Introduction: The Changing History of a Case History

Abstract

It was Freud himself who first made the claim that Breuer’s case of Anna O., published in 1895 in the Studies on Hysteria, represented the inaugural moment of psychoanalysis. As early as 1904 there appeared a minor publication in which Breuer’s patient features in this role (Freud, 1904), but then five years later he placed her at the head of a much more public retrospective account of the development of psychoanalysis, the first lecture that he gave at Clark University on his trip to the United States in 1909:

If it is a merit to have brought psycho-analysis into being, that merit is not mine. I had no share in its earliest beginnings. I was a student and working for my final examinations at the time when another Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer, first (in 1880–2) made use of this procedure on a girl who was suffering from hysteria. (Freud, 1910, p. 9)

Das eigentlich Unverständige sonst verständiger Menschen ist, daß sie nicht zurechtzulegen wissen, was ein anderer sagt, aber nicht gerade trifft, wie er’s hätte sagen sollen.’

J. W. von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (1824)