In the fall of 1900, Freud, then forty-four, a virtually unknown, only moderately successful medical practitioner, analyzed a young woman of eighteen. The girl’s father had brought her in, alarmed by the discovery of a letter in which his daughter threatened suicide. Moreover, the young woman suffered from chronic asthma and laryngitis; she took no interest in domestic affairs and buried herself in her studies; she fought with her mother and accused her father of having an affair. The father hoped that Freud would bring his daughter “to reason.” In his account of her treatment, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Freud called his patient “Dora.” The play Fräulein Dora shifts the perspective to Dora: a bright, curious, intellectually ambitious girl first coming into sexual awareness in an unreflectively patriarchal culture. Her story shines a light on the origins of modern views of female sexuality and on the theoretical foundations that sill underlie our culture’s response (“hysterical”) when girls and women speak out.