When “Dora” Came to See Me for a Second Analysis

Abstract

In this essay, I imagine what Dora's second analysis would have been like had she come to see me many years after her first analysis with Freud. To contextualize Dora's “second” experience (aided by my knowledge of Freud's analysis and his ideas about the nature of Dora's problems), I picture what she would have presented to me and how my understanding of her selfobject transference would have guided me in listening to her subjective experience. Dora's manifold fears of rejection and the many ways in which these now reappeared in the transference guided the interpretive process. But the traumatic experience occasioned by the fact that Freud essentially dismissed her desperate efforts to gain acceptance for her version of what happened between her and Herr K at the lake seemed to have been put to rest. Having been listened to engaged Dora emotionally in this second analysis and appreciably eased her current difficulties.