, interpreted, and spoken about to reveal everything out into the open.
Freud talks a lot about sexuality and gender, especially when it comes to the mother and Herr K. He introduces the mother as basically being no good and being over compulsive with cleaning. He even mentioned how she made everything so perfect that nobody wanted to even eat off the clean dishes. Dora was very close to her father, but did not get along with her mother, and she even took notice to the fact that her parents were no longer sexual with each other. Her father had turned to Herr K's wife and they had a secret love affair. They were constantly sneaking off together to spend time with each other, and then they even all moved to Vienna. However, it was Dora who Freud instigated about the most when it came to sexual tension because of her passion with Herr K. When she first told him about Herr K trying to kiss her and she ran away, Freud made his opinion clear about what he thought had really happened. He believed that Dora very much liked Herr K, but she became scared of the excitement he had shown through his pants. Freud instigated that since she was so young, she could not fully understand what was going on and also got too excited, herself. Dora claimed she felt nothing but disgust and couldn't believe what had happened, but when Herr K was confronted he even claimed, "She took no interest in anything but sexual matters, and that she used to read Physiology of Love and books of that sort in their house on the lake. It was most likely that she had been over-excited by such reading and had merely 'fancied' the whole scene" (p 19).