So much for the orthodox view. Now for the revised version. There are four main charges. In increasing order of importance they are that, one, Freud did
The third charge is that the picture Freud himself painted of one of Breuer’s most famous patients, ‘Anna O.’, or Bertha Pappenheim, was seriously flawed and quite possibly based on deliberate deceit. Henri Ellenberger himself traced the clinics where Pappenheim was treated and unearthed the notes used by Breuer. Since some of the wording in these reports is identical with the later published paper, we can be sure that these are indeed the original notes. Ellenberger, and others since, found that there is no evidence at all that Pappenheim ever had a phantom pregnancy. This is now believed to be a story Freud invented, to counter the apparent lack of sexual aetiology in the Anna O. case as recounted by Breuer, which was completely at odds with Freud’s insistence that sexual matters lay at the root of all hysterical symptoms. In his biography of Josef Breuer (1989), Albrecht Hirschmüller goes so far as to say that ‘The Freud–Jones account of the termination of the treatment of Anna O. should be regarded as a myth.’
37 Hirschmüller himself was able to show that many of Pappenheim’s symptoms went into total or partial remission spontaneously, that she went through no catharsis or abreaction – in fact the case notes end abruptly in 1882 – and that, following treatment by Breuer, she was hospitalised in the next years no fewer than four times, each time being diagnosed with ‘hysteria’. In other words, Freud’s claim that Breuer ‘restored Anna O. to health’ is false and, moreover and equally important, FreudThe significance of the Anna O. case, or at least the way Freud reported it, is threefold. It shows that Freud exaggerated the effects of the ‘talking cure’. It shows that he introduced a sexual element when none was there. And it shows that he was cavalier with the clinical details. We shall see that these tendencies all repeated themselves in important ways throughout the rest of his career.