“Cure With A Defect”: A Previously Unpublished Letter by Freud Concerning ‘Anna O.’1
Abstract
The paper makes available the text of a previously unpublished letter by Freud, probably
addressed to the founder of British ecology and former patient, Sir Arthur Tansley, F.R.S., dating
from 1932, concerning the treatment and later life of 'Anna O.', the first patient of
psychoanalysis. It gives the full text of Freud’s letter as discovered, and offers a brief
commentary on its significance as evidence of Freud’s view or views of Anna O.’s treatment,
case-history and later life. The authors compare the view of Anna O.'s treatment and later life
with other sources, in particular Freud's roughly contemporaneous letter to Stefan Zweig. The
letter's principal novel formulation is to be found in the phrase 'cure with a defect' with which
***
The following letter was recently discovered amongst the papers of Sir Arthur Tansley,
F.R.S. (1871-1955), in the Library of the Department of Plant Sciences in the University of
Cambridge. On the face of it, it appears to be by Sigmund Freud, although it is written in the
addition to the accounts that Freud gave of the case of Anna O., the case that opened the book he
2
co-authored with Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1895). The purpose of this short
communication is to give the full text of Freud’s letter and offer a brief commentary on its
significance as evidence of Freud’s view or views of Anna O.’s treatment, case-history and later
life.2 However, some basic information about Tansley may prove useful to readers.
Tansley, an English botanist with deep interests in psychology and philosophy, was for
University College London till 1906, when he was appointed Lecturer in Botany at Cambridge, a
post he resigned in 1923. Following his growing interest in psychoanalysis during the First
World War, he published a bestseller, The New Psychology and its Relation to Life, in 1920. For
three months in 1922, and again for six months in 1924, he was in analysis with Freud; he
became a full member of the British Psycho-analytical Society in 1925, and remained a member
till his death in 1955. In 1927, he was elected Fellow of Magdalen College and Sherardian
Professor of Botany in the University of Oxford, retiring in 1937. He played a guiding role in
government post-war nature conservation planning which began in 1941 and led to the
foundation in 1949 of the Nature Conservancy, of which he was the first Chairman, holding the
At the top of the single manuscript page on which the letter is copied out is the following
The full text of the transcription of Freud’s letter which follows this heading reads as follows:
3
Meine Vermutungen über den Hergang bei Breuer’s erster Patientin sind sicherlich
richtig. Er hat sie gegen seine Tochter, die ihn nach der Lektüre meiner Darstellung
Auch ist der Verlauf des Falles nicht rätselhaft. In Breuers Kranken[ge]schichte findet
sich ein kurzer Satz: - “brauchte aber doch noch längere Zeit bis sie ganz ihr
verbirgt sich die Tatsache, dass sie nach Breuers Flucht neuerdings in Psychose verfiel,
und ziemlich lange - ich glaube 3/4 Jahr - in einer Anstalt fern von Wien verbringen
musste. Dann war die Erkrankung abgelaufen, aber es war eine Heilung mit Defekt. Sie
hat heute über 70 Jahre, nie geheiratet, und nach Breuers Ausspruch, an den ich mich
gut erinnere, nie eine Liebesbeziehung gehabt. Unter der Bedingung des Verzichts auf
die ganze Liebesfunktion durfte sie gesund bleiben. Breuers Behandlung hatte ihr,
sozusagen, über die Trauer hinweggeholfen. Es ist interessant, dass sie, so lange sie tätig
In English translation4:
“My guesses about what happened afterwards with Breuer’s first patient are certainly
In addition the course of the case is not enigmatic. In Breuer’s case-history, you will find
a short sentence: - “but it was a considerable time before she regained her mental balance
entirely.” (Studien über Hysterie, p. 32).5 Behind this is concealed the fact that, after
Breuer’s flight, she once again fell back into psychosis, and for a longish time - I think it
was 3/4 of a year - had to be put in an institution some way from Vienna. Subsequently
the disease had run its course, but it was a cure with a defect. Today she is over 70, has
never married, and, as Breuer said, which I remember well, has not had any sexual
relations. On condition of the renunciation of the entire sexual function she was able to
remain healthy. Breuer’s treatment, so to speak, helped her over her mourning. It is of
interest that, as long as she was active, she devoted herself to her principal concern, the
Firstly, it relates to Breuer’s “famous first patient” (Freud (1914) 11-12) as Freud called her in
On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement. As is clear from Freud’s own repeated use of
the case history of Anna O. in his expositions of psychoanalysis, the story of this famous first
patient not only has great historical interest, but is useful and still debated over as a source of
understanding of psychoanalysis itself. As Freud put it, Breuer “found a technique for bringing
to her consciousness the unconscious processes which contained the sense of her symptoms, and
5
the symptoms disappeared.... This discovery of Breuer's is still the foundation of psycho-analytic
Secondly, Freud placed much emphasis on the fact that, behind Breuer’s published case-history,
there was a hidden story to which only he was privy, through his discussions with Breuer and
through his reconstructions of the events that went on in the early 1880s. Again, this hidden story
had more than a strictly personal or historical interest, since Freud argued that Breuer had
accidentally discovered the fundamental phenomenon that, for Freud, was the foundation for the
entire sexual theory of the neuroses: “The fact of the emergence of the transference in its crudely
sexual form, whether affectionate or hostile, in every treatment of a neurosis, although this is
neither desired nor induced by either doctor or patient, has always seemed to me the most
irrefragable proof that the source of the driving forces of neurosis lies in sexual life.” (Freud
In his treatment of her case, Breuer was able to make use of a very intense suggestive
rapport with the patient, which may serve us as a complete prototype of what we call
`transference' to-day. Now I have strong reasons for suspecting that after all her
symptoms had been relieved Breuer must have discovered from further indications the
Thus, any accounts of Freud’s which give further information about the treatment of Anna O.
