Hysterical Girl

Sigmund Freud produced only one major case history of a female patient. Hysterical Girl uses a feminist lens to imagine Dora, the name Freud used at the turn of the 20th century to protect his subject’s identity, as a girl today. In the film, she tells her version of events, alongside Freud’s own words. What emerges is a portrait of the corrosive grip that a seemingly archaic theory from the Victorian era still has over thinking and policy around women, sex and consent, even in the era of #MeToo. “Dora” — whose real name was Ida Bauer — was 17 when her parents brought her to therapy after she accused a family friend of sexual assault. “Please,” Dora’s father asked Freud, “bring her to reason.” During the 11-week treatment, Freud chipped away at the case like a detective of the unconscious: why would you keep seeing the man you say assaulted you? Are you out for revenge? Did you send out signals? Did you secretly want it? A century later, the questions that women face haven’t changed much. Hysterical Girl intercuts several decades of archival material — from the cinema of John Hughes and Roman Polanski to the Congressional testimonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford — to tease out the ways in which Freud’s theory of hysteria persists into the present day.