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BERTHA PAPPENHEIM CONTINUES TO INTEREST psychoanalysts and other researchers even though her contacts with Breuer ended in 1882—some 90 years ago. Since the preparation of my recently published paper on Bertha Pappenheim (1972), Lucy Freeman's carefully researched book on Anna O. (1972), and Ellenberger's article (1972) containing new information about post-Breuer Bertha Pappenheim have appeared.
In the following paragraphs, I should like to focus on Ellenberger's data, which fill in some gaps in Bertha's life and which seem consistent with my offered explanation about Bertha's pathological mourning and its significance in her pathology.
Ellenberger's constant efforts to obtain information about Bertha Pappenheim, especially in the period following her therapy with Breuer, are, I feel, noteworthy. Karpe tells us that despite the termination of Bertha's treatment with Breuer in June 1882, she was subsequently hospitalized in a sanatarium; that in 1887, Martha Freud reported that Miss Pappenheim "felt pretty well during the days but … she still suffered from her hallucinatory states in the evenings" (Karpe, 1961). In 1890, she published a collection of grief stories, In der Trödelbude, under the pseudonym of Paul Berthold. In 1895, she became the house-mother in a Frankfurt Jewish orphanage, and from then on her career in social work was launched. The many achievements of her later adult life, without apparent illness, are well known.
In a recent paper, I have suggested that the case of Anna O. could be considered as an example of pathological mourning, triggered by the impending death of her father but deriving from