Who Was Anna O in Psychoanalysis?

Andrew Scull says Anna O was the foundation patient of psychoanalysis, and she was Joseph Breuer's patient, not Sigmund Freud's. Her real name was Bertha von Pappenheim. It stayed hidden for a long time behind the pseudonym, the way many of these cases used false names because the stories exposed a patient's inner life. She had nursed her father through an illness until he died, then developed physical symptoms that troubled her and became somewhat depressed. Breuer and Freud treated that as repressed memories and trauma. Memories lurking in the subconscious, returning in distorted form, became central to psychoanalysis.

Freud and Breuer wrote Studies in Hysteria, with short cases of patients Freud had treated. At first Freud thought the buried experiences were real, including childhood sexual assault that the person could not face. He later described resistance: the memories are hard to retrieve, the person fights them, and only long and painful work brings them into consciousness so the personality can change. In this account, what happens in childhood has a dramatic effect.