The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure

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.

Gabriel Brownstein is an associate professor of English at St. John’s College. His short stories have been published in The Harvard Review, Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All Story, and Glimmer Train. He won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his collection of stories, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3W, and his 2005 novel The Man from Beyond was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.