and the sources of his information regarding this treatment will help us reconstruct how Freud
came to a different view of the case of Anna O. than the one Breuer placed on record in 1895 -
“The element of sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her. The patient, whose life became
known to me to an extent which one person's life is seldom known to another, had never been in
6
love.” (Breuer and Freud (1895) 21-2) Freud himself as he grew older seemed to make of the
‘reading’ of the case history of Anna O. a potential experimentum crucis regarding the
correctness of psychoanalytic theory. The interpretation of the case not only confirmed the later
importance he accorded to the aetiology of sexuality in the neuroses, but was also an index of the
rationality of the steps by which he moved steadily away from something close to Breuer’s
position to his own mature view. His challenge to the reader in a number of publications appears
to be: If indeed one could prove that Anna O.’s neurosis was entirely without the sexual
elements that have come to be associated with psycho-analytic treatment and explanation, then
It will be remembered that Breuer said of his famous first patient that the element of
sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her and had contributed nothing to the very
rich clinical picture of the case. I have always wondered why the critics did not more
aetiology in the neuroses, and even to-day I do not know whether I ought to regard this as
Freud’s letter to Tansley concerning Anna O. is one of a small number of documents that
date from the 1920s and 1930s relating to the case. Most of Freud’s accounts of the case of Anna
O. were published as part of general presentations of psychoanalysis to a wider public. His first
account of the case was as part of the Five Lectures delivered in Worcester, Massachusetts in
1909 to a general American audience. (Freud (1910) 14) In his Introductory Lectures of 1916-
17, he mentioned the case of Anna O. at certain key points in his exposition of the sense of
symptoms and the relation of psychoanalysis to hypnotism. (Freud (1916-17) 257-8, 279, 292) In
7
three general short accounts of psychoanalysis written in the early 1920s, Freud made what had
become by then a canonical reference to Breuer’s first patient as the starting point of
psychoanalysis. (Freud (1923 [1922]) 235, 237; Freud (1924 [1923]) 193-4, 197; Freud (1926)
263-4)
The lengthiest accounts of the case of Anna O. in Freud’s published writings, however,
are to be found in those curiously hybrid - and, in relation to Breuer, curiously vacillating (see
History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914) and An Autobiographical Study (1925). These
documents - expository, historical, autobiographical - have set the precedent that has been
followed ever since: questions concerning the ‘true’ history of Anna O.’s treatment by Breuer
have become pressing for each of those who wish to give a historical account of the development
of analysis, a wish that simultaneously expresses itself as an inquiry into the early development
Thus, in October 1928, when Ernest Jones was asked to give a biographical account of
Freud - premonitions of things to come! -, the very first question of fact he put to Freud
concerned Anna O., as if Freud’s awareness of her case marked his birth as ‘Freud’:
I have been asked to write a Biography of you for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If there
is time I will send you a copy to correct, but feel I should be competent for even this
responsible task. I wonder if you can remember when it was that Breuer first told you of
Anna O.? I assume it must be about 1884. (Freud/Jones (1993) 20 October 1928, 650)
Freud’s reply was direct but failed to answer precisely the question Jones had specifically asked
him:
8
You are right in assuming that Breuer's reports of his case date from about 1884. Our
relationship began gradually about 1882, in 1885 I went to Paris. (Freud/Jones (1993) 27
Around the same time (probably in 1927), Marie Bonaparte made notes about conversations she
had during her analysis with Freud about the famous first patient of Breuer’s.(Borch-Jacobsen
(1996) 30, 93-103) Five years later, Stefan Zweig’s quasi-biographical study of Freud, Mental
Healers of 1932, elicited the frankest and most detailed account, prompted by what Freud
It [your book] declares that Breuer's patient under hypnosis made the confession of
having experienced and suppressed certain “sentimenti illeciti” (i.e. of a sexual nature)
while sitting at her father's sickbed. In reality she said nothing of the kind; rather she
indicated that she was trying to conceal from her father her agitated condition, above all
her tender concern. If things had been as your text maintains, then everything else would
have taken a different turn. I would not have been surprised by the discovery of sexual
etiology, Breuer would have found it more difficult to refute this theory, and if hypnosis
could obtain such candid confessions, I probably would never have abandoned it.
