TRANSFERENCE :

- HYMANMUSLIN,M.D.
IN THE MERTONGILL,M.D.
DORACASE *

I N HIS POSTSCRIPT TO THE DOFU Freud wrote that his

CASE,
failure to interpret the transference in time accounted for
her flight from analysis. He also made a specific suggestion as
to what transference interpretation he should have made, and
he discussed transference in general terms. Because the case is
so widely used for teaching purposes and because we believe
that it offers an excellent opportunity to review and
demonstrate some of the important issues about transference
analysis, we have made a retrospective study of the
transference manifestations in the case as a follow-up to our
previous paper on the early analysis of transference (Gill and
Muslin, 1976). Our thesis there was that transference and
resistances are always present and should be interpreted at all
stages of an analysis. We suggested that the failure to do so
could lead to an unmanageable transference or a premature
interruption of treatment, and gave the Dora case as an
example of the latter.
Any case is clearer in hindsight, and we do not imply that
Freud was not subsequently aware of some of the points we
plan to make. He wrote in 1923 with regard to this case
The work reported here was supported by National Institute of Mental Health
Research Grant MH-22749and by National Institute of Mental Health Research
Scientist Award K5-MH-19,436 to the second author.
Drs. Muslin and Gill are Professors of Psychiatry at the Abraham Lincoln
School of Medicine, University of Illinois.
312 HYMAN MUSLIN- MERTON GILL

(written up in 1901 and not published until 1905): “It is not to

be expected that after more than twenty years of uninter-
rupted work I should see nothing to alter in my view of such a
case and in my presentment of it; but it would obviously be
absurd to bring the case history ‘up-to-date’ by means of
emendations and additions” (p. 13).
That Freud was perfectly clear about how incomplete the
report was is obvious from the title, “Fragment of an Analysis
of a Case of Hysteria.” His principal goals were to present
some ideas about the etiology of hysteria and to exemplify
dream analysis, not to discuss analytic technique. The case
report is nonetheless far more complete than most of those in
our literature, and it lends itself to a number of conclusions
about the transference which seem to us quite probable.’
Although Freud’s failure to include something in his account
does not necessarily mean that he was not aware of it at the
time of writing, we believe that the centrality of the points we
make, if they are correct, is such that he would have been
explicit about them had he been aware of them.
If further justification for a restudy of the case is needed,
we find it in the fact that some consider that it remains . . . “a
model for students of psychoanalysis” (Jones, 1955, p. 257).
What an early milestone the case is in Freud’s technique may
be seen from his statement that transference ‘I. . . did not
come up for discussion during the short treatment” (1905, p.
l3), although we will point out an important instance in which
he actually did interpret the transference.
We have organized our discussion of transference analysis
in the case around three major propositions that should guide
the work of every analyst in every case:
1. Transference interpretation has priority over other
material and demands continuing attention, even though- the
temptation to give priority to extratransference interpretation
is ever present.
2. Effective transference interpretation includes demon-
strating to the patient the immediate stimulus in the inter-
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personal interaction of patient and analyst which the patient

has used to justify his transference elaboration.
3. The countertransference of the analyst is ever present,
and the analyst must be alert to how it may be,distorting his
recognition of the transference.

The Ubiquity of Transference and the Necessity

for Its Continuing Analysis
Whereas Freud’s discussion of transference interpretation in
the postscript shows a considerable advance over what he
described in the actual conduct of the case, it still falls short of
what his understanding of transference interpretation came to
be. The postscript contains significant evidence of the view of
transference as an obstacle to treatment rather than as the
central and strategic battleground it came to be in his later
writings on the subject (1917, p. 455).
Though it might be argued that Freud never quite
explicitly declared transference analysis to be the primary and
continuing focus of analytic work, that conclusion readily
follows from the juxtaposition of two important sentences in
his 1912 paper “The Dynamics of Transference”: “The
resistance accompanies the treatment ,step by step.” And
.“When anything in the complexive material (in the
subject-matter of the complex) is suitable for being trans-
ferred on to the figure of the doctor, that transference is
carried out; it produces the next association, and announces
itself by indications of a resistance” (p. 103).
From our vantage point 76 years later, the most striking
aspect of the Dora case from the transference point of view is
the low priority attached to the search for transference mean-
ing in a given segment of material. In the reported material,
Freud did not often include himself in the cast of characters to
which his patient was reacting. Associations to and about
another person-whether father, mother, or lover-were
seldom recognized, or at least written of, as implicitly
pertaining to him.
314 HYMAN MUSLIN-MERTON GILL

