Freud’s Case of Dora: Wellspring of Discovery and Discourse

After 60 years of non-critical silence, Freud’s Dora became the target of a surge of publications in the 1970s and 1980s that criticized his mismanagement of his adolescent patient. Jennings (1986) showed how this “Dora revival” was fueled by a revolutionary change in attitude toward countertransference and new understanding of adolescent development. In retrospect, the “revival” was just the start of a “Dora Wellspring” of over 200 publications about the case. Further, the most dominant and enduring theme in Dora literature has become the question of feminine psychosexual development and identity. This article reveals the crucial, albeit indirect and delayed, impact of Jacque Lacan’s “return to Freud” in the 1950s, which brought Dora and hysteria to the attention of the early French feminists, who transformed Dora into a case exemplar for their deconstruction of male patriarchy. In turn, Dora was re-examined by dozens of psychoanalysts and writers, mostly female, seeking to develop a viable theory of feminine psychosexual development in the 1980s and 1990s. This discourse stimulated another surge of publications in the new century that have sought new insights by re-examining Freud’s thinking in the Dora period and by directly applying Lacanian concepts to contemporary thinking about gender and trauma.


Introduction
The history of psychoanalysis can be seen entirely as a struggle with the question of feminine sexuality. (Lacan, 1952: Ecrits, p. 28) the 1970s and early 1980s, which were critical of how Freud had mishandled his famous case of Dora. Even more remarkable was the fact that this legendary analysis and seminal clinical text had remained untouched by critical comment for nearly 60 years prior to this "Dora Revival." Jennings concluded that two major theoretical currents created the conditions for this abrupt outpouring of critical studies. The first was the revolutionary change in attitude toward countertransference in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. At the time of the Dora case in 1900, and for many decades to come, countertransference was seen as a negative and disruptive interference that revealed the neurotic failings of the analyst and was decidedly shameful to admit. In Freud's case, he was blind to his negative countertransference to Dora, which persisted and influenced his writing, rewriting, and decisions to delay publication of his failed "fragment" of analysis for almost five years. By the 1960s, however, countertransference was appreciated as a natural and pervasive process in the dyadic relationship of therapy that should be used to understand the dynamics of unconscious conflicts and defenses.
The second major contributor to the Dora Revival was the emergence of a psychoanalytic theory of adolescent development and its treatment. Erikson (1962) was only the second analyst to openly criticize Freud's mistakes with Dora in an English-language publication 1 . Erikson showed how Freud misunderstood and over-reacted to Dora's expressions of the normal developmental stage-specific concerns and behaviors of adolescence. Freud did not understand Dora's preeminent adolescent plea for "fidelity" in reaction to the gross infidelities and hypocritical deceits of her father, mother, Herr K and Frau K. Freud was singularly insensitive to Dora's adolescent outrage at being used as an object of sexual barter in a conspiracy of adults. Moreover, Freud treated Dora like an adult, pummeling her with explicit sexual interpretations. His counter-transferential frustration with Dora rose as she exercised adolescent autonomy in rejecting his authority and interpretations.
In his efforts to validate his new prized theory of the Oedipus complex, Freud made insistent interpretations that Dora was repressing her natural (Oedipal) sexual attraction to Herr K. But 17-year old Dora wanted nothing to do with the seductions of an older, lecherous, married man and was seeking validation of her own truth-that she was being manipulated and abused by this circle of deceitful adults. Fifteen months after terminating the analysis, Dora returned to Freud on April 1 st with vindicating confessions from the adults, but Freud showed his lasting countertransference by rejecting her request to resume analysis as an April fool's joke.
