What Ida taught Freud about psychoanalysis
15 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the eleventh in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
The real name of the young woman whom Freud would make famous as Dora was Ida Bauer. Ida was born in Vienna in 1882 to Philip Bauer, a rich textile industrialist, and his wife Katherina or Käthe (née Gerber). In 1898, when Ida was sixteen, she developed a nervous cough, and Philip brought her to see Freud, who recommended a course of “psychological treatment” (p.52; page references are to the Penguin edition). The nervous cough subsided spontaneously, however, and Freud did not begin treating Ida until two years later, when she was eighteen, by which time she had become suicidal. Philip’s words to Freud, on “handing her over” (p.49) to Freud for psychoanalytic treatment, speak volumes: “Please try and bring her to reason” (p.57).
The case history is famous, among other things, for its apparent failure; Ida abruptly terminated the treatment in her third session, barely three months after starting. “You know that you are free to stop the treatment at any time,” Freud calmly replies, after Ida tells him that this is her last session with him (p.146), but gamely continues the analysis for one more hour. His case study is, therefore, “only a fragment of an analysis,” as he readily admits (p.40).
It is, nevertheless, immensely instructive. In fact, it is instructive precisely because it is a failure. As so often with Freud, it is his willingness to learn from his failure — and to exhibit that failure for all to see — that constitutes his true genius. This is the point that Lacan emphasised in his reading of Dora in “Presentation on transference” (Écrits, pp.215–226; page references are to the French edition).
In effect, Ida teaches Freud something fundamental about psychoanalysis, something that Freud could perhaps not have learned in any other way. She teaches him, that is, about the importance of free speech, and in particular about the way that the analyst can inadvertently hinder the free speech that he is supposed to be facilitating.
This hindrance can be summed up in the term countertransference, which Lacan defines as “the sum total of the analyst’s biases, passions, and difficulties, or even of his inadequate information, at any given moment in the dialectical process [of the treatment]” (Écrits, p.225). In Ida’s case, Freud’s countertransference consists in “putting himself rather too much in Herr K’s shoes” (Écrits, p.224) — that is, in identifying with the man who had “had the audacity to make her [Ida] a proposal” while the two of them were on a walk together by the side of a lake (p.56). We now know that the real name of Herr K was Hans Zellenka — Freud having chosen, as a pseudonym, the letter that is pronounced in German the same way as the last syllable of his real surname.
“Due to his countertransference,” Lacan comments, “Freud harps too often on the love Herr K supposedly inspired in Dora” (Écrits, p.224). By failing to notice his identification with Herr K, Freud triggers a reaction in Ida similar to that which Herr K had triggered with his indecent proposal by the lake: she slaps him in the face and hurries away (p.138). The identification with Herr K is already evident in Freud’s blatantly sexist assumption that Ida should have reacted to an earlier incident of sexual harassment — when, at the tender age of fourteen, she had been forcibly kissed on the lips by the lecherous Herr K — by getting sexually excited (p.59). Most of us today would see Ida’s response to this unwanted advance — her “violent feeling of disgust” — as perfectly normal, but Freud sees it as “entirely and completely hysterical” (p.59). Indeed, Freud states that such a reaction is by itself sufficient to warrant a diagnosis of hysteria; “I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable: and I should do so whether or no the person were capable of producing somatic symptoms” (p.59).
If, by contrast, Freud had recognised his identification with Herr K, and spotted that this was the cause of Ida’s transference — that is, of her treating Freud as if he were just another lecherous old man like Herr K — he might have pointed this out to Ida. She would, no doubt, have rejected such an interpretation, but this would not have prevented the interpretation from having a salutary effect; “the very opposition to which it would have given rise would probably, despite Freud, have set Dora off in the right direction: the one that would have led her to the object of her real interest” (Écrits, p.225) — that is to say, to her homosexual love for Frau K (whose real name we now know was Peppina, née Heumann).
Freud did eventually learn the lesson Ida taught him, but it was not until two decades later, in the footnotes dated 1923, that he would make it public. And it is here that the true value of Dora lies — not in the sexist prejudices of a stuffy nineteenth century doctor, but in his willingness to display this blindness for all to see, and so provide his readers with the means to go beyond, not just his own biases, but their own too.
