120th Anniversary of “Dora” Telling Her Burning House Dream to Freud
DreamTime, Winter 2021
Sigmund Freud published one of his most famous case histories in 1905 as Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (“Dora”). Dora is now known to have been teenager Ida Bauer, who lived with her family in Vienna when she saw Freud, and who has been acclaimed as a feminist hero because she stopped her psychoanalysis with Freud after just 11 weeks. Our Science Festival event aimed to look at the case study not as a criticism of Freud but to emphasise Dora’s dream, her free-associations to it, and the events of her life, so as to honour her strength, her life, and the dream’s poignant depiction of her life at that time.
The event was featured in the “main tent” of the Swansea Science Festival on 24 October 2020, with many online attendees worldwide. Panel members were Dany Nobus, Brunel University, London and the Freud Museum London; Deirdre Barrett, Harvard Medical School; Brigitte Holzinger, Institute for Consciousness and Dream Research, Vienna; Zora Wessely, University of Vienna; and, from Germany, writer Katharina Adler, author of the novel Ida, and Ida Bauer’s great-granddaughter.
The event concerned the first dream that Dora told Freud, and began with a film of Holzinger reading the dream in Freud’s Vienna apartment—now the Sigmund Freud Museum—where Dora first told it to him. Mark Blagrove chaired the discussion and read out contributions from around the world. Simultaneously, Julia Lockheart painted the dream onto two pages which she’d chosen from Freud’s (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams while Holzinger read the dream. (DreamsID.com has details of this Illustration & Discussion method.)
Dora’s biography has been pieced together by various authors (e.g. Decker 1991). Dora was born in 1882 in an apartment on the Berggasse in Vienna, the same street on which Freud would later live and work. Her younger brother Otto became a prominent Austrian socialist politician. In 1895 Dora’s father commenced an affair with a young woman, “Frau K.,” whose husband then befriended Dora and started propositioning her. In 1898 Herr K. propositioned Dora after a boat trip on a lake; she slapped him; and for four successive nights, until she could leave Herr and Frau K.’s house with her father, she had the burning house dream.
Dora begged her father to break off the friendship with the K.s, seeing herself as “handed over to Herr K. as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and his wife” (Freud 1905, p. 66). In October 1900 her father arranged for Dora to see Freud because he wanted to “bring her to reason” (p. 57). Six weeks into the treatment, Dora again had the burning house dream. On 31 December she left the psychoanalysis.
The dream:
“A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said ‘I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.’ We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up.”
The case study gives details of Dora’s free-associations to elements of the dream, from which she and Freud found a very plausible understanding of the dream’s meanings (before Freud’s own further associations resulted in speculations which overshadowed those meanings). Dora had recently experienced the danger of fire in waking life; in the dream, fire seems to be a metaphor for the danger she was in with Herr K. Regarding the “jewel-case,” Dora recalled a dispute about a piece of jewellery her father had bought her mother, which she did not want. Dora said that her father gave her mother jewellery as cover for gifts to Frau K.; and that Herr K. had recently given Dora an expensive jewel-case. Freud suggested that the jewel-case symbolized the female genitals, that the dream meant “This man is persecuting me, he wants to force his way into my room. My ‘jewel-case’ is in danger…” and that it depicts Dora’s wish that her father rescue her.
The discussion: We set aside Freud’s subsequent associations and speculative diagnoses and followed the Ullman dream appreciation method (Ullman 1996), which emphasises listening to and asking questions about the dream and the dreamer’s recent life circumstances and mapping these together, with minimal projections and speculations from group members. Lockheart’s painting also acts as a map of the dream and our fascinating discussion, which touched upon the lack of overt emotion stated in the dream report; the oppressive situation Dora was in; the ethics of her identity being named by authors after Freud; and that thankfully Dora, who was Jewish, was able to come to the US to be with her emigrant son after the Anschluss.
The painting: At top left Lockheart depicted the Alpine spa town of Merano, where Dora/Ida lived with her family before 1900 and where the K. family also lived. The painting’s composition brings together the father, Dora/Ida and Otto, with the mother pointing at her jewel-case.
Lockheart chose the pages to paint on with regard to the shapes of the text and paragraphs. As often occurs, while painting she found words on the pages that are uncannily relevant to the dream: “female genitals” appearing twice under the jewel-case; “boyish” in Dora’s brother’s head; “17” at bottom left, her age at starting to see Freud; the words “was night room in which dressing to go”; and, most eerie of all, “Fräulein K.” in her mother’s head! These can be seen, along with a film of the event, on the gallery page of DreamsID.com.
The words “deserves to be recorded in detail: dream” at upper right are also relevant, as although there is much debate and dispute regarding Dora and the case study, we are grateful that Freud recorded this poignant dream.
Our next event in early 2021 will be an online discussion, with Lockheart’s simultaneous painting, of Dora’s second dream—just before she left psychoanalysis—of her father having died and Dora travelling to his funeral. Event details are at DreamsID.com.
- Decker, Hannah S. (1991). Dora and Vienna 1900. New York: Macmillan.
- Ullman, Montague (1996). Appreciating Dreams: A Group Approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Dr. Julia Lockheart is a fine artist and Senior Lecturer at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity St David (UWTSD), and Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Mark Blagrove is Professor of Psychology at Swansea University, Wales, and Director of the Sleep Laboratory at Swansea University.
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