While Jennings (1986) was correct in explaining how these two major theoretical changes opened the floodgate of the Dora Revival, he entirely missed a third major development in psychoanalysis that contributed to the resurgence of interest in the case of Dora: the question of feminine psychosexual develop-1 Wolstein (1954) was first to reproach Freud's failure to attend to Dora's loveless relationship with her mother. study-guide, 12 book reviews, and 4 theses ( Figure 1). This article will argue that the Dora case has had a powerful and uniquely singular impact on the history and development of psychoanalytic thinkingcentered most importantly on the formulation of a cogent theory of feminine psychosexual development-and it has continued to be a Wellspring of discourse and discovery. Organized in a historical chronology, the article will cover the following seven epochs: 1) Dora andFreud's early Oedipal theory (1895-1910); 2) Dissension against the castration complex and penis envy ; 3) Lacan's "return to Freud" and a revolutionary reconception of Dora (1950s) The historical review begins with the seeds of the Dora Wellspring as found in Freud's early Oedipal theory and the subsequent dissension and schism in the psychoanalytic movement in response to his castration complex and penis envy in the 1920s and 1930s. The review then moves to the reconceptualization of Dora by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in 1952, which excited interest in Dora and feminine psychosexuality and ultimately transformed Dora into a feminist case exemplar by the early French feminists in the late 1970s. In turn, by using the Dora case of hysteria to explicate and attack patriarchy and the suppression of women, the feminist movement popularized Dora, while challenging psychoanalysis to reconstruct its own understanding of feminine sexuality in the 1980s and 1990s. This period was dominated by female analysts and feminist writers and much of the Dora literature spread to non-psychoanalytic forums, such as feminist and literary explorations of feminine psychosexuality. But, starting in the 1990s, psychoanalysis reclaimed Dora in a big way. There was a surge of studies that focused on the crucial historical period of theoretical development surrounding the Dora case (i.e., especially seduction theory and Oedipal theory) as well as direct efforts to apply Lacanian and feminist concepts in mainstream psychoanalysis. This high level of psychoanalytic activity continues in the new century with a focus on sexual trauma and gender identification.

Dora and Her Discontents: The Question of Feminine Psychosexuality
1) Dora andFreud's early Oedipal theory (1895 to 1910) Four years after the ground-breaking publication of Studies on Hysteria (Freud, 1895), Freud was bursting with creativity and ambitious to establish his new and fertile theories of the unconscious mind, The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900) she was the victim of traumatic child sexual abuse by a middle-aged man from age 13 to 15 (rather than "seduction" by a father-representing Oedipal male), and she had a predominant attraction and identification with an older woman (rather than the presumed primary Oedipal father figure).
Given this mismatch of patient and theory, Freud's persistent and frank interpretations would eventually drive Dora from her daily treatment (six days per week) in three months. But through its publication, Freud's (1905a) Fragment of an Analysis would expose the contradictions and inconsistencies of his Oedipal theory to criticism. Although Freud stopped everything to write the case within 25 days of its conclusion, and even though the paper was initially accepted for publication in 1901 (Tanner, 2005), Freud delayed publication for five years until it was published in two parts in October and November of 1905. Clearly, Freud recognized and admitted that he had error in many ways and he considered the case to be an incomplete "fragment" and "failure". As revealed in his subsequent revisions and additions to the text, Freud must have also struggled with the fact that Dora did not "fit" his prized Oedipal theory of psychosexual was the Castration Complex, which he added to a later edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud, 1905b) in 1915.
2) Dissension against the castration complex and penis envy (1920 to

1940)
In Freud's final schema, the boy and girl share the same "masculine" sexual history of desiring the mother as the first object, and both come to realize, in fantasy, that having the phallus is the desired status because the phallus is the target of the mother's desire. For the boy, the castration complex ends the Oedipus complex. Out of his fear of castration (i.e., loss of his penis), the boy gives up his primary object love for the mother and identifies instead with the father.
For the girl, the castration complex begins the Oedipal complex. She must transfer her object love to the father (who has the phallus that she envies) and identifies with the mother who (to the girl's disappointment) does not have a phallus. Freud (1920) continued to develop the castration complex and, had full confidence in his theory. But he had still not resolved the inherent contradiction of positing a normative heterosexual attraction for both genders, while asserting that the unconscious has no natural or automatic opposite-gender object for the 2 Blass (1992) was first to propose that Freud's Oedipal theory was so insufficiently developed at the time of Dora's analysis that Freud did not conceptualize the case in Oedipal terms and did not make Oedipal interpretations. Her thesis disavows the frequent assertion by Dora critics that Freud's rigid adherence to the Oedipus complex prevented him from a more nuanced understanding of Dora's adolescent dynamics. sexual drive. Instead unconscious desires are polymorphous and can be variably directed at objects of both genders and with variable aims and results. Until 1920, Freud tried to solve the contradiction of innate sexual differences with the concept of bi-sexuality in which both sexes partly identify with the opposite-sexed parent. But bi-sexuality is itself an indefinite and variable process that begs the question. Nevertheless, despite the murkiness of bi-sexuality, Freud believed that the castration complex provided the universal mechanism for how the same external event (threat of castration) triggered the sexual differentiation of both genders.
