The Enigma of Anna O

By Melinda Given Guttmann

Subjects: Psychoanalysis and feminism, Feminists, Biography, Jewish women, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Women and psychoanalysis, Pappenheim, bertha, 1859-1936, Analysands, History, Jews, Psychoanalysis, history

Description: "The story of "Anna O" was one of the most famous of the case studies in Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer's seminal book Studies on Hysteria. Until 1953 when Freud's biographer revealed her identity, no one was aware that the real woman behind the anonymous pseudonym was the renowned German Jewish feminist, Bertha Pappenheim. Born to a wealthy orthodox Jewish family in Vienna, Pappenheim was related to some of the most recognizable names in Jewish society - the Warburgs, Guggenheims and the Goldschmidt-Rothschilds. When her father became terminally ill, the then twenty-one-year-old developed strange symptoms and was treated by the family physician, Joseph Breuer. The treatment consisted of Bertha relating her dreams and her own "fairy tales," a process which she termed the "talking cure," which later became the basis for Freud's theories of psychoanalysis.". "After her father's death and her own recovery, Pappenheim moved to Frankfurt where she became an internationally known figure in her own right. Through her writing, social work, spiritual and social activism for Jewish orphans, abandoned wives, prostitutes, unwed mothers and girls sold into slavery, Bertha Pappenheim became one of the most famous Jewish women in Europe at the turn of the 20th century."--BOOK JACKET.