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PARTISAN REVIEW
Now, not only Freud, but also his first co-author, Josef Breuer, have
been accused of disingenuous distortion by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a
French professor of comparative literature. He argues in
Souvenirs diAnna
O.
that Breuer and Freud lied when they reported that Anna 0., the arche–
typal patient of the cathartic method, had been successfully treated.
Because her treatment was in fact a failure, all talk therapy is therefore
invalid. Each later instance of its application is merely the useless repeti–
tion of a false model, an archetypal myth. Breuer omitted from the report
he published with Freud the fact that his patient suffered a serious relapse
that required her hospitalization in a private sanitarium. Moreover, the fail–
ure of Anna O.'s treatment was a carefully guarded secret of the
psychoanalytic movement.
How accurate is this claim of lying and secrecy?
Were the fail ure a closely guarded secret of the psychoanalytic move–
ment, why would Ernest Jones reveal it in his biography of Freud and even
identifY the patient? Did Breuer and Freud in fact claim she was cured?
Both authors insisted that their treatment was not "causative," i.e., did not
affect the causes of illness. Both insisted that her "symptoms" cleared up
when she described under hypnosis the emotional circumstances of their
first appearance. Breuer noted at the end of the case that after his treatment
she suffered a temporary depression and that it was some years before she
"regained her mental balance entirely." Does this guarded conclusion con–
stitute a claim of "cure"? Freud's own version of the case seemed to become
increasingly sanguine in the Clark Lectures in
1909,
where he claimed that
no one had ever before cured an "hysterical symptom" by catharsis. Then,
in
1925,
he wrote more expansively that Breuer had relieved his patient of
"all her symptoms," surely suggestive of a more complete remission. Here
Freud was clearly embellishing the story around the time he was writing
Breuer's obituary. Had his memory slipped? Was it deliberate obfuscation?
Was it exaggerated praise of Breuer? It is impossible to know.
Why, at the time, did Breuer not describe her relapse? He had begun
to treat the case when his patient was twenty-one years old in
1880.
He
published the case thirteen years later when she was thirty-four and enter–
ing on a career as director of a Jewish orphanage and an advocate of
women's rights. Her family and probably her identity as a patient were well
known in Vienna. I would argue that consideration for her budding career
and her family prevented Breuer from being entirely candid. Indeed, Freud
mentioned the problem of "medical discretion" in his obituary of Breuer.
Anna O. herself destroyed all personal records of her illness as if it had been
a shameful episode.
Instead of the traditional "talking cure," Borch-Jacobsen would have
us believe that Anna
0.
was acting a role of which she was quite conscious