Freud essentially confined himself in his report to extra-

transference “material,” both contemporary and genetic. In
fact, he reveals that he had a special interest in sexual
material, “because I was anxious to subject my assumptions to
a rigorous test in this case’’ (p. 31).’ He came to recognize a
connection between this special interest and his neglect of the
transference: “Owing to the readiness with which Dora put
one part of the pathogenic material at my disposal during the
treatment, I neglected the precaution of looking out for the
first sign of transference . . .” (p. 118). Our suggestion is that
the “readiness with which Dora put one part of the pathogenic
material at my disposal” was in itself a manifestation of trans-
ference.
An interest in special kinds of material is likely to inter-
fere with the analyst’s unbiased attention to the patient’s
associations, and we find Freud writing: “I did not find it easy,
however, to direct the patient’s attention to her relations with
Herr K. ... The uppermost layer of all her associations during
the sessions, and everything of which she was easily conscious
and of which she remembered having been conscious the day
before, was always connected with her father” (p. 32).
Freud tells us that there was one respect in which her
reproach against her father was justified, namely, that in a
sense “she had been handed over to Herr K. as the price of his
tolerating the relations betweeen her father and his wife . .” .
(p. 34). He concluded that this reproach concealed a
self-reproach (p. 36), but what he missed was the transference
reproach concealed behind it. H e knew that Dora’s father had
given his support to the treatment for his own purposes (p.
log), and the fact that he had no intention of acting as the
father’s agent blinded him to the plausibility with which Dora
might have believed that he would.
Freud wrote in the postscript that “Transference is the
one thing the presence of which has to be detected almost

Subsequent quotations are from 1905, unless otherwise specified.

TRANSFERENCE IN DORA CASE 315

without assistance and with only the slightest clues to go upon

. . .,, (p. 116). But soon after (p. 118), he wrote that, at the
beginning, Dora was constantly comparing him with her
father, anxiously trying to make sure whether he was being
straightforward with her. It is clear, then, that Dora’s talk
about her father was the disguised transference material that
required interpretation, and there were not slight clues but
gross indications of the probable transference. Erikson (1962)
in his discussion of the Dora case has emphasized this aspect of
the transference.
Another set of associations with a closely related implicit
transference meaning is the material about the governess who
pretended an int.erest in Dora, but was in fact only interested
in her father (pp. 36-37). Again Freud interpreted correctly
that Dora’s reproach against the governess concealed a
reproach against herself, but what he missed was her im-
plied transference reproach against Freud that he pre-
tended to be interested in her but was really working for her
father.
An especially clear example of Freud’s failure to put
transference in the forefront of his technique with Dora is in
the last session, which began with the dramatic announcement
that she was there for the last time. Freud said she was free to
stop the treatment any time she wished, but t!lat “for to-day
we will go on with our work“ (p. 105). Even though it had be-
come crucial to give primary attention to the transference
meaning of Dora’s decision, the “work” that was of the greatest
moment to Freud was to continue to unravel the dynamics of
the neurosis.
Although these illustrations are of nodal points in the
case, we do not want them to obscure our contention that
transference interpretation should be the primary continuing
focus throughout the analytic work. What is striking about the
case material is not simply the major omitted transference
interpretations but the almost complete absence of any trans-
ference interpretations, despite the many indications of
316 HYMAN MUSLIN- MERTON GILL