What really happened with Breuer's patient I was able to guess later on, long after the
break in our relations, when I suddenly remembered something Breuer had once told me
in another context before we had begun to collaborate and which he never repeated. On
the evening of the day when all her symptoms had been disposed of, he was summoned
to the patient again, found her confused and writhing in abdominal cramps. Asked what
what was wrong with her, she replied: “Now Dr. B.'s child is coming!”
9
At this moment he held in his hand the key that would have opened the “doors to the
Mothers”, but he let it drop. With all his great intellectual gifts there was nothing
Faustian in his nature. Seized by conventional horror he took flight and abandoned the
patient to a colleague. For months afterwards she struggled to regain her health in a
sanatorium.
youngest daughter (born shortly after the above-mentioned treatment, not without
significance for the deeper connections!) read my account and asked her father about it
(shortly before his death). He confirmed my version, and she informed me about it later.
When Ernest Jones published the first volume of his biography of Freud in 1953, he gave
an account of Breuer’s treatment of Anna O. which made public for the first time the fact that
Breuer’s case history was at best partial and at worst highly misleading as to the subsequent fate
of his patient and her medical treatment. He in part based himself on stories told him directly by
Freud, and in part on the evidence of letters exchanged between Freud and his then fiancée
Martha Bernays, from 1882 on. Some of these letters have subsequently been made partially
available. (Forrester (1986), Forrester (1990), Appignanesi and Forrester (1992) 81-2) Following
Jones’ account, pioneering research by Henri Ellenberger (1972) and Albrecht Hirschmüller
(1978/1989) has revealed the extent to which Anna O. - Bertha Pappenheim - suffered a severe
and prolonged relapse following the end of her treatment by Breuer. Subsequent research into
her case and into the various accounts given by Breuer, Freud and others is conveniently
can be perfectly combined with remarkably sustained tendentiousness. We do not intend to enter
into these controversies here, but this previously unpublished letter does call for some
commentary concerning certain new elements concerning Freud’s view of the case. It should be
borne in mind that the letter was written only five months after Freud had written, off his own
The first sentence of the letter is probably a response to Tansley’s query concerning the
reliability of the account Freud had given in On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement
and An Autobiographical Study. In his letter to Zweig, Freud had referred to having been “so
convinced of this reconstruction of mine that I published it somewhere” - leaving it unclear what
publication he was referring to. This letter to Tansley confirms that the passage Dora Breuer read
was in An Autobiographical Study, published in February 1925, and she must have asked her
father about it before his death on 20 June 1925.6 What exactly Dora Breuer asked her father,
and what exactly he confirmed must remain a matter of speculation, as both Fichtner (1989, 75)
and Borch-Jacobsen (1996, 37-8) agree. In contrast to the letter Freud wrote Zweig, to Tansley
he gives no further details whatsoever of the “untoward event” (Freud (1914) 12; English in the
original) which abruptly terminated Anna O.’s treatment, beyond informing him that Breuer had
The next paragraph of the letter is framed in a way that at first reading might be called
more ‘conciliatory’ in relation to Breuer’s published account than his remarks to Zweig and his
reported comments to Bonaparte.7 Freud emphasizes the ‘considerable time’ that Breuer had
admitted elapsed before she regained her health. In the Zweig letter, he mentions “for months
afterwards”; in the letter to Tansley he speaks of “a longish time - I think it was 3/4 of a year -
had to be put in an institution some way from Vienna”. Following the most accurate modern
11
reconstruction of Anna O.’s treatment, that of Albrecht Hirschmüller, we see that Bertha
Pappenheim spent four months from July to October 1882 being treated at Kreuzlingen and then
two further periods at the asylum at Inzersdorf, one of five and a half months, the second of four
months, in 1883-85, and a further 18-day stay in July 1887. (Hirschmüller (1978/1989), 279-301)
We thus see that Freud’s recollection of these events from fifty years previously was not far off,
although he may well have been omitting from his calculation the second and third stays at
Inzersdorf. It should be noted, however, that this is the only extant source in which Freud
specifies so exactly the length of time for which, to his knowledge, Bertha required subsequent
The story told to Zweig of the final scene of Anna O.’s treatment - the drama of the
hysterical pregnancy - is not present in the letter to Tansley; that drama is summed up in the
phrase “Breuer’s flight”. Yet the next sentence - ‘Subsequently the disease had run its course’ -
strikes a new note. It is as if the disease had an internal dynamic, relatively unaffected by
Breuer’s intervention. And Freud completes the sentence with a striking formulation: “it was a
cure with a defect (Heilung mit Defekt).” The rest of the letter is in one sense a clarification of
what this formulation means: healthy, capable of work, but, in order to be so, throughout the
whole of her life she was obliged to renounce sexual relations. This, we suggest, is the defect
Freud is referring to - rather than to the failure of Breuer’s treatment in curing her immediately.
