Two Freudian case studies

Anna O
Anna O is often described as Freud’s first case study. In fact, she was not really his patient at all but
that of a colleague, Josef Breuer, with whom Freud wrote Studies on Hysteria, a collaborative work
in which her case is presented. Anna was a pseudonym for Bertha Pappenheim, a 21-year-old
Jewish girl who first visited Breuer in 1880. Her symptoms included a severe cough, hallucinations,
disturbed vision and hearing, and paralysis of the right side of the body. Anna had been brought up
in a very strict household and was sexually ignorant and immature. She had nursed her father
through a terminal illness and, after his death, her symptoms grew worse.

During the day, she experienced hallucinations and at night fell into a trance and mumbled to
herself. Breuer found that by encouraging her to describe these hallucinations and say aloud the
words she normally mumbled, he could bring her some relief. Later, she developed a fear of water
and was unable to drink for days at a time. During one of her trances, she recalled watching an
English tourist allow her dog to drink water from a glass. After she had described this sight and
released the emotion connected to it (in this case disgust), she was able to drink once more. Again
and again Breuer found that by tracing a symptom back to its source it could be removed. For
example, Anna had wanted to cry while sitting by her father, but she thought her tears would
disturb him. And when she wanted to check the time, she had to squint. This had led to her
impaired vision. The paralysis was traced once again to her father’s bedside. One night she had
seen a black snake. Obviously, she couldn’t scream because it would have upset and frightened her
father. She was so afraid that the right side of her body seemed to go numb, and she found that she
couldn’t move her right arm.

Dora
Dora, whose real name was Ida Bauer, was 18 when her father first brought her to see Freud. Like
Anna O, she was diagnosed as hysteric. In Dora’s case, however, she seems to have suffered with
hysterical symptoms since childhood.

Like Anna, Dora suffered from multiple symptoms, including migraines, depression, breathing
difficulties, nervous cough, and inexplicable voice loss. Her parents were unhappily married and
her father had begun an affair with the wife of a close friend (whom Freud names Mrs K). The
husband (Mr K) had made sexual suggestions to Dora, who suspected her father of secretly offering
her to Mr K in return for his wife (something Freud did not believe).

Freud concluded that her symptoms derived from jealousy. In other words, it was a classic Oedipal
(or rather Electra) conflict: Dora was jealous of Mrs K and wished to replace her. Freud also
suspected a great deal of ambivalence towards Mr K and a possible lesbian attraction to Mrs K.

Adapted from: http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/17828/1/the-freudian-case-studies.html