"Dora" II

I don’t think that Freud intentionally blends fact and fiction together. It seems more like he gets an idea into his head about the reasoning behind some aspect of her dream and twists it until he can figure out how to make it fit into his analysis. In the reading for today he makes the explanations difficult to understand. Part of this is because his ideas are much further outside what is obvious. He attempts to convince the reader that “the antithesis of ‘water’ and ‘fire’ must be at the bottom” of her dream. He spends most of section 3 talking about how they relate and what links them together in the physical world and in Dora’s dream.

One way in which he accomplishes this is through transference. It seems like Freud likes to inform her that what she says isn’t what she means. In the first section he managed to find ways to tell Dora that she was in love with her father, Herr K and Frau K. Her childhood love for her father transferred to Herr K when her father started spending time Frau K. This love then transferred to Frau K because Dora was repressing her love for Herr K.

I think that his dream analyses would be more validated if he only discussed one meaning that results from analyzing the dream. In certain parts it seems as though he is leading Dora to give him answers he wants to hear. He questions her about the jewel case because he thinks that it’s important that in the dream it is a jewel case and not jewelry. I think he overemphasized this. If there was a fire in the house why would someone try to grab individual pieces of jewelry rather than whatever was kept in the jewel case? It makes sense. He also doesn’t explain the analysis in a way that’s easy to understand. The explanation with the fire and water isn’t as straight forward as it could have been. When I had finished reading this I didn’t completely agree with his ideas.