What Freud is evoking is the psychoanalytic aim of rendering a patient capable of ‘love and
work’. Anna O., he is pointing out, was capable of work, but not love - in the sense of sexual
love.
treatment, so to speak, helped her over [hinweggeholfen] her mourning.” One might read this as
12
attributing to Breuer’s cathartic cure the sole function of allowing her mourning to run its course
- independently of another episode of illness, one which was not connected with her mourning,
and one which was fundamentally unaffected by Breuer’s treatment. Speculatively, one might
say that Freud is implicitly invoking a complex, as opposed to simple, disease-picture, one laid
over the other. Breuer’s cathartic cure addressed only those symptoms connected with her
mourning for her father - but left untouched another disease, which progressed in accordance
with its own temporality.8 The syntactically peculiar feature of this sentence - why did Freud add
‘sozusagen’ (‘so to speak’)? - indicates hesitation about the correct verb to use to describe
Given that the formula ‘cure with a defect’ is immediately followed by the brief sketch of
the striking sexual abstinence of Anna O.’s later life, the letter implies that the defect as much as
the cure should be attributed to, or at least put into connection with, Breuer’s treatment. What
could be the implication of the phrase Freud uses: “and, as Breuer said, which I remember well,
has not had any sexual relations”? Freud was almost certainly referring to the passage already
cited from Breuer’s case-history: “The element of sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in
her. The patient, whose life became known to me to an extent which one person's life is seldom
known to another, had never been in love”. (Breuer and Freud (1895) 21-2) Here, in writing to
Tansley in 1932, he treats Breuer’s account as an accurate account of Anna O.’s sexual life - and
then extends it unchanged from the period of her treatment, when she was in her early 20s, to her
old age. The implication is that her sexuality as Breuer observed it got frozen in aspic - and that
Breuer’s treatment of her might have had a part in that process of freezing. It should also be
noted that, in his published account of the case in the Introductory Lectures of 1916-17, he had
made a similar, although less pointed, remark: “In spite of her recovery, in a certain respect she
13
remained cut off from life; she remained healthy and efficient but avoided the normal course of a
It is the ordering of the sentences in the letter that is singular, and requires careful
interpretation. The last five sentences repeat an oscillation in time: from the moment of the cure
with a defect in the early 1880s to Anna O.’s fully unfolded and revealed life as seen in the
1930s, then back to the early 1880s and the exact effect of Breuer’s treatment, and then forward
again to the 1930s and her lifelong struggle against ‘white slavery’. Why does Freud engage in
While repeating the oscillation, the sentences have an opposite character to each other,
the first set negative, second set positive. The first set connects what was lacking in the cure - the
‘defect’ - with what was lacking in Anna O.’s later life - sexual relations. The second set
connects what Breuer’s treatment did do for his patient - helped over her mourning for the father
- with what she did do in her later, healthy life - campaign against ‘white slavery’. The
oscillation shows first the losses and then the gains of Anna O.’s life. Yet even the gain is
thematically related, Freud clearly implies, to her treatment by Breuer. Bertha Pappenheim
campaigned against the male exploitation and defilement of young women and also - and equally
- campaigned to safeguard young women from violation, setting up houses for their protection.
Freud implies that this positive action of protecting young women from being violated by men is
in some sense the positive version of the negative abstinence from sexual relations. It is what he
might elsewhere have called the substitute-formation, perhaps even the sublimation, of her
And, hidden in the subtext perhaps, but visible in this repeated oscillation and in the
subtle link between ‘Breuer’s flight’ and the ‘cure with a defect’, is the notion that Breuer failed
14
to grasp Anna O.’s sexuality - it was his flight from her that left her with the permanent ‘defect’
of a sexless but healthy life. There is perhaps an assumption that underlies Freud’s account:
namely that there are moments in a person’s life, of which Anna O.’s ‘cure with a defect’ was
one, which constitute a crossroads, where irrevocable choices are made. Freud implies that
Breuer dropping Anna O. stone-dead slammed the door on one path out of her illness - via the
transference-love for Breuer to some other mode of liberation of her sexuality. As a result of her
being abandoned, she had to accomplish this work herself, in the mid-1880s, putting her self
back together as a self-made woman, and in the process closing down her sexuality forever - or
rather replacing it with her work on behalf of violated girls. All of Freud’s accounts make this
assumption: there are crossroads and turning-points in people’s lives, and this was one such for
Anna O.