implicit transference material in even this case report,

selectively biased toward extratransference material.
We shall give more examples of Freud’s failure to deal
with the transference in the other sections of this paper, but
turn now to additional evidences in the general discussion in
the postscript that Freud had some distance to go in his under-
standing of transference. Freud wrote: “When it is possible to
work transference into the analysis at an early stage, the
course of the analysis is retarded and obscured, but its
existence is better guaranteed against sudden and overwhelm-
ing resistances” (p. 119). The significance of the phrase
“retarded and obscured” can only be as compared with a
model analysis conceived as proceeding without resistance and
with memories regularly being recalled. One of the principal
points of our previous paper was that, even if the patient is
apparently associating freely and producing relevant material
about the dynamics of the neurosis, one should not conclude
that there may not at the same time be transference resistance
that requires interpretation. That Freud was not yet aware of
this may be seen in his saying that he was deaf to the warning
that Dora might leave the analysis because “no further stages
of transference developed and the material for the analysis
had not yet run dry” (p. 119). When Freud said, “She acted
out an essential part of her recollection and phantasies instead
of reproducing it in the treatment” (p. 119), he was
apparently referring to her flight from the analysis and did not
realize that her associations contained many allusions to her
recollections and fantasies in the transference that could have
been dealt with before the “sudden and overwhelming
resistance” which led to her flight.
Another indication of Freud’s failure to recognize the
ubiquity of transference in his theoretical generahations in
the case report is his statement that “A regularly formed
dream stands, as it were, upon two legs, one of which is in
contact with the main and current exciting cause, and the
other with some momentous event in the years of childhood”
TRANSFERENCE IN DORA CASE 317

(p. 71). Freud’s later understanding calls for adding a third

leg for a dream dreamed in analysis-the transference leg.
Even.though Freud wrote in the original report that the
“great defect, which led to its being broken off prematurely [is
that] I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good
time” (p. 118), in a footnote probably written just before pub-
lication four years later, he wrote that his principal technical
error was his failure to interpret Dora’s homosexuality, rather
than his failure to “master the transference” (p. 120). True
though it is that this insight foreshadows Freud’s later
recognition that he had underemphasized the role of the
mother in development at this point, it is also a retreat from
his emphasis on the transference. Had he been able to
combine the two, he would doubtless have seen Dora’s
transference attitudes were from her mother as well as her
father.
Despite the evidence that the major advance yet to come
in Freud’s understanding of transference was to see the
ubiquity of transference and the need to give it priority in
interpretation, he did say in the postscript: “. . . transference
cannot be evaded, since use is made of it in setting up all the
obstacles that make the material inaccessible to treatment,
and since it is only after the transference has been resolved
that a patient arrives at a sense of conviction of the validity of
the connections which have been constructed during the
analysis.” And “Transference, which seems ordained to be the
greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, becomes its most powerful
ally, if its presence can be detected each time and explained to
the patient” (pp. 116-117).

The Interpersonal Stimulus to Transference Elaboration

Because the analyst is a participant in an interpersonal inter-
action, transference manifestations are never simply projec-
tions onto a blank screen, but are more or less plausible
elaboratiqns by the patient of something the. analyst has said
318 HYMAN MUSLIN-MERTON GILL

or done, or, less obviously, left unsaid or undone. The closest

we have been able to find to an explicit statement by Freud of
this principle we have already quoted from “The Dynamics of
Transference” (1 912): “When anything in the complexive
material ... is suitable for being transferred on to the figure
of the doctor, that transference is carried out; it produces the
next association, and announces itself by indications of a resis-
tance . . .” (p, 103). We interpret “suitable for being
transferred on to the figure of the doctor” as meaning that the
here-and-now context of the interpersonal relationship
between analyst and patient is a more or less plausible point of
departure for the elaboration of the “complexive material.”
The principle is illustrated in Freud’s statement in the post-
script of the transference interpretation he says he should have
made to Dora. He wrote, with regard to the first dream, that
he should have asked her whether she
‘noticed anything that leads you to suspect me of evil in-.
tentions similar (whether openly or in’some sublimated
form) to Herr K.’s? Or have you been struck by anything
about me or got to know anything about me which has
caught your fancy, as happened previously with Herr K.?’
Her attention would then have been turned to some detail
in out relations, or in my personal circumstances, behind
which there lay concealed something analogous but im-
measurably more important concerning Herr K. . . . be-
cause of the unknown quantity in me which reminded
Dora of Herr K., she took her revenge on me as she
wanted to take her revenge on him, and deserted me as
she believed herself to have been deceived and deserted
by him. [1905,p. 118-1191.
What he actually did say after interpreting that Dora still felt
tempted to yield to Herr K. was that she feared that a similar
situation had arisen with Freud and she had therefore decided
to give up the treatment. However, he made no reference to
any “detail in our relations” which might have made her feel
TRANSFERENCE IN DORA CASE 319

