ud told her that her pain was a self-punishment for a "double crime": the long-ago slap at Herr K when he had made advances toward her, and her revenge on Freud by terminating the treatment before it was completed. Freud never saw her again after that but in 1905, he published "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," better known as the case of Dora. Dora was not actually a hysterical patient. She was simply a young woman in shock due to her father’s affair, her constant fighting with her mother and brother, and the fact that a married man (who was also a friend of the family) was hitting on her and no one really believed it. Freud could have said to her "You are right, and they are wrong," but instead, he chose to manipulate Dora’s mind and make her believe that the whole scene was a result of her childhood sexual insecurities. Freud related neurosis and hysteria in women to marriage and sexual frustration in most cases. His explanation is vague and it seems as though he just tries to make it applicable to the entire gender in any situation. Under the cultural conditions of today, marriage has long ceased to be a panacea for the nervous troubles of women; and if we doctors still advise marriage in such cases, we are nevertheless aware that, on the contrary a girl must be very healthy if she is able to tolerate it….On the contrary, the cure for nervous illness arising form marriage, would be marital unfaithfulness. But the more strictly a woman has been brought up and the more sternly she has submitted to the demands of civilization, the more she is afraid of taking this way out; and in the conflict between her desires and her sense of duty, she once more seeks refuge in neurosis. -Freud, 1976a, p.195 Evidence shows that men and women in extreme cases have the same degree of neurosis and hysteria as a result of marriage and sexual frustration. The symptoms are the same regardless of gender. Freud was extremely ...