Curiously enough, Breuer’s own unpublished notes, which Freud never saw, moved half-
way to recognizing something of the shift in her sexuality, a recognition one can be reasonably
certain Freud would have endorsed: “At all events, she has never been in love to the extent that
this has replaced her relationship to her father; it has itself, rather, been replaced by that
relationship.” (Breuer’s case notes, quoted in Hirschmüller (1978/1989) 108) Breuer mused that
Anna O.’s capacity for love was wrapped up in her relationship to her father. In 1914 Freud saw
the ‘untoward event’ as having revealed “the sexual motivation of this transference” that
Breuer’s treatment had benefitted from. It would be only a small step - Freud’s step - to see Anna
O.’s relationship to her father as having been transferred onto her therapeutic relationship to
Breuer. What Breuer’s flight did, Freud implied, was close up the Pandora’s box he had opened -
i.e. oblige Anna O. to undo the transference to Breuer and restore it once again to the hidden
place it had formerly occupied. Thenceforth her sexuality remained tied to her father and thus
15
inertly invisible in an immediately recognizable sexual form. The defect of his treatment is to be
seen in Anna O.’s incapacity for sexual fulfilment.9 The text of this letter makes it more doubtful
that Freud’s view was that the cure of her illness (as opposed to the resolution of her mourning)
It should be noted - and we hope that this reminder is superfluous - that these
speculations concerning Anna O.’s illness and Breuer’s treatment of her do not bear directly on
the actual facts of the matter, but solely on Freud’s construal and interpretation of them, as
It is, then, in the formulation ‘a cure with a defect’ that this letter adds to our knowledge
of Freud’s view of Breuer’s treatment of Anna O. Nonetheless, given the considerable debate
that has developed over Anna O., the famous first patient, there is much else in this letter which
It is worth remembering that every communication is framed and modulated by the specific
relationship between the two persons communicating. What might we be able to deduce from the
content of Freud’s letter about his relationship with Tansley? And, inversely, how might our
background knowledge of the relationship between Freud and Tansley guide our interpretation of
the letter?
The obvious comparison is with the letter Freud wrote to Stefan Zweig earlier in 1932, in
which he ‘divulged’ details of the ‘untoward event’ which terminated Anna O.’s treatment. None
of these details are to be found in Freud’s letter to Tansley. An immediate and evident, though
16
not necessarily a sufficient, reason is that Freud was writing to Zweig to correct a version of the
Anna O. story that had appeared in print, which he, we may infer, wished Zweig to correct in
later editions of his book. Freud is already confronted with a public version of the Anna O. story
which he wishes to correct; having been minimally informative about the episode in his own
writing, he certainly did not wish to see an alternative - in his view, incorrect - version
circulating. In writing to Tansley, he is not confronted with such an extant public version; it is
most probable that Tansley’s letter was a simple letter of enquiry, and one which already took
into account Freud’s own published versions, and treated them as authoritative as far as they
went. Tansley simply wanted to know a little more. Freud told him a little more, but - with our
benefit of hindsight - was decidedly discreet about the details of the ‘untoward event’. Was this
only because Zweig had published an erroneous account, whereas Tansley was simply asking for
more information? Or was this because Zweig was close enough to Freud to be allowed these
This question is a difficult one to answer. We know of others besides Zweig to whom
Freud revealed some of the details of the ‘untoward event’: Ernest Jones, James Strachey and
Marie Bonaparte. All four of these figures were undoubtedly closer to Freud than Tansley was,
and therefore there may have been a criterion of intimacy, if not reliability, that Freud informally
kept to in deciding to whom to reveal his ‘reconstruction’. It should be noted, however, that this
appears to have been exactly Tansley’s reason for writing to Freud, as he himself records it in his
lecture (full details are given below): “Freud indeed in a later work records his strong suspicion
that Breuer was eventually shocked to discover overt sexual manifestations in Anna, and that this
had something to do with his withdrawal from the cathartic work on hysteria. I had the curiosity
to write to Freud and enquire whether he knew exactly what happened.” The presence of such an
17
‘intimacy-criterion’ may thus explain the fact that Tansley apparently did ask specifically about
the dénouement of the case of Anna O., and in effect was fobbed off, just as Ernest Jones was in
1928, with an interesting letter which did not reply adequately to Tansley’s question. In the letter
to Tansley, Freud gives the frame (absence of sexual relations, campaign against sexual
exploitation of girls - juxtaposed with “Breuer's flight”) without recounting the central scene.