that a similar situation had arisen, nor did he elaborate any

further on her wish to yield to him.
Perhaps this failure to relate the transference interpreta-
tion to the specifics of the immediate libidinal interaction
explains why Freud wrote that transference interpretation
played no part in the treatment, even though he did make this
crucial transference interpretation. That even this interpreta-
tion did not lead Dora to confess her plan to interrupt the
treatment testifies to the power of her decision to do so, and
seemingly without warning.
In fact, Freud did discover something in himself which
reminded Dora of Herr K. The day after first telling the first.
dream, Dora brought an addendum to the effect that the
time after waking up she had smelled smoke. He interpreted
that the smoke showed “that the dream had a special relation
to myself; for when she used to assert that there was nothing
concealed behind this or that, I would often say by way of
rejoinder: ‘There can be no smoke without fire!’ ” (p. 73). But
Dora was able to put him off from “such a purely personal
interpretation [I], saying that Herr K. and her father were
passionate smokers-as I am too, for the matter of that” (p.
73). Though he did not continue with his transference inter-
pretations, he tells us, the readers, what he might have told
Dora: “I came to the conclusion that the idea had probably
occurred to her one day during the session that she would like
to have a kiss from me. This would have been the exciting
cause which led her to repeat the warning dream and to form
her intention of stopping the treatment” (p. 74). Freud was
in a position to use the “detail” of the smoke to make an in-
ference that Dora wanted a kiss from him as part of a plausible
transference interpretation that she was apprehensive of
yielding to the same temptation with Freud that she was
frightened of in relation to Herr K.
Freud concludes his account to the reader thus: “Every-
thing fits together very satisfactorily upon this view: but owing
to the characteristics of ‘transference’ its validity is not suscep-
320 HYMAN MUSLIN -MERTON GILL

tible of definite proof” (p. 74). This is similar to the statement

we quoted earlier from Freud with which we disagreed, that
transference “has to be detected almost without assistance and
with only the slightest clues to go upon” (p. 116). The test of
the validity of a transference interpretation lies in the patient’s
response to the interpretation. If the interpretation has not
been made, one cannot be sure of its validity.
But, in addition to the way in which Freud’s interest in
Dora’s sexuality could have been plausibly construed by her as
a sexual interest in her, the case material offers other evidence
of the way in which the first dream probably alluded to an
interpersonal action between Freud and Dora. In an hour
shortly before the one in which she told the dream, Freud had
interpreted Dora’s play with a reticule as symbolizing mastur-
bation. One of the wishes he interpreted in the dream was that
Dora wanted to give Herr K. a “return present” of her
“jewel-case” (p. 69). Our suggestion is that a transference
meaning of the dream is that Dora interpreted Freud’s
“prying” into her reticule as a sexual interest in her and that
she also wished to offer Freud her “jewel-case,” i.e., her
genitals.
Yet another piece of evidence for the likelihood of our
speculation about Dora’s transference wish and its appearance
in the dream material is that Dora began the very session in
which she told the dream with a symptomatic act of hurriedly
concealing a letter she was reading when Freud came to get
her from the waiting room. The letter turned out to be a
matter of complete indifference, Freud says, and he con-
cluded, though he apparently did not interpret, that Dora
“only wanted to play ‘secrets’ with me, and to hint that she was
on the point of allowing her secret to be torn from her by the
doctor” (p. 78).
We turn now to the second dream to look for possible
evidences of the transference and, in each suggestion, whether
Freud’s or ours, look for its anchorage in the analytic situa-
tion. In the postscript Freud proposed “several clear allusions
TRANSFERENCE IN DORA CASE 321

