She is one of the most well-known patients of the 20th century: Dora, the Jewish girl with 'petite hystérie' and an extremely convoluted family history. Dora, who was barely eighteen when she dared to end her treatment with Sigmund Freud prematurely, thereby depriving him, as he put it, "of the satisfaction of freeing her much more thoroughly from her suffering." For Katharina Adler, the defiant patient was long nothing more than a family anecdote: her great-grandmother, who gained posthumous fame not under her real name and not for any particular achievement, and who was at times portrayed as both a victim and a heroine. "Gradually, the desire grew within me to complement this image of her, but also to counter it. I wanted to show a woman who cannot simply be dismissed as a lifelong hysteric or broadly instrumentalized as a heroine.".