Whatever Freud’s respect for Tansley - as a patient he knew and respected, and as a prestigious
man of science in Britain - he almost certainly did not regard him as an intimate. Nor was
Tansley completely sound on doctrinal questions - we know of at least one occasion when Freud
basic psychoanalytic concepts, such as the unconscious. (Cameron and Forrester, 1999) And
there is an additional factor: Tansley had already shown himself to be a capable and successful
popularizer of psychoanalysis, and quite possibly told Freud that his letter of enquiry was written
in the course of the preparation of public lectures on the early history of psychoanalysis. Freud
may, therefore, have been more careful than otherwise about what he told such an effective
popularizer, in the interests of ‘controlling’ the public view of psychoanalysis and its early
history.
It is prima facie implausible that the letter in Tansley’s handwriting is anything other than a
letter from Freud. It does, after all, state at the top: “Letter from Freud on Breuer’s “Anna O.” 20
Nov. 1932.” What reason would Tansley, a respectable scientist and prominent supporter of
psychoanalysis, have for attributing to Freud a text which was not in fact by Freud? Nonetheless,
18
to still all such doubts, we would like to present the circumstantial evidence which allows us to i.
endorse with circumstantial evidence the presumption based upon applying a principle of charity
to this manuscript; ii. place the letter more firmly within the context of Tansley’s own work, and
iii. give a reason as to why the only trace of the letter is this transcription of the original. This
evidence also allows us to conclude with certainty that Tansley was the original addressee of the
letter (i.e. he did not borrow this letter from a colleague - for instance, Ernest Jones, who, as we
have already noted, had in 1928 already asked Freud specific questions about Anna O.’s
The single page letter was found in an unlabelled box-file of Tansley’s papers in which
his executors stored many of his papers. There is nothing exceptional about this file, although
there is much that is interesting in it. There are typewritten drafts of papers, some by Tansley,
some by others; there are notes for lectures Tansley gave, both in botany and on “the new
psychology”. There are notes and drafts, including a Preface for a book called Essays on the New
Psychology, which Tansley appeared to be preparing for publication; however, this follow-up to
his first book on psychology never appeared. (Tansley did complete and publish a book entitled
Mind and Life, but of a very different sort, and only in the 1950s). There is also an
Autobiographical Introduction written by Tansley on the occasion of his delivering a talk to the
Magdalen College Philosophy Club (Oxford) in May 1932. One contextual fact of importance is
that there are many other notes in this box with the date 1932, most of them from earlier in the
year than November. There are also a series of notes on Freud's writings, particularly the
writings of the 1890s - on Angstneurosen, Abwehrneurosen, etc, - neatly dated and with page
references down the side, indicating a reference to the German texts Tansley was working on.
19
There is also a manuscript of four or five pages of similar notes on some of the cases from
Studien über Hysterie - Katherina and Elizabeth von R. - but not Anna O. When it was first
found by L.C., the manuscript was not immediately adjacent to these notes, but was not
separated by many texts from them. Thus, the position of the letter in the box leads one to
believe that it formed part of Tansley’s research into Freud’s early writings in psychoanalysis.
This hypothesis is confirmed by a typewritten Ms. also in the box entitled ‘The Historical
discussion, constitutes pp. 5-19 of this Ms.; pp. 20-21 goes on to discuss the absence of sexuality
in the case, and the discussion continues on to p. 22. We quote from these pages:
In 1881 Breuer certainly had not the theoretical equipment necessary for anything like a
thorough analysis. He was simply feeling his way. It is clear for instance, in view of later
work, that the girl’s attachment to her father and the snake hallucination were strongly
sexual; and indeed Breuer’s report of the complete absence of any sexual manifestation in
her life or illness is in itself more than suspicious. Such a situation so far as we know
simply does not exist. Freud indeed in a later work records his strong suspicion that
Breuer was eventually shocked to discover overt sexual manifestations in Anna, and that
this had something to do with his withdrawal from the cathartic work on hysteria.
I had the curiosity to write to Freud and enquire whether he knew exactly what happened.
He replied that his suspicions were entirely confirmed by Breuer in reply to direct
questions from his own (Breuer’s) daughter whose interest was aroused by reading
Freud’s remarks: further, that in fact Anna became ill again when Breuer’s treatment
stopped and had to go to an institution for about 9 months. There she really did finally
20
recover, and is now an old lady of over 70, having maintained her health; but she has
never married nor, so far as is known, has she ever had any love relation.
