The doctor is called. It is fall 1880 and the father is dying of tuberculosis in the family’s big apartment in Vienna. The 21-year-old daughter has been nursing him. She tends to him at night and her sleeping schedule is awry–she has nodded off when sitting at his bedside, and once in the summer country house she thought she saw snakes crawling from the walls, out to get him. Terrified, she tried to push one away and found that her fingers had turned into little snakes themselves. The next day, outside playing a ringtoss game, she happened upon a stick and that too turned into a snake. Now she has “absences” where she drops out of consciousness–drops out of time–and then rejoins the conversation or activity at hand. She’s also bored, so bored that she makes up stories in her head, her own “private theater,” while her body stays there, where it should be.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is the story of the birth of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud credited the woman, a patient of his colleague Josef Breuer, with inventing the method. She herself, who was referred to as “Miss Anna O.” in a case study, called it, in English, “chimney sweeping.”
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In the Library of Congress’s traveling exhibit, “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” which will stop at the Field Museum in the fall, there are placards that pay homage to Anna O. and her discovery of the “talking cure.”
Freud reportedly found grim amusement in Pappenheim’s vocation and is said to have told one of his patients, Princess Marie Bonaparte, “She never married. And she has found great joy in life. Can you guess how? What she does?… She is active in societies for the protection of white women. Against prostitution! She speaks out against everything sexual.”
Anna/Bertha is intriguing. Much is known of her interior life when she was a certain age, and much is known of her public life at a certain age, but little is known of her later interior life, and there’s a gap during her period of institutionalization. In her professional life she was severe, witty. She translated Mary Wollstonecraft. She set up her home for wayward girls with no uniforms or corporal punishment and tried to teach the girls useful skills such as housekeeping and cooking. She had among the orphans and workers her “daughters,” whom she doted upon, and would invite a favored few to her home every Tuesday for conversation and contemplation of her antiques and jewelry.
Relief from boredom.
By the time Pappenheim died of cancer in 1936, 1,500 girls had passed through the home in Neu Isenburg, near Frankfurt. The home’s main building was burned down during Kristallnacht in November 1938, and in 1942 adult workers and children were deported to ghettos and death camps. It’s unknown whether any survived.