Ultimately, as Freud pushed harder for the primacy of the castration complex, along with its essential corollary of female penis envy, he encountered growing resistance from his followers, which precipitated a major schism in the psychoanalytic movement. As summarized by Juliette Mitchell (Mitchell & Rose, 1983, p. 15 It is no coincidence that half of the dissenters in this list were female analysts, all of whom intuited that penis envy did not "fit" their life experience as females. In the mid-1920s in a historical period collectively called "the Jones-Freud debate", Ernest Jones aligned with these dissenting female analysts, who included Klein, Horney, Deutsch, and Lampl-de Groot. The dissenters rejected Freud's assertion that penis envy arose directly from recognition of biological difference and argued instead for primary femininity in which penis envy was demoted to a secondary defensive formation. In rejecting penis envy as a primary causal process for girls, however, the dissenters needed to develop a viable alternative process. Thus, for example, Klein (1928) and Horney (1926) hypothesized an equal, but very different Oedipal mechanism in which the girl has a natural valuation of her vagina (in the same way that the boy naturally values his penis) and the girl fears injury and violation through rape by the father. Whereas Freud remained focused on establishing the castration complex as the all-important universal mechanism that precipitated and caused gender-specific heterosexual identification, the dissenters pursued a more viable theory of female psychosexual development and identity.
As a group, the major neo-Freudian contributors in this period found the explanation in a presumption of inherent biological dispositions. But any explanation that allowed biological differences was anathema to Freud. His foundational conception of the unconscious requires that desire is polymorphous and variable to object and aims-which is absolutely independent of the actual gender of the child. He was adamant that "we must keep psychoanalysis separate from biology, just as we have kept it separate from anatomy and physiology" (Freud, 1935: p. 329). Although the Object Relations group and others might try to downplay biological differences by emphasizing the psychological aspects of the gender-identification, Freud knew that they were still trapped by the problem of inherent biological differences.
In his final years, Freud continued to face strong opposition and endeavored to salvage his theory. In his 1933 essay "Femininity", Freud (1933) acknowledged the need to establish a mechanism that is specific to girls (and not present for boys) that could explain how girls terminate their attachments to their mothers. Perhaps Freud's most important reformulation of the theory was to replace the genital emphasis on "the penis" with an emphasis on its symbolic meaning as "the phallus." He recognized that the presence or absence of the penis is what gives full meaning to the perception of difference. It could be argued that the construction of feminine psychosexual development was Freud's foremost concern at the end of his life. His final paper, Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense, published posthumously in 1940, expanded the role of castration anxiety in the construction of personality. In his final formulation, the threatened loss of the phallus precipitates the fracture of the primordial unity of child/mother and self/object for both boys and girls and this division then creates the subject, the individuated ego, along normative heterosexual Oedipal lines. Compared to boys, however, girls have two extra developmental tasks of changing their love-object from mother to father and their erogenous zone from the clitoris to the vagina.
3) Lacan's "return to Freud" and a revolutionary reconception of Dora (1950s) Although Freud's final work on the castration theory was largely ignored or disregarded as an irrelevant effort by the aging master, an unlikely supporter would emerge to take up the flag for Freud's theories. Trained as a psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan (1901Lacan ( -1981 abandoned his profession in favor of psychoanalysis in the early 1930s. In 1949, he contributed his original idea of "the Mirror Stage", for which he is probably best known. Lacan argued that the object and the subject shift and change places in the polymorphous unconscious of the infant and young child. The child can only conceptualize itself as a separate being when it is "mirrored" back to itself from the position of another's desire. For Lacan, the all-important and essential mechanism for this differentiation of the "I"-must be language. Through language, the polymorphous chaos and variability of the unconscious becomes signified and differentiated as you and I, she and he, self and other(s), and this is where sexuality becomes conceptualized as male and female.
Lacan's central idea was that humans are born into language through the speech of others, and that the subject, the self, and one's sexual identity are constructed from the primordial unconscious through the significations and dis-  Freud's (1940) final reformulation of the castration complex, which emphasized the meaning of the absence or presence of the phallus (rather than the anatomical penis), which is the realm of symbolic language. By applying Saussure's linguistic theory and Levi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology, Lacan believed that Fatefully, Lacan chose Dora as the first published demonstration of his linguistic re-articulation of Freud's theories. Lacan (1952Lacan ( /1983) asserted that psychoanalysis is a "dialectical experience" that "deals solely with words." Lacan re-analyzed the case as a sequence of three "dialectical reversals" of Dora's "truths" and Freud's "reversing" interpretations.