to the transference” in the second dream. In the dream, she

was told it would take two hours to get to a station, and when
she told the dream there were-though Freud did not know
it-two hours left to the treatment. He related a situation of
frustrated striving and waiting in the dream to someone
waiting and striving for a marriage partner, and, in the trans-
ference, to her having said a few days before that the treat-
ment was too long. He did not make the connection, which we
will elaborate on later, that she was becoming impatient for
him to declare his love for her. We add that this might be
related to the dream content of first being told many times
that a station was only five minutes away, and then that it was
two and a half hours (later changed to two hours) away. Dora’s
associations were to her having said exasperatedly to her
mother that she had asked her for a key one hundred times
when in fact she had asked her about five times. The trans-
ference meaning may be her exasperation and impatience
with Freud or, alternatively, her identification with what she
considered to be such feelings on his part. Freud related the
refusal to be accompanied in the dream to her taking revenge
against men, demonstrated in the transference by breaking off
the treatment and thus showing his helplessness and
incapacity as a physician.
He does not say that he made any of these interpretations.
We have already pointed out that when she announced she
was there for the last time, he asked her when she had decided
that. When she said two weeks before, he commented that
that sounded like the warning a governess would give. That
led her to tell the story of the governess whom Herr K. had
seduced and abandoned, and there is no mention of any
further discussion of the transference in the hour, except for a
repetition of the interpretation that she was giving him notice
like a governess in connection with the question of why she had
waited two weeks before telling her parents about Herr K.’s
proposal at. the lake.
Freud reports that at the time the second dream occurred
322 HYMAN MUSLIN -MERTON GILL

Dora was raising a number of questions, including why she

said nothing about the scene by the lake for some days after it
happened and why she then suddenly told her parents about
it. Freud interpreted her telling her parents as an act of
revenge, and we speculate that a transference meaning of this
line of associations and its connection to the analytic situation
was the impending sudden announcement to Freud as an act
of revenge.
In the dream, Dora had left home without her parents’
knowledge. This could mean, in the transference, her plan to
leave treatment without “permission” and her prior decision to
do so without Freud’s knowledge. Another likely transference
meaning of Dora’s questions in the dream is that Dora was
identifying herself with Freud, whose many questions could
have been plausibly interpreted by her as his frustrated striv-
ing and waiting to attain his goal.
Freud interpreted part of the dream as a fantasy of
defloration with a kind of detail that Dora could have learned
only from a medical book or an encyclopedia. He tells us that.
the impression made upon her by the interpretation “must
have been forcible [I]” (p. loo), since it led to a piece of the
dream that had been forgotten. It was that she went calmly to
her room and began reading a big book that lay on her writing
table. Freud interpreted to Dora that the calm reading in fact
referred to agitated reading about sex in an encyclopedia. We
may infer that the discussion of sex in the analysis had the
transference significance of a defloration and that the de-
floration interpretation was itself elaborated into a trans-
ference fantasy of Freud-the purveyor of medical informa-
tion -forcing his way into her.
Of course we recognize the speculative element in our
suggestions and that, with ingenuity, anyone could make
many more. Their validity can never be established because
the interpretations were not made. Our point is to show the
wealth of plausible speculations about the transference to
which the material lends itself and how these are all, from
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Dora’s point of view, plausible responses to things Freud had

said or done or failed to say or do.

do unt ert ransferen ce

A major obstacle both to alertness to the transference and to

correct transference interpretation is countertransference.
While one is inevitably hesitant in discussing Freud’s
countertransference, the material seems to provide persuasive
evidence that it played a role in his blindness to important
aspects of the transference.
Early in the case report, when Freud describes how the
reader may be astonished and horrified at his discussing
fellatio with an inexperienced girl, or, for that matter, with
any woman patient, there is no statement on Freud’s part that,
even though one is “dry and direct,” the discussion may very
well be taken by the patient to indicate the analyst’s sexual
interest. The same consideration holds true for many of
Freud’s interpretations -for example, his suggestion that
Dora’s play with the reticule represented masturbation. Of
course, at that stage of the development of analysis, Freud had
first to demonstrate that one can discuss sexual matters
without being prurient. Only later could he recognize how
such discussions could become plausible stimuli to trans-
ference elaboration.
But over and above this issue, there is evidence of Freud’s
personal blindness to the implicit libidinal interplay between
himself and Dora. After Freud tells us about how Herr K.
suddenly embraced and kissed the fourteen-year-old Dora,
probably with her feeling his erect penis through his trousers,
he comments that “This was surely just the situation to call up
a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who
had never before been approached” (p. 28).
Despite our recognition that what Freud was emphasizing
was the hysterical nature of this response in Dora, we must
agree with Erikson who wrote: “I wonder how many of us can
324 HYMAN MUSLIN -MERTON GILL

