The Birth of the Legend: Ernest Jones

Abstract

We now find ourselves in a curious position. The argument so far about the Anna O. case has been predicated on a close examination of the available evidence. Considering first the documents contemporaneous with her treatment by Breuer it appears that in his view the underlying illness that she suffered from passed more or less spontaneously, but that the hysterical symptoms grounded in the illness were susceptible to the new method of treatment that he developed in working with his patient. By the time Bertha decided to end the treatment on 7 June 1882, both the illness itself and the concomitant hysterical symptoms had considerably subsided. After a brief trip to stay with relatives, she went to the Sanatorium Bellevue for just over three months to convalesce and to try to be rid of a morphine dependence which had developed as a consequence of an acute facial neuralgia. At the end of her stay at the sanatorium, however, she still required the morphine, although it appears that apart from a brief loss of her ability to use her native language each evening, her hysterical symptoms were still in abatement. This residual symptom too declined over the months following, though it is possible that she sometimes still suffered from her absences, which, in Breuer’s view, though not hysterical symptoms themselves had been the ground on which the hysteria had taken root.

Man geht nie weiter, als wenn man nicht mehr weiß, wohin man geht.¹

J. W. von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (Posth.)