97: Standard Edition Volume 2 Part 2: Studies on Hysteria, Part II: Anna O.

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Abby, Patrick, and Dan turn to the first case study in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria: Fräulein Anna O. It is a paradoxical and deeply overdetermined text. This troubled young woman was a patient of Breuer’s, not Freud’s. The prose is exclusively Breuer’s, and the approach described reflects his unwavering commitment to hypnosis, the cathartic method, and an associationist model of the mind. But this famous case can also rightly be seen as the beginning of psychoanalysis; indeed, Anna O. herself coined the phrase “the talking cure.” Yet even as the case of Anna O. would come to serve as a kind of skeleton key for unlocking Freud’s subsequent sensitivities to listening, transference, and the layered temporalities of psychic traumas, her story would also become an object of mischaracterization and myth-making for Freud and others. Abby, Patrick, and Dan thus begin by addressing the case history as a broader genre while establishing some working distinctions between “Anna O.” as a character in Breuer’s text, the real-life Bertha Pappenheim (the person behind the pseudonym), and the subsequent legend of Anna O. as an arch-hysteric whose distress culminated in a (fictious) phantom pregnancy. They walk through Breuer’s narrative on its own terms, tackling Anna O.’s many symptoms, especially those involving her intermingling of silence and speech in multiple languages, and the pivotal scene that, per Breuer, represented a breakthrough in the treatment. The questions this all raises – about the limits of knowledge, the contingencies of suffering, and what it means to be healed – set up the next episode, about the story behind the story, and the remarkable biography of Bertha Pappenheim herself. 

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