follow today without protest Freud’s assertion that a healthy

girl of fourteen would, under such circumstances, have
considered Mr. K.’s advances ‘neither tactless nor offensive’
(1962, p. 456). We suggest that Freud’s expectation of the
sexual response of a mature woman in what he himself calls
“this child of fourteen” indirectly reveals his libidinal involve-
ment. Marcus (1974) makes a similar suggestion, based both
on this point and on the rapidity and blandness with which
Freud made sexual interpretations. Freud’s suggestion that
Dora could have accepted the “not impracticable” solution of
the K.’s being divorced, her father continuing with Frau K . ,
and Dora marrying Herr K. seems unlikely to Marcus, as it
does to us.
Probably the clearest evidence for this countertrans-
ference was Freud’s failure to interpret that, when Dora said
she was ending the treatment, there seemed a clear indication
that she wanted him to try to get her to stay. Her associations
immediately following Freud’s statement that her decision two
weeks before to end the treatment sounded to him like the
notice given by a governess, were about the governess who,
though abandoned by Herr K., waited for him to renew his
advances.
Freud did interpret to Dora that she had identified with
the governess in her wish for Herr K. to repeat his proposals to
her, which she had spurned. She corroborated his inter-
pretation to the extent of agreeing that she continued to long
for him (p. 107). The wish for Freud to make an advance, to
make clear that he was in earnest and would not abandon her,
may have been clear to Freud, though he does not write that
he realized this transference wish was implicitly expressed in
Dora’s associations about Herr K. However, he tells us, the
readers, that he might have kept her in treatment if he had
acted a part and given her a substitute for the affection she
longed for (p. 109).
But what was called for was not such play-acting but an
interpretation of the transference wish. Whether or not Dora
would have stayed had he made the interpretatioii, one cannot
TRANSFERENCE IN DORA CASE 325

tell, but it must also be remembered that these transference

wishes had gone unrecognized and uninterpreted throughout
the course of the analysis. Such a libidinal involvement might
account for Freud’s unwillingness to risk another rejection, a
speculation we base on his having written that if Herr K. had
indeed pursued her she might have returned his affection, but
“she might just as well have been merely provoked into satis-
fying her craving for revenge upon him all the more thor-
oughly” (p. 110). Of course such an interpretation, similar to
the earlier interpretation we suggested of her wish for a kiss
from Freud, would in all likelihood have been considered
seductive by her, but transference interpretations have trans-
ference repercussions, which must in their turn be interpreted.
Freud and most subsequent commentators see Dora’s act
of departure as one of revenge and hostility and overlook its
libidinal aspects and his failure to recognize and interpret
them.
Further persuasive evidence of a libidinal countertrans-
ference lies in the subsequent meeting between Freud and
Dora. Dora came to see Freud fifteen months after the treat-
ment was over. He says that she came to ask for help, but “One
glance at her face, however, was enough to tell me that she
was not in earnest over her request” (pp. 120-121). How he
possibly could have told this from one glance at her face
remains a mystery, and, indeed, the evidence he subsequently
gives to indicate that she was not in earnest is unconvincing.
She said that she had come for help with her right-sided
facial neuralgia, and when he asked how long it had been
going on, she said, two weeks. Freud said that he couldn’t help
smiling, and he was able to show her that two weeks before she
had read some news about him in the newspaper. Strachey
tells us that this was no doubt news of Freud’s appointment to
a professorship (p. 122n).
But how do we know what this news meant to her? Even
though Freud says he did not know what she wanted, he offers
the explanation that her facial neuralgia was a self-punish:
ment, remorse for having given Herr K. a box on the ear and
326 HYMAN MUSLIN- MERTON GILL

