One of the most significant legacies Sigmund Freud left behind was the method he devised for interpreting the meaning of people’s lives. Freud developed a psychoanalytic mode of investigation and interpretation that relies on decoding hidden and disguised meanings. Interpretation from Freud’s standpoint is always a matter of going beneath the surface, beyond the obvious, to explore a mysterious area of private imagery, symbol, and myth. Within the psychoanalytic tradition there is a motto that says: Don’t trust what you see; the surface is deceptive; the real truth lies between the lines and beyond the obvious.
The case of Dora examines the realm of mysterious and private life. During the year of 1900 Sigmund Freud offered therapy to a girl of eighteen, who he called Dora in a short story he wrote after his sessions ended with her. The rest of this paper will focus on the accounts from Freud himself and Dora, Freud’s patient.
Dora was a girl of attractiveness, intelligence and was economically well off, even with all of these qualities Dora was rarely happy with her life. She suffered from several symptoms that Freud termed hysteria. Her symptoms included: difficulties breathing, recurrent headaches, fainting and violent attacks of coughing. The symptoms did not seem to have any physical cause.
Freud uncovered the following story that shaped the underlying reasons for her hysteria. Dora had unwittingly become part of a web of deceit and infidelity that involved her parents and their friends – Herr and Frau K. It’s seems that Dora’s father had been carrying on an affair with Frau K. Freud accounts that there was good reason that Herr K knew of the affair and in exchange for his wife considered his friends daughter (Dora).
The Essay on Sigmund Freud Years Of Life
Known as the "father of psychology," Freud developed many of the first theories of modern physiology. His ideas and concepts will continue to be studied through the years. He put forth many new concepts about sexuality, consciousness, unconsciousness and instincts. He spent his whole life devoted to discovering the secrets of the human nature. Personally I think this guy was weird. Sigmund Freud ...
Dora’s father tacitly “handed over” her for his tolerating the relationship between his wife, and himself. Herr K frequently sent Dora gifts and took long walks with her. During the time Dora’s mother upset with her marriage and frustrated at her daughter spent most of her day cleaning the house and trying to avoid the situation. All four of the adults attempted without success to conceal the truth about their tangled and pathetic lives. Dora believed the underlying reason her father sent her to therapy was so that
Freud could convince her that nothing was going on between the families.
During the sessions with Freud, Dora revealed to startling incidents from her past in which Herr K made sexual advances toward her. Two years prior, as Herr K and Dora walked back to a vacation house from a visit to the lake, Herr K had proposed his love to her and intimated that Dora make love to him. Dora responded by slapping him in the face. Frightened by the event Dora told her mother, who told her father who asked Herr K about the night. Herr K denied it ever taking place and insisted that she was lying because she loved him and wanted such a thing to happen. In the end Dora’s father took Herr K’s word over his own daughters. Two years prior to this incident while in Herr K’s place of business he embraced Dora and kissed her. She described a “violent feeling of disgust,” broke free and ran into the street. Though she never mentioned the first event, until in therapy, she continued to befriend Herr K until the lake incident two years later.
Freud believed that these two events were the basis for Dora’s hysterical symptoms. (Neurotic symptoms are symbolic manifestations of unconscious fears, desires, conflicts, and mysteries.) Trying to connect the two events Freud used free association that is letting a patient’s mind wander in response to a stimulus and reporting all thoughts aloud to the therapist as they occur. From the free association Freud arrived at a tentative and partial explanation for some of Dora’s symptoms. Herr K was handsome and Dora had obviously been attracted to him, Freud reasoned that the disgust Dora felt in response to Herr K’s first kiss disguised her sexual interest. Her disgust took the place of excitement by the neurotic process of reversal affect. The reversal affect is when a pleasurable emotion is replaced by an unpleasurable one that is less threatening. Furthermore displacement transferred the positive sensation from the lower region of the body to the upper region, Dora’s throat and thorax. Freud believed that Dora had felt more than just Herr K’s embrace.
The Essay on My Dream House 2
Every person has its own dream place where he/she would like to live. Somebody wants to live in a small house while somebody’s willing to live in a huge villa, somebody wants to live somewhere in the forest without people living nearby while others would like to live in a crowded city, somebody wants to live in a desert while others want to live somewhere in tropics. All people are different and ...
