In his famous 1905 case study on the subject, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Freud of course does his best to obscure his patient’s identity. He does, though, assert his right to describe her full body in discussing her symptoms and his interpretation of them. “Now in this case history … sexual questions will be discussed with all possible frankness, the organs and functions of sexual life will be called by their proper names … I will simply claim for myself the rights of the gynaecologist.” He wasn’t one, of course. Still, if he wanted to actually say anything, he was probably right to claim these terms for himself.
The use he makes of them, though—there it is possible to take some issue. His patient, 18-year-old Dora, is suffering from a battery of hysterical symptoms (difficulty breathing, a nervous cough, “hysterical unsociability,” etc.), and in analyzing her Freud uncovers an incident he suspects may be related to them: when Dora was 14, her father’s friend Herr K “suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips.” I have ideas about what to call this and how to understand it. Freud has different ones: “This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of 14 who had never before been approached.” (What??? my college self wrote here in the margin.) Instead Dora felt revulsion, in what Freud terms a “reversal of affect,” and even years later still seemed sometimes to “feel upon the upper part of her body the pressure of Herr K’s embrace.”
These wandering wombs and Womb-Furies and hysterias and the treatments for them, have been named by men, most of the time.
It’s at this point in his analysis that Freud really begins putting his defended terminology to work. “I believe that during the man’s passionate embrace she felt not merely his kiss upon her lips but also the pressure of his erect member against her body. This perception was revolting to her; it was dismissed from her memory, repressed, and replaced by the innocent sensation of pressure upon her thorax…” And, presto, the haunting feeling that Herr K is still embracing her! Of course.
As for what Dora believed about her own illness, Freud writes, “It is of course not to be expected that the patient will come to meet the physician half-way with material which has become pathogenic for the very reason of its efforts to lie concealed; nor must the inquirer rest content with the first ‘No’ that crosses his path.” She doesn’t know the truth, in other words, and whatever she does know she certainly won’t say, and so the doctor just has to work harder to get her to disclose it, even—especially—if she doesn’t want to, for her own good.