In the "first truth", Dora enters analysis in outrage over the duplicitous and odious behavior of the quadrille of adults in her life. She complains that her father and Frau K are having an affair (which is unchallenged by her mother) and that her father has turned a blind eye to her seduction by Herr K. Rather than affirm Dora's victimization, however, Freud makes the "first reversal" of Dora's truth by emphasizing that Dora is obsessed with her father's affair and that she should, "Look at your own involvement in the disorder which you bemoan." In the "second truth", Dora acknowledges that, by enjoying her secret intimate confidences with Frau K, she has been complicit in allowing the affair to continue and enabling Herr K's plot to seduce her. In the "second reversal", Freud interprets Dora's jealousy of her father's love affair as a revelation of her infatuation with Frau K as her (Oedipal) rival for her father's love.
In the "third truth", Dora acknowledges her enchantment with Frau K's "adorable white body" and the pleasure of her intimacy with Frau K (e.g., sleeping together in same room, sharing sexual knowledge and the details of Frau K's sex life). In the third and final "reversal", Freud asserts that Dora is bitter over losing her bond with Frau K and emphasizes her lack of anger at Frau K, who betrayed Dora by joining the quadrille in calling Dora a liar.
Although Freud later admitted his failure to pursue his own interpretation of homosexual attraction, Lacan argued that Freud's greatest error was failing to make the connection between the mystery of femininity that Dora found in the painting of the Madonna and the adorable white body of Frau K. For Dora, Frau K was the representation of the mystery of her own femininity. Instead, disastrously, due to his negative countertransference and determination to apply his new Oedipal theory, Freud continued to press Dora into openly accepting her love attraction to Herr K (as the Oedipal substitute for her father). Lacan argued that "the problem of Dora's condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as a man's object of desire, and this is the mystery that motivates Dora's idolization of Frau K" (Lacan, 1952(Lacan, /1983).
For Lacan, it is better for interpretations to be enigmatic and polyvalent, open to exploration and further questioning by the analysand. Thus, Freud's greatest failure was to cease asking questions of Dora's desire after the third reversal. Instead, Freud was too precise and authoritative in telling Dora the (Oedipal) answer to the question of her femininity (Breidenthal, 2010). Given Freud's masculine over-identification with Herr K (whom he knew and described as "still quite young and of prepossessing appearance"), Freud could not get past his heterosexual prejudice in affirming a heteronormative Oedipal complex that posited paternal predominance as natural rather than normative. Lacan argued that Dora's driving question was not "who do I love?", but "what am I?" and "what sort of woman will I become?" This was a complicated matter given Dora's history as a "wild" tomboy, her trauma of being sexually objectified by men while still a girl, her alienation from a mother who modeled total revulsion toward sex, and her frustration with the societal restrictions against advanced female education and a meaningful career like her beloved brother Otto (Decker, 1992). As a female confidant and adult role-model, Frau K was crucial and cherished in Dora's search for her own sexual and personal identity. This is why Dora remained loyal 3 to Frau K despite her betrayal and deception.
The brilliance of Lacan's reconceptualization was that he "saved" Freud's Oedipal theory (along with the castration complex) by showing that Dora needed to safeguard her father's affair in order to preserve her own intimate bond with Frau K and thereby continue to explore her (Oedipally-driven) curiosity about what her father loved in this other woman. Most importantly, Lacan's analysis opened the doors to the exploration of the mystery of feminine sexuality itself.
By pursuing an understanding how language signifies and differentiates the chaotic polymorphous multiplicity of desires of the unconscious, Lacan saved Freud's most essential presumption that there is no biological predetermination of gendered sexuality. Gender identity is, in this sense, completely random.
