Compare and contrast male and female perspectives, and the Essay

Compare and contrast male and female perspectives, and the encompassing cultural prejudices and presumptions which define and determine the analyst's analysis o - Essay Example Despite the significance of the case with hindsight, the analysis was never completed, and many see this case history as an example of the way in which Freud misinterpreted the problems which his patients had, instead forcing their case to fit his theories, and not the other way around. It is clear, although again with the benefit of hindsight, that in the case of Dora, Freud was seriously mistaken about the situation she found herself in. He may even have willfully interpreted her very real sufferings at the hands of her father, and his friends, the ‘K’s as imagined in order to treat her symptoms as hysteria. The event which triggers Dora’s unhappiness, and which leads to her analysis by Freud, concerns Dora and one of her father’s friends, and man named ‘Herr K’ by Freud. There are two versions of this event; in Dora’s version, the man accosts her by the lake, and makes sexual advances. According to Dora, this is the second time that Herr K had pressed himself upon her; on the first occasion, she was fourteen, and the friend of the family had first tricked her into meeting her alone, and then kissed her. Although modern society will understand the girl’s revulsion, Freud says â€Å"the behavior of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical† (Freud, 1990, page 59). Herr K and, after initial belief, Dora’s father, rubbish the story; Herr K even suggests that she has read too many books on sex, and had been ‘over-excited’ in Freud’s phrase. Dora’s father agrees: It seems very strange that Dora’s own father should take the word of a man whom he does not hold in high regard, above that of his only daughter. As the case history unfolds, we can see clearly that Herr K is a womanizer and a liar, as well as a cuckold. Dora is a young, intelligent and truthful woman from a good family; yet her account of the event by the lake is dismissed in favor of the man’s version.