Dora

Who was Dora?

Dora is the pseudonym given by Sigmund Freud to a patient whom he diagnosed with hysteria, and treated for about eleven weeks in 1900. Her most manifest hysterical symptom was aphonia, or loss of voice. The patient's real name was Ida Bauer; her brother Otto Bauer was a leading member of the Austromarxism movement.

Freud published a case study about Dora, Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria - the first, and subsequently the most controversial, of his published case-studies.