Masculinity and femininity are entirely constructed through language. As Lacan and his French analytic colleagues 4 continued to develop this central idea of constructed gender identity and femininity, it became part of French intellectual discourse and resonated with the early French feminists who formed the "second wave" of feminist theory 5 . 3 Dora's bond with Frau K (Peppina Zellenka) was lifelong. They became accomplished partners in contract bridge and Frau K helped Dora to escape from the Nazis in Vienna in 1938, the same year as Freud. Frau K, along with four of Freud's sisters, was later deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in September 1942 (Ellis et al., 2015).  Cixous and Clement, 1975a). The centerpiece of this major work of feminist theory was "The Untenable" debate between Cixous and Clement (1975b) as to whether Dora was a hero or victim. Cixous argued that Dora's hysteric symptoms were a heroic effort to break the patriarchal structures that oppressed her-by using the only power available to her-her hysteric symptoms. In contradiction, Clement held that Dora was a victim because she capitulated and remained a hysteric, and her act of resistance changed nothing. Open Journal of Social Sciences the status of "an event in women's history" and a woman "hailed as an exemplary feminist heroine" (Shah, 2016: p. 558). 5) Dora and the reconstruction of feminine psychosexuality (1970s to 1980s) Along with fellow Parisians Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Cixous is one of the creators of poststructuralist feminist theory, which focused on elaborating and deconstructing gender in language. Both Irigaray and Kristeva were psychoanalysts steeped in Lacan's language-based reformulations of Freud's theories. This means that the question of the development and character of feminine sexuality-and its relevance to Freud's failed analysis of Dora-was explored by psychoanalytically-sophisticated feminist thinkers using psychoanalytic terms and theory. The first major effort to directly meld feminism with mainstream psychoanalysis was Juliet Mitchell's (1974) landmark book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. At the height of the Women's Movement, Mitchell surprised her fellow feminists by showing that classical psychoanalytic theory was not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but rather a useful tool for studying the formation of gender identity and sexuality within patriarchal culture.
Historically, Lacan's thinking failed to make any direct impact on mainstream English-speaking psychoanalysis-mainly because his work remained untranslated from French until 1982, but also because his writing itself is difficult to comprehend 6 . Instead, Lacan's influence was delayed and indirect-making its impact through the work of psychoanalytically-informed feminist writers and psychoanalysts who were predominantly female. Beginning with the populariza- tertransference, but grounded in his sexist and patriarchal attitudes of male authority and mastery of knowledge. His over-identification with Herr K's masculinity caused Freud to consistently disregard the importance of Dora's female relationships (e.g., with Frau K, her mother, her governess) in favor of male ones. Evans (1982: p. 64) applied Cixous to show that Dora was "sickened" by the hypocrisy of the "sordid network of illicit sexual activity…involving not only Dora's father and Mrs. K, but Mr. K and numerous governesses", all hidden beneath "the stiff rind of propriety." Gallop (1982) applied Lacan's ideas to the Dora debate between Cixous and Clement in La Jeune Nee (Cixous & Clement, 1975a Malcolm (1987) and Van den Berg (1986. Van (Dane, 1994), patriarchal exchange of women (Findlay, 1994), patriarchy (Hengehold, 1993), and Lacan's (1958/2017) theory of the structure of hysteria per Dora (Ragland-Sullivan, 1989). Dora's primary role in the establishment of "hysteric narrative" in literary criticism was also cemented in the 1990s in eight additional articles, seven by women.
6) Psychoanalysis "reclaims" Dora in a new era of rediscovery (1990 to 2005) Following the intensive discourse between psychoanalysis and feminism in the 1980s, and the continuing prominence of Dora in the rise of "hysterical narrative" and feminist literary criticism in the 1990s, the field of mainstream psychoanalysis showed its own resurgence of interest in Freud's case of Dora in two forms: 1) a surge of historical studies that focused on the crucial period of theoretical development surrounding the Dora case (i.e., especially seduction theory and Oedipal theory) and 2) efforts to directly apply Lacanian and feminist concepts in psychoanalysis. a) New historical perspectives on Dora: At least nine historical studies of Dora were published in the period 1990-2005. Foremost was Decker's (1992) landmark book, Freud, Dora and Vienna: 1900, which added rich biographical details about Dora, her brother Otto, her parents, Frau and Herr K, and Freud himself in the social historical context of Jews and anti-Semitism in turn-ofthe-century Vienna. In describing the sexual mores, patriarchy, and medical treatment of hysteria, Decker revealed that Dora had already endured many years of exasperating and painful treatments by multiple doctors using electrotherapy and hydrotherapy before she reluctantly began treatment with Freud.
