FREUD ESTABLISHED PSYCHOANALYSIS during a historical phase of humanity when European societies enjoyed relative peace and progress. It is indicative that the promotion of psychoanalysis was integrated into a period where the mental symptom was posed as an object of treatment through the function of thought and speech between two people, outside the family environment and religious institutions.

Hysteria and hysterical patients led Freud to structure the tool of psychoanalysis, impressed by the power of unconscious sexuality, which created symptoms as an outlet for the non-fulfillment of an unconscious forbidden desire. He found in the tragedy of Oedipus the core human fantasy concerning the family nucleus. Freud first wrote about hysteria around 1893, after the years of training he spent in Paris, with the famous professor Charcot. He had realized that the hysterical symptom, despite its physicality, is connected to mental creations, and in fact of a symbolic nature, with sexual character. In the beginning is the body with its sensations, stimuli, its sensory world, its mobility, pleasure, and displeasure. It comes into contact with others and the things that will gradually be inscribed as internal representations and objects.

Freud observed Dora in 1900, wrote about the case in 1901, and later published it in 1905, for confidentiality reasons, under the title Fragment of a Hysterical Analysis.

The book consists of two parts: On one hand, the text of Freud, and on the other, the discussion of four prominent French psychosomatists who commented on the text about Dora at a psychosomatic conference in 1967 and published it in the Revue Française de Psychanalyse in 1968 and again in the Revue Française de Psychosomatique in 1997.

In the discussion of the psychosomatists, what emerges is Dora's difficulties in responding to mental conflicts, in the absence of flexibility and fluid communication between the various aspects constituting her mental world. Her body becomes the field of expression of conflicts, not only for their resolution but primarily for their inability to undergo mental absorption.

Through the discussion of the psychosomatists, Dora seems to use her symptoms as a shield against the heavy atmosphere of her childhood and the overstimulating events of her adolescence. In this sense, her hysteria often represents a kind of anti-excitation, which proves to be chronic and fragile over time. When, moreover, this is not even capable of defending and protecting, then physical illness may appear as a result of mental destructiveness.