Searching for the Real ‘Anna O.’

The woman behind one of Freud’s most influential case studies, writes Gabriel Brownstein, was not the straightforward success story of legend. THE SECRET MIND OF BERTHA PAPPENHEIM: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure, by Gabriel Brownstein Bertha Pappenheim stopped eating and sleeping. She lost her language and ability to move. Her eyes crossed and her muscles spasmed. She suffered, her doctors said, from the prevailing diagnosis afflicting primarily well-to-do women in fin de siècle Vienna: hysteria. What this meant was and is a source of debate: Did her facial paralysis emerge from a biological condition? Was her intermittent deafness psychological — or something more metaphysical? Her physician, Josef Breuer, taken with the engaging and beautiful young woman, began visiting her daily. Sometimes Pappenheim made up fairy tales, sometimes she spoke of her hallucinations. Together they traced the source of her trauma to her father’s sickroom and with the repressed unearthed, Pappenheim began to improve. There was catharsis in this exchange. Pappenheim herself described the process, which came to be known as “the talking cure,” as “chimney sweeping.” More than a decade later, Sigmund Freud included Pappenheim’s story under the name “Fraulein Anna O.” — a case in “Studies On Hysteria.” Later, Freud added apocryphal details to the case, including a pseudo-pregnancy that illustrated his theory of transference. Embellishments aside, Anna O. — psychiatry’s most famous inconvenient woman — entered the annals of history as a success story that helped birth psychoanalysis. The trouble is, as Gabriel Brownstein writes in his fascinating “The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim,” it was all a lie. Pappenheim was not cured. She continued to suffer long after Breuer gave up her case and ended up in a sanitarium, subjected to untold horrors, and addicted to the drugs that Breuer had prescribed her. Her true triumph came long after she quit analysis. She emerged from this crucible in middle age, reinvented herself as an advocate and philanthropist and never again spoke of her time under Breuer’s care. She advocated on behalf of Jewish girls exploited by the sex trade, and opened institutions to house […]

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