Although six days a week of Freud's novel "talking therapy" would be less physically aversive, Dora entered analysis with the lowest expectations and intense distrust and skepticism toward physicians. Decker identified the misalliance between Dora's needs and Freud's goals of validating his theories about hysteric symptoms, dreams, infantile sexuality, masturbation, bisexuality, and secondary gain. Blass (1992) argued that Freud's Oedipal theory was so insufficiently developed at the time he treated Dora that he did not conceptualize the case in Oedipal terms and made no Oedipal interpretations. Makari (1997Makari ( , 1998 argued that, having abandoned seduction theory in 1897, Freud had a two-stage developmental hypothesis that Dora's hysteria was initially caused by early oral zone autoerotic overstimulation and later activated by her object-directed genital masturbation. Robins (1991) showed how Strachey's faulty translations of Freud's original text distorted the meaning of Dora's dreams and impacted Anglo-American studies of the case. Open Journal of Social Sciences Thompson (1990) revisited Felix Deutsch's (1957)  b) Psychoanalysis incorporates Lacanian and feminist concepts: During the same period from 1990-2005, more than 20 mainstream psychoanalytic studies of Dora tried to directly incorporate either feminist and/or Lacanian concepts into contemporary psychoanalytic thinking. Loewenstein (1992Loewenstein ( , 1993 applied Lacan's "dialectical" reconceptualization of Dora to show that psychoanalytic life histories are multivocal, dialectical, ever-unfolding, and nonpositivistic-rather than linear, detective-like investigations leading to a single solution (e.g., Spence, 1986). Lacanian concepts were also reflected in psychoanalytic articles by Banks (1991) and Gonchar (1993), who applied the incest taboo and the exchange of women, and by Thompson (1994), who argued that the key to the revelation of truth was not what Dora said, but what she omitted and tried to keep hidden-which, was only revealed by Freud's skills of observation and interpretation. Ornstein (1993) focused on Dora's desperate need for "holding" by a self-object because she was raised by an unempathic mother who was incapable of (Lacanian) mirroring and because her idealizations of her father, Herr K and Frau K were destroyed by their exploitative behavior.
The influence of feminist thinking is further shown in psychoanalytic publications in the 1990s and early 2000s that emphasized the importance of sexual abuse in the Dora case. Lakoff and Coyne (1993) devoted an entire book to the Dora case to show that psychoanalytic interpretations are inherently oppressive acts of social power inequities, such as Dora's status as younger, female, disabled, less educated, and less scientifically knowledgeable. Mahony (1996) also devoted an entire book to the Dora case and concluded that the overriding quality of Freud's treatment was "inexcusable" coercion of a girl by three adult men: Herr K forced himself on Dora at age 13 and 15; Dora's father forced Dora into treatment with Freud to silence her revelations of abuse; and Freud forced his  Gladwell (1997) showed how Freud "re-abused" Dora by not acknowledging the reality of her sexual abuse trauma because he did not yet understand how childhood traumas disrupt normal oedipal-phase changes through the inhibition of ordinary developmental fantasies. Shopper (2002) argued that Dora's overstimulating involvement in the sexual affairs of her parents and Frau and Herr K prevented her from developing the normal "illusion of celibacy" that facilitates separation from the parents in pursuit of non-incestuous sexual outlets. Hollander (2004) found similarities between Dora's paradoxical response to her sexual trauma and her own adolescent paradoxical "pleasure" and dissociative responses to sexual abuse by her father. Waugaman (2004) showed that Dora was traumatized by the collusion of her own father and Freud, who identified with Herr K's virility and tried to induce her to submit to his unwanted sexual advances. Like the feminist debate about hysteria, Akavia (2005) argued that Dora was seeking differentiation from a family system in which disease, hysteria, and shared symptoms defined their identifications and relations.
Benvenuto (2005)  loved-then, as a girl, and now with her own husband and son. Rabaté (2005) revisited Lacan's "second" reanalysis of Dora in 1958, in which Lacan (1958/2017) discussed the structure of hysteria and applied Levi-Strauss' concept of the patriarchal exchange of women outside the clan. In the famous traumatic scene by the lake, Dora realized she was just another sexual object to be used and thrown aside like her mother, the two governesses, and Frau K.
