The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim
The Woman Who Invented Freud's Talking Cure
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The story of a patient who changed the world, and the mystery of her illness.
In 1880, young Bertha Pappenheim got strangely ill—she lost her ability to control her voice and her body. She was treated by Sigmund Freud’s mentor, Josef Breuer, who diagnosed her with “hysteria.” Together, Pappenheim and Breuer developed what she called “the talking cure”—talking out memories to eliminate symptoms. Freud renamed her “Anna O” and appropriated her ideas to form the theory of psychoanalysis. All his life, he told lies about her. For over a century, writers have argued about her illness and cure.
In this unusual work of science, history, and psychology, Brownstein does more than describe the controversies surrounding this extraordinary woman. He brings Pappenheim to life—a brilliant feminist thinker, a crusader against human trafficking, and a pioneer—in the hustling and heady world of nineteenth-century Vienna. At the same time, he tells a parallel story that is playing out in leading medical centers today, about patients who suffer symptoms very much like Pappenheim’s, and about the doctors who are trying to cure them—the story of the neuroscience of a condition now called FND.
The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim argues for the healing art of listening and describes the new “talking cures” emerging out of neuroscience today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brownstein (The Open Heart Club), an English professor at St. John's University, takes a fresh and fascinating look at the life of Freud's "Anna O" and the illness that ailed her. In 1880s Vienna, Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) was stricken by a mysterious collection of symptoms (roving paralysis, aphasia, headaches, etc.) broadly defined as "hysteria." She sought treatment from Freud's mentor Josef Breuer, and together patient and doctor fashioned a curative method in which Pappenheim recounted "repressed memories," which seemed to alleviate some of her symptoms. Cited by Freud in his and Breuer's 1895 treatise Studies on Hysteria, the "Anna O" case serves in many ways as "the founding myth... of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis," Brownstein writes. Yet the claim that Pappenheim was "cured" is false, according to the author, who notes that Freud and Breuer corresponded in the following years about her continued mental suffering and suggests she later eschewed psychoanalysis. Brownstein theorizes that Pappenheim's symptoms may have stemmed from functional neurologic disorder, and includes case histories of present-day sufferers to contextualize the condition. Infused with emotion from Brownstein's own personal losses (he wrote the book while grieving the deaths of his wife and father, the latter of whom had begun the research into Pappenheim), the result is a riveting look at the boundaries between neurology and psychology and the gender dynamics of medicine. This captivates.
