The Story of Anna O.

Anna O. was the cornerstone in the formation of Freud's discoveries and theories - yet he never saw her. He only heard about her in clinical detail from a colleague and friend who had treated and perhaps "cured" her. Grasping the implication of Breuer's revolutionary discovery about the human mind, Freud persuaded Breuer to collaborate with him in the first book about psychoanalysis, "Studies on Hysteria", containing Breuer's famous essay on Anna O. On the basis of discoveries inherent in that study, augmented by other experience and knowledge, Freud began to put together a hypothesis about how people get sick emotionally - and how they may get well. Lucy Freeman has taken a famous patient and made that patient come alive, a human being, a distinguished personality whose brief medical history is all that we have known of her until now.