Freud believed that the first erogenous zone is the mouth. For Dora, the mouth retained an extraordinary sensual significance, as she grew older. Freud believed that Dora had experienced excessive oral stimulation in childhood, through sucking her thumb. Based on Dora’s associations, Freud speculated that she unconsciously fantasized relations between her father and Frau K in oral terms. Combined with other images and experiences centered on orality, her symptom of hysteria developed: a persistent cough. A short time after Dora “tacitly accepted” Freud’s interpretation the cough disappeared.
During the course of therapy, Dora reported to Freud that she had a recurring dream. Freud saw this as one of the “royal roads to the unconscious,” and devoted a great deal of time to interpreting it. The dream: Dora’s house was on fire, she woke up and dressed herself quickly, her mother wanted to stop and save her jewel case but her father said no they rushed from the house just in time, Dora’s father had saved her. The dream had started just after Herr K’s proposition, and once again it had returned. To make sense of the dream Freud once again asked Dora to use free association. Her first account was about a dispute between her parents about locking her brother’s bedroom door at night.
Dora’s mother wanted it locked but her father was afraid something like a fire would cause them to need to get out of the room quickly. Dora precisely remembers that two years ago her father had feared a fire at a small house on a lake they were staying at. Dora remembers napping on the bed of that house and waking up to see Herr K standing at the end of the bed. She decided to start locking the door for fear of Herr K, but he stole the key from her. From that point on she began to dress quickly in her room. On some level, the dream brings a resolution to Dora’s problem with Herr K. In the dream, her father saved her from the fire in doing so her father saved her from the “fiery” sexual advances of Herr K.
The Essay on Every Father’s Dream
Parents play an important role in the fulfillment of their children’s dreams. Often, before a child can even start to dream, parents have already made a mental picture of what they want their children to be in the future. In Barack Obama’s (2004) “Dreams from My Father,” we see the important role a father plays in the success of the incumbent president. On the contrary, in Arthur Miller’s (1949) “ ...
The significance of the jewel case in the dream is one of sexuality. In German jewel case is a slang word for a virgin girl’s genitals. The dream concerns Herr K’s attempt to make Dora’s jewel case his own, meaning to have sexual intercourse with her. Even though her father saved her in the dream Freud believes he represented the object of Dora’s or romantic and sexual longings. These feelings thus are in accord with a young woman’s Oedipus complex, and she feels she would be a better wife to either of them than their current wives are now.
More extensive interpretations of the dream revealed a number of highly peculiar meanings that link the dream content to Dora’s neurotic symptoms. Freud reminded Dora of an old folk belief that people who play with matches wet the bed. Thus her father saying that something might happen in the night so that someone would have to leave the room suggests bedwetting could be a reason. This was the case when Dora was between the ages of 7 and 8, so severe that her parents had to take her to the doctor. The bedwetting subsided with the onset of her first neurotic symptom: difficulties in breathing, nervous asthma. Freud believed that bedwetting is closely associated with masturbation. Although Freud could never get a clear confession, he is convinced this spurred the neurotic symptoms.
Based on these circumstances, Freud surmised that Dora masturbated frequently as a child and that she experienced a great deal of guilt about both behaviors. She came to see both of them as dirty actions associated with sexuality. All sexuality acquired a dirty connotation after Dora learned, at and early age, that her father had contracted a venereal disease by leading a loose life before his marriage. In some form Dora believed that her father passed on his disease to her. Many of her symptoms affirm her unconscious convictions that she is her father’s daughter, she, like him, is sick and dirty and this is because of sex. This is where her manifestation of her neurotic symptoms stim from. Her difficulty in breathing, Freud believed where from her father, who on occasion was short of breath. Thus her symptoms prove she is her father’s daughter and that she is like him, sick and dirty. Most of her symptoms occurred when her father was away on trips leading Freud to believe she was trying to makeup for lost love she felt for her father.
The Essay on Father Laforgue World Dreams Algonquin
Response to "Black Robe" The world views of the French Catholics and the Algonquin Indians differed greatly in this film. Father LaForgue's world view was centered on Jesus Christ. In Father LaForgue's eyes, he was put on this earth to serve Jesus and everything he did was for him. He believed that after life on earth, everybody goes to heaven, which he referred to as "paradise." Being a good ...
But this is where the story of Dora ends and the chapter of her illnesses closes. At this point Dora stopped therapy and choose not to return. Freud viewed Dora as a great success and failure. On one hand, he had not found her a clear resolution for her problems; on the other he had gained helpful insight that would lay down the basis to help others in the future.
