ABSTRACT
An in-depth analysis of the case of Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim), called by Freud “the birth of psychoanalysis.” The chapter proposes the case has been consistently misrepresented and misunderstood.
Bertha was a well-educated girl in a conservative Jewish family. Her father developed tuberculosis. Bertha cared for him while her own health disintegrated. She became anorexic, and experienced paralysis in her neck and both sides of her body. Bertha developed two different personalities: a normal-self and an “evil-self” who hallucinated and behaved destructively. Her speech disintegrated into word salad drawn from four languages. When her father died, she became suicidal.
Internist, Josef Breuer, began treating Bertha. He joined her self-induced trances and interrogated her about the origin of her symptoms. As Bertha talked, her symptoms disappeared. Therapy occurred in an autohypnotic trance of which she was amnesic. The final phase of treatment was her sequential hallucinatory reliving of the preceding six months. She recovered through her creative use of psychosis.
Bertha’s case has been consistently misrepresented. Rather than cured, Breuer hospitalized her for addiction to drugs he’d been administering. Though Freud described the case as the origin of psychoanalysis, it doesn’t resemble psychoanalysis at all. Unwittingly, Freud simply rebranded animal magnetism.
