Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification

Offers an examination of the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory and practice, which was born with the publication of Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria in 1895. In his opening essay, Breuer described the case of Anna O., a young woman afflicted with a severe hysteria whom he had cured of her symptoms by having her recount under hypnosis the traumatic events that precipitated her illness. Hysterics suffer from reminiscences, wrote Freud, and they heal when they remember these repressed or dissociated memories. This discovery of Breuer’s, Freud continued, is still the foundation of psychoanalytic therapy. It is also the foundation of present-day recovered memory therapy and more generally, of our widespread belief in the healing and redemptive power of memory. However, this belief, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen asserts, is based on a deceptive account of the founding case of psychoanalysis. Drawing on the most recent Freud scholarship and on documents long kept from public view, Borch-Jacobsen demonstrates that Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) was in fact, never cured by Breuer’s talking cure at all.