Rescuing Freud's 'clever girl' from her saviors: The impact of assumptions on the understanding of a treatment

The aim of this qualitative study was to examine the reason for the treatment failure in Freud's (1920) case "The Psychogenesis of Homosexuality in a Woman" using a two-person psychological perspective. This study sought to uncover the actual experience of a previously silent patient and thereby address an entire body of literature that had been written trying to explain what transpired in the failed treatment. Through a thematic content analysis of the patient's own words rendered from a Spanish translation of the recently published German biography, patterns of experience emerged whereby it was possible to understand the patient's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in regard to her parents, the baroness, herself, her womanhood, Freud, and her analysis. It was then possible to take the patient's experience and reanalyze the case from a two-person psychological perspective.;The results indicated a major disparity between who the authors of the numerous published critiques have imagined the patient to be and who she really was. The divergence created between the actual and assumed patient led to an equally divergent analysis of the case. The results of the thematic content analysis were inconsistent with two of the most common assumptions on which previous critiques have been based: the assumption that the patient was weak or passive and that Freud was a powerful oppressive force in the treatment. This research showed the necessity of including the patient's experience in a two-person psychological analysis of a case. Through the analysis of the data in this study, it was clear that the patient was attempting to use Freud and analysis for her own purposes. The research shows that most probably the treatment failed due to the different treatment goals of the analyst and the analysand within the context of a mandated treatment.