Worse yet, Dora saw that her father had "gifted" her to Herr K in exchange for taking his wife (Rabaté, 2005: p. 90). Dora's disillusionment was evidenced in her second dream, with its negative signifiers for femininity and metaphor of being trapped. Thus, to the extent that her father had failed her, Dora had to love him all the more to resolve her Oedipal complex. in most of Freud's case studies, particularly Dora (e.g., Kanzer & Glenn, 1980). Colombo (2010) claimed that Freud's strong identification with his own surrogate mother (his nursemaid Monika) explained his ongoing difficulties with maternal transferences and why he continued writing about the reality of child seduction by governesses even after abandoning his seduction theory ( Figure 2). In his book-length analysis, Romano (2015) Kadi, Lacan's (1952) original Oedipal understanding of Dora emphasized a powerful father who possessed the phallus in the symbolic order. Lacan later developed a new conception of the ineffable feminine "jouissance" of the body, which goes beyond the phallus and signifiers in the symbolic realm. Lacan refused to translate his French term "jouissance" which, like much of his work, is ill-defined and confusing. But Lacan's purpose was to retain the multiplicity of femininity and feminine desire which transcends, even defies, clear definition or signification. Thus jouissance is an incomprehensive meld of pleasure, excitement, impulsiveness, anxiety, satisfaction, love, and eros, and, notably, pain.
The Lacanian idea of jouissance brings us back to the qualities of femininity that Helene Cixous first found in Freud's Dora and hysteria in the early 1970s, which inspired her call for ecriture feminine-a new kind of female writing that was exuberant, uninhibited, unpredictable, mysterious, and disruptive. Paradoxically, Lacan's original structural critique of the Dora case in terms of the significations of language, as well as his subsequent conception of jouissance, both resonated with the postmodern feminists because both ideas destroy the rigid binary model of male and female sexuality. Instead both Lacanian ideas allow for a more flexible and ambiguous understanding of gender and sexual identity.
Gender does not need to be rigidly binary or heteronormative.
Indeed, a non-normative ambiguous conception of gender may be the new Open Journal of Social Sciences frontier in feminism, psychology and psychoanalysis. Queer theory (e.g., Quindeau, 2018;Hutfless, 2018) challenges the patriarchal, the heteronormative, and the hegemonial (i.e., the dominance of one social group over another) by questioning all of the predominant expectations of femininity, masculinity, identity and sexuality. Instead, theorists now appear to be rethinking the binary biases of male vs. female and hetero-vs. homosexual in search of a theory that, like Lacan's jouissance, is fluid and embraces ambiguity and multiplicity, while explicitly rejecting certainty.

Conclusion
Clearly, Freud struggled greatly with Dora. Ida Bauer was Freud's most personally challenging case, but she also yielded the core question that most greatly challenged him as a scientist and psychoanalyst. Dora embodied the mysteries of pre-and post-Oedipal psychosexual development and gender identity, as well as the stages of the primary erotogenic zones and the adolescent/adult eruption of genitally focused desire and gender identity. In short, young Dora embodied the enigma of femininity that Freud could never understand, as he famously admitted to psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte in a letter on December 8, 1925: The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?" (Jones, 1953: p. 421).
Freud was agonized by the question of "What does Dora want?" Ultimately, by sharing his encounter with Ida Bauer, Freud presented a case that struck a chord so deep and resonant with women that "Dora" became a heroine exemplar in the rise of feminism and she has served as a central point of discourse in the critique of patriarchal suppression and the deconstruction of gender identity and heteronormativity in psychoanalytic theory and society at large.
Influenced by Lacan's (1952) critique of Dora as a linguistic construction of gender/sexuality, the French feminists exposed and attacked the patriarchal biases in Oedipal theory. The feminist critique challenged psychoanalysis to accommodate the need for a new, "separate but equal" understanding of feminine psychosexual development and identity. In the wake of the feminist and Lacanian reconstruction of female sexual identity, a major new surge of mainstream psychoanalytic publications in the new century focused anew on the Dora case in what can be seen as an effort to process and incorporate Lacanian and feminist ideas into contemporary psychoanalysis. In brief, these contributions include the following: 1) Elucidating how Freud's sexist and patriarchal attitudes, devaluation of femininity, and heteronormative bias were expressed in his negative countertransference to Dora, specifically, and how patriarchy, sexism, and phallocentric thinking had infested psychoanalysis, generally.
2) Emphasizing the importance of pre-Oedipal psychosexual development, and the need for a "separate, but equal" theory of female psychosexual development.
3) Contributing to the devaluation and diminished role of the Oedipal conflict as the predominant universal principle in psychoanalytic psychology. 4) Promoting the international popularization of Jacque Lacan's psychoanalytic ideas in cultural, literary, feminist and psychoanalytic thought. 5) Elevating the importance of the mother's pre-Oedipal role and feminine identification with the mother-in contradiction to Freud's devaluation of Dora's mother as a foolish, uncultivated and ineffectual parent.

Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.