I think we may safely conclude that Breuer really did cure her of the very severe hysteria
precipitated by her father’s illness and death but that she then transferred her love to him.
After his “flight” as Freud calls it in his letter to me, she had a new attack, but with her
improved psychical and physical health she was able to overcome this after a time by
herself, very likely by renewed and now permanently effective repression, [JF: added in
pen by AGT: ‘but without the aid of “conversion” into physical symptoms’.] It is clear
that the situation in the traumatic scene when Anna was waiting for the surgeon by her
father’s sick bed was never analysed at all. The repression of the psychical elements
contributing to that psychical situation was never removed. However that may be, Breuer
deserves the greatest credit both for his persistence and for his insight into mechanism.”
This passage ends his discussion of the case of Anna O.; a bridge section then leads into an
exposition of the case of Lucy R., also from the Studien über Hysterie.
The faithfulness of this account to the letter from Freud printed above indicates that
Freud’s reply to his enquiry to which Tansley refers in his exposition is the one discovered in the
box. Thus, like Ernest Jones, Tansley’s curiosity concerning the exact fate of Anna O. had been
aroused both by the case-history itself and by Freud’s later discussions of it; almost certainly, it
was the following passage in On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement that awakened
Tansley’s curiosity:
Anyone who reads the history of Breuer's case now in the light of the knowledge gained
in the last twenty years will at once perceive the symbolism in it - the snakes, the
stiffening, the paralysis of the arm - and, on taking into account the situation at the
21
bedside of the young woman's sick father, will easily guess the real interpretation of her
symptoms; his opinion of the part played by sexuality in her mental life will therefore be
very different from that of her doctor. In his treatment of her case, Breuer was able to
make use of a very intense suggestive rapport with the patient, which may serve us as a
complete prototype of what we call `transference' to-day. Now I have strong reasons for
suspecting that after all her symptoms had been relieved Breuer must have discovered
from further indications the sexual motivation of this transference, but that the universal
nature of this unexpected phenomenon escaped him, with the result that, as though
confronted by an ‘untoward event’, he broke off all further investigation. He never said
this to me in so many words, but he told me enough at different times to justify this
reconstruction of what happened. When I later began more and more resolutely to put
forward the significance of sexuality in the aetiology of neuroses, he was the first to show
the reaction of distaste and repudiation which was later to become so familiar to me, but
which at that time I had not yet learnt to recognize as my inevitable fate. (Freud (1914)
11-12)
Further information about Tansley’s Ms. can be gleaned from a letter annexed to the Ms. from
John Rickman, dated 18 January 1933, which is without doubt a commentary on the typed Ms.,
since there are a number of marks in the margin which are John Rickman’s, clearly alluded to in
his letter to Tansley, which are then the starting point for Tansley’s emendations (in his own
hand) in scrupulous accordance with Rickman’s suggestions. Rickman’s letter allows Tansley’s
aim in the paper to become clearer. Rickman’s letter opens: “This paper is clear & convincing,
but what a difficult task you will have before you when you come to link it with the second
period characterised by the “Three Contributions”.” And he ends his letter on p. 5: “This paper is
22
the easier of the two, the next will prove difficult; in this you have only to show how he de-
conditioned conditioned reflexes, in the next how the reflex paths are found - a very different
matter!/Yours ever/J.R.”
We can thus deduce that Tansley was writing a two-part paper which he intended - or
contemplated - submitting to the British Journal of Medical Psychology, for which Rickman was
Assistant Editor, in which capacity he was writing to Tansley; the paper would deal with the
development of Freud’s ideas in relation to biological science. (There is, indeed, an incomplete
Ms. in the box-file entitled “II Biology and Psychology”, but it is not clear that this was the
second part of the two-part paper, since it deals primarily with the general theory of instincts and
reflexes, in particular J.B. Watson’s ideas, in the context of evolutionary theory.) Nonetheless, it
is also clear that the Ms. in which Tansley used Freud’s information concerning Anna O. was
originally a spoken contribution to a Symposium (which internal evidence indicates took place in
the evening).
Furthermore, it is possible to infer that the passage concerning Freud’s letter to Tansley
was a late addition to the Ms. As we noted, the discussion of Anna O.’s sexuality covers pp. 20-
22 in the Ms.; the passage concerning Freud’s letter begins half way down p. 21 and finishes a
third of the way down the next page, which is numbered p. 21a (in typescript). The next four
pages were originally numbered 21, 22, 23, 24 in typescript, but have been altered in ink so as to
run 22, 23, 24, 25. From p. 26 on, the original numbering required no further emendation. In
addition, the pagination of p. 20 in the Ms. is in ink, not typescript, and the final sentence of the
page includes an addition in ink of ‘p. 22.’, implying that the text should go from this point to p.
