Some More Speculations on Anna O.

She sat in a rocking chair, by her father's sick bed, looking at the window, and looking away from thoughts that she could never think. While confined to her dying father's room, she began to cough nervously, as she heard echoes of dancing and parties in the streets outside. Suddenly, her two arms changed into the shape of black wriggling snakes. Then her hair, her head, her fingers—all turned into snakes. The sheer terror drove her into frantic prayers—praying to a paternal god in English, so that her earthly father would not hear or understand her words. From that night on she would never speak German, until Dr. Breuer came to hear her prayers through the daily tales she told him.

The conundrum of Anna O. will be with us forever. There simply is not enough factual information to make conclusions. Yet the innuendos she arouses are multiple. The dark incestual themes haunt us, and the psychic splitting plagues us with divergent diagnostic thoughts. When Breuer saw Anna O. she appeared severed into two halves. She played out the false self roles of a good self and a bad self. Such a split self extends beyond oridinary hysterical dissociation and suggests borderline pathology: a split that has never healed and a malignant primary object that is seized up with split-off aggression. So we find an intrapsychic situation of pathological mourning doubly compounded with an actual death. Anna O.'s father died during the reported time of fermenting pathology.

What role did Anna O.'s mother play in the acute manifestation of her pathology? The mother threw her daughter into the frey of her father's degenerative illness (tuberculosis), requiring her daughter to be her husband's night nurse, despite the family wealth that certainly would have allowed for the hiring of a professional nurse. Anna O. spent night after night awake in her father's sickroom, at the expense of great social isolation. She would naturally have been erotically stimulated by this nearness to her father, whic