at having transferred her feelings of revenge to him. Despite

the fact that Dora had come on her own, rather than, as at
first, at her father’s bidding, Freud says nothing about the
possiblity of her positive attachment to him nor does he recog-
nize any genuine desire for help. It may be that his counter-
transference led him to reject the implicit wish in her seeking
him out-i.e. , to renew their relationship. In any event, Freud
apparently terminated the interview quickly and never saw her
again.
Marcus (1974) makes the interesting suggestion that a
clue to the fact that Freud had not resolved his feelings about
Dora lies in the very haste with which he wrote up the case,
and that the writing itself was his mode of resolution.
In the most general sense, one can say that Freud’s goal
was to understand Dora psychodynamically and that he lost
sight of Dora’s goals. When, for example, he expressed his
satisfaction at what had been accomplished in the interpre-
tation of the second dream, Dora said “Why, has anything so
very remarkable come out?” (p. 105).
Freud was optimistic about the result he had achieved
in this fragmentary treatment. Unfortunately, we have
evidence to the contrary. The report by Felix Deutsch (1957)
of the visit to him of a woman whom he recognized as Dora
makes clear that her neurosis continued to plague her for the
rest of her life.
Our considerations in this paper do not rest on whether
the specific transference suggestions we have made are
correct. Others have stressed other possible interpretations.
Marcus (1974), for example, regards Freud’s countertrans-
ference as largely negative. He quotes Freud’s remark about
“her really remarkable achievements in the direction of intol-
erable behaviour” (1905, p. 75), and considers that Freud was
angry because Dora would not surrender herself to him.
Others (K.Lewin, 1975; Moscovitz, 1973) have emphasized
Dora’s masculine identification, as Freud did in his retro-
spective note, and presumably someone who approaches the
TRANSFERENCE IN DORA CASE 327

case from that point of view would find potential transference

interpretations different from ours. We would emphasize that
any such attempt should be based.on finding the specific data
in the material or in the relationship between Dora and Freud
that justify such suggested interpretations, as we have
attempted to do. Furthermore, neither we nor anyone else can
be sure that speculations about the transference are correct
because the true test of the validity of an interpretation lies in
the patient’s response to it. If it was not made, as we said
earlier; we cannot know the patient’s response.
In his discussion of the Dora case, Langs (1976)
emphasizes the importance of attention to the real interaction
of patient and analyst. There is, however, a major difference
in perspective between our two studies. He focuses on how
deviations from an ideally neutral framework for analysis lead
to disruptions of the therapeutic alliance, while we focus on
the importance of interpreting the patient’s inevitable trans-
ference elaborations of the actual reality situation. He focuses
on the meanings to Dora of what he considers Freud’s errors of
commission- like Freud’s prior connection with Dora’s
father-while we focus on Freud’s failure to recognize and
analyze the transference meanings in the material of the
analysis, including his interactions with her. In other words,
we argue that it is the failure to interpret the repercussions on
transference of deviations from an ideally neutral framework
that interfere with the therapeutic alliance, not the deviations
as such. We realize that some deviations can be unanalyzable,
but we do not believe that was the case with Dora.
If errors and the distinction between real and trans-
ference are emphasized, the unwary may conclude that it is
possible to conduct an “error”-free analysis and thus obviate
the need to continually search for how the analyst is being per-
ceived as a participant in an interaction.* It is primarily to
* In other writings (e.g., 1973) Langs makes clear that the analyst must search
for the transference meanings to the patient of even perfectly “correct” behavior
-the intimacy, for example, of the analytic situation as such.
328 HYMAN MUSLIN- MERTON GILL

demonstrate this need, as well as to argue the ubiquity of

transference and the need to give it primacy in interpretation,
that we have made this retrospective study of Dora. Our
discussion of Freud’s possible countertransference is in the ser-
vice of this primary aim.3

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-(1976), The misalliance dimension in Freud’s case histories: I. The case of
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The Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine

Department of Psychiatry
P.O. Box 6998
Chicago, Illinois 60680

* After we had completed this paper, Glenn’s paper, “Freud’s Adolescent

Patients: Katherina, Dora, and ‘the homosexual woman”’ (1978) came to our
attention. Glenn makes several of the same points about Dora and her treatment’
that we do. His central focus is on how the analysis exemplifies problems in the
treatment of adolescents, whereas OUK is on general principles of the analysis of the
transference. T h e two papers are complementary.
“Dora” and Otto Bauer circa 1892