22 - which is not the present p. 22, but is thus clearly a p. 22 of an earlier draft. Thus we can
infer that an original draft had interleaved in it the section discussing Anna O.’s subsequent fate,
23
including the information derived from Freud’s letter. This makes it highly plausible that
Tansley had prepared the bulk of the lecture/paper before receiving Freud’s letter in late
November 1932, and then added this section (either for the version given to the Symposium or
subsequent to it, for the version sent to Rickman). Unfortunately, it has not been possible to
Note also that this explanation of Tansley transcribing the letter explains the omissions
from the letter. Given what we know of Freud’s letter-writing habits, it is extremely unlikely that
he omitted to make any personal comments or ask for any of Tansley’s personal news; Tansley
was, after all, a former patient and respected follower of Freud’s. The omission of such passages
from the transcription is completely understandable if we recognize that Tansley was interested
for professional reasons only in the passage in the letter which was pertinent to his lecture/paper
A final question can also be answered: Why did Tansley copy out Freud’s letter, since it
was addressed to him? One possibility is that he gave the letter to someone else, but, before
doing so, wished to retain a copy for himself. There is no evidence for this - though that does not
mean it is not true - although the above consideration (namely that this is clearly only the torso
of a letter) also argues against his having given the letter to someone else. There is, however,
evidence that Tansley had another reason for copying out the letter. In the summer of 1953, Dr
Kurt Eissler interviewed Tansley - probably in Cambridge; the interview was taped and later
transcribed. Dr. Eissler deposited the transcription in the Sigmund Freud Archives, which are
now held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Tansley gave Eissler an account of his
contact with Freud and, towards the end of the interview, the following interchange occurs:
24
Tansley Yes, I believe I’ve got them somewhere but I haven’t looked them up a long time.
know about a new way of sedation of some what Freud had done. So I wrote and
considerable difficulty because this German script /laughs/ wasn’t very good. I
mean the handwriting wasn’t very good. It puzzled me but I did eventually make
it out. /laughs/
Tansley But that was all. You can’t say that we had a continuous correspondence of any
We suspect that the sentence “But I wanted to know about a new way of sedation of some what
Freud had done.” - on the face of it, a very odd thing to say - is a mangled transcription of a
statement referring to Tansley’s interest in the case of Anna O. (There are a number of other
similarly mangled transcriptions throughout the 22 page transcript.) It is plausible that ‘Patient’
might easily have been misheard by the transcriber as ‘Sedation’, particularly if transcription
mistakes in the words immediately prior to it had already been made. On this assumption, the
phrase “I wrote and asked him to tell me what happened in connection with it afterwards, and he
25
wrote me immediately, answering my question” refers to Tansley’s initial enquiry about Anna O.
and Freud’s response in the letter published here for the first time. Tansley’s difficulty with
Freud’s gothic script has been shared by many others, particularly those not educated in the
schools of German-speaking countries. Thus we suspect that his puzzlement over Freud’s script
led him to copy out the letter in Roman script - reasonably successfully, we may infer, as the Ms.
here reproduced indicates (“I did eventually make it out”). Tansley’s difficulty in reading
Freud’s handwriting is thus sufficient explanation of his copying out the letter. Where the
original letter is, together with the other letters that Freud and Tansley exchanged, is not as yet
known.
Laura Cameron
Department of Geography
Downing Place
John Forrester
REFERENCES
Appignanesi, Lisa and Forrester, John (1992) Freud’s Women, London: Weidenfeld &
Olson, in collaboration with Xavier Callahan and the author, New York/London:
Routledge
Cameron, Laura, and Forrester, John, ‘“A nice type of the English scientist”: Tansley, Freud and
Ellenberger, Henri F. (1972) `The story of “Anna O.”: A critical review with new data' Journal
Fichtner, Gerhard (1989) ‘Les lettres de Freud en tant que source historique’ Rev. Int. Hist.
Psychoanal. 2 51-80
Forrester, John (1986)`The true story of Anna O.' Social Research 53 327-347; also in Forrester
(1990)
Forrester, John (1990) The Seductions of Psychoanalysis. Freud, Lacan and Derrida.
Freud, S. (1960) Letters, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tanya and James Stern, London, Hogarth.
Freud/Jones (1993). The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908-
Hirschmüller, Albrecht (1978/1989) Physiologie und Psychoanalyse in Leben und Werk Josef
Breuers, [Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, Suppl. 4], Bern: Hans Huber, 1978, trans. The life
and work of Josef Breuer. Physiology and psychoanalysis, New York/London: New York
Rosenbaum, Max and Melvin Muroff (eds.) (1984), Anna O: Fourteen contemