Ida Bauer (patient)

Ida Bauer ("Dora") and her brother Otto as children

Ida Bauer (born November 1, 1882 in Vienna , † December 21, 1945 in Manhattan , New York ) was the sister of the Austrian politician Otto Bauer . It became known as the "Dora case" in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis .

Life

Ida Bauer was the daughter of the textile industrialist Philipp Bauer (1853–1913), an ailing bon vivant , and his wife “Käthe” ​​Katharina Bauer, née Gerber (1862–1912). From the age of eight, Ida suffered from migraines and nervous coughs. The migraines disappeared at the age of 16, instead of which an aphonia appeared. At the age of 16, Ida Bauer was first introduced to Freud, who had already treated her father. However, no treatment was given because the symptoms improved quickly. It was not until she was 18, after a “word of power” from her father - according to Freud - that Freud began therapy. This was preceded by upsets, but especially a letter to the parents with threats of suicide and unconsciousness after arguments with the father. The analysis lasted only three months, after which Ida broke off the therapy, but - as Freud describes in the epilogue - presented again to Freud a year and a quarter later. Freud's therapy, begun in 1900, showed only limited success, but the "Dora case" gave him the opportunity to develop his theoretical concept of transference .

In 1904 Ida Bauer married the entrepreneur and composer Ernst Adler (1873–1932). Their son Kurt Herbert Adler emerged as conductor, bandmaster and opera director of the San Francisco Opera Company . In 1939, following her son, Ida Bauer escaped via France to New York, where she died of cancer in 1945.

The Dora case

Freud's description of the "Dora" case is divided into five parts, a foreword (study edition, vol. VI pp. 87-93), the description of the state of the disease (study edition, vol. VI, pp. 94-135), the first dream and its interpretation ( Study edition vol. VI pp. 136–161) and the second dream and its interpretation (study edition vol. VI pp. 162-176) as well as an afterword (study edition vol. VI pp. 177–186).

In the foreword, Freud deals with the doctor's duty of confidentiality, especially in view of the intimacy of the content of the conversation, especially regarding the patient's sexuality and fantasies, and justifies its publication with the assurance that he has done everything to avoid identification. In fact, Freud had already written the paper in 1901, but published it only in 1905 for reasons of confidentiality. It was only after a change in Ida Bauer's life, presumably her marriage and the associated name change, that Freud had the work published. Freud describes his approach, and we learn that Freud relied largely on memory protocols because he would find taking notes during the lesson disturbing. The original title "Dream and Hysteria" shows that Freud wanted to show her intervention in the analysis after the "Interpretation of Dreams" (published 1900). Ultimately, the aim is to complete the incoherence of the life reports, which Freud saw as an essential criterion of hysteria, by adding unconscious content. Freud emphasizes the importance of dream interpretation in this context as "... an indispensable precondition for understanding the psychological processes of hysteria and the other psychoneuroses ..." (study edition vol. VI p. 90). Freud further reports that he has fundamentally changed his technique since the publication of the “Studies on Hysteria” ( Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud 1895). He had replaced it with the free association of the patients' ideas in order to extract unconscious material from them that could make the symptoms understandable. Incomplete, according to Freud, is the technique of interpreting Ida's individual ideas, except for the interpretation of dreams. This would have required describing the progress of the analysis, to this extent Freud's presentation remains fragmentary, not only because Ida broke off the analysis.

In the chapter on Ida's state of illness, Freud first points out the incompleteness of the life and illness report of the hysterical, which Freud describes as the “theoretically required correlate” (study edition, vol. VI, p. 96) of the symptoms. The aim of the treatment is to come to an understandable, complete story. So one can say that for Freud the reconstruction of the life story is an important goal of the analysis. Freud assigns the patient's family and social environment, as well as the somatic facts, an essential value for the understanding of the symptoms. In terms of family relationships, Freud first describes the father as a wealthy, but very sick man for a long time. When Ida was six years old, he had suffered from tuberculosis , and when Ida was ten years old, he suffered from a detachment of the retina , which two years later was followed by paralysis, confusion and psychological problems that led him to therapy with Freud. He diagnosed syphilis . Freud describes his character as gifted, active, he is a "framework" for Ida's life. Elsewhere, however, Freud describes him as not being completely honest, probably also a point that could have been very important for Ida. The father was between 45 and 50 years old when he brought Ida for Freud's treatment. Freud describes Ida's relationship with her father as tender, which was heightened by the father's illnesses.

Ida Bauer essentially told Freud two dreams.

First dream: “There's a fire in a house, says Dora, my father is standing in front of my bed and waking me up. I dress quickly. Mama still wants to save her jewelry box, but Papa says: I don't want me and my children to burn because of your jewelry box. We rush down and as soon as I'm outside, I wake up. ”(From Freud: Fragments of a Hysteria Analysis, Study Edition Vol. VI, p. 136)

In the second, considerably longer dream, the sleeper wanders through an unknown city. But then she goes into the house in which she lives and finds a letter from her mother in her room. She writes that since the daughter left the parents' house without their knowledge, she did not tell her about the father's illness. Now he is dead and if the daughter wants, she can come. The dreaming makes her way to the train station and asks about a hundred times where it is. She always receives the answer that he is five minutes away. Then the dreaming enters a dense forest and asks a man. He replies that the train station is about two and a half hours away. He offers to accompany the dreaming, but she refuses. She sees the station building in front of her, but feels paralyzed and cannot get there. Finally, the dreaming is found in her father's house, the chambermaid opens the door and says that everyone is already at the funeral.

Freud interpreted these dreams on the basis of the complicated family situation in the Bauer household.

Ida Bauer regularly supervised the children of a family K. (real name cellska), whose mother (Peppina cellska) had a long-term relationship with the lung sick Philipp Bauer in Merano. On the other hand, according to Ida's report, Mr. K. (Hans cellska) himself repeatedly sexually harassed her, for the first time when she was only 14 years old.

Freud ultimately interpreted the dreams as an expression of Ida's suppressed sexual desires towards her own father, Mr. K. and Mrs. K. - an interpretation that has attracted much criticism in recent times.

Ida Bauer discontinued the therapy she had started in 1900 after only 11 weeks, which was very disappointing for Freud. After some time, however, she visited Freud and reported that most of her symptoms had subsided after confronting her father, his lover and their husband about their experiences and admitting everything. However, the psychoanalyst Felix Deutsch , whom Ida's family doctor called for help in 1923, is said to have again found almost paranoid behavior and general hatred of men in the patient .

In later years Peppina Nahrungsmittelka became Ida's preferred bridge partner .

Literary processing

In 2018 the novel Ida was published , in which Ida Bauer's great-granddaughter, Katharina Adler , retells the story of Ida Bauer as a fictional work with a researched historical background.

literature

• Sigmund Freud: Fragment of a Hysteria Analysis (1905) with an afterword by Stavros Mentzos. Fischer paperback, 2nd edition 2007.
• Charles Bernheimer, Claire Kahane: In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism . Second Edition, Columbia University Press, 1990.
• Hannah S. Decker: Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 . The Free Press, 1991.
• Robin Tolmach Lakoff, James C. Coyne: Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Power in Freud's Case of Dora , Teachers' College Press, 1993.
• Patrick Mahoney: Freud's Dora: A Psychoanalytic, Historical, and Textual Study . Yale University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-300-06622-8 .
• Günter Rebing: Freud's Fantastic Pieces . The case histories of Dora, Hans, Rat Man, Wolf Man . Athena Verlag Oberhausen 2019, ISBN 978-3-7455-1044-7.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ida Bauer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography
• Example of feminist criticism of Freud's interpretation
• Case presentation with a family situation farmer

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ilka Piepgras: Ida. Die Zeit, December 4, 2017, accessed on April 13, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Claudia Voigt: The big "Aha". Der Spiegel No. 30, July 21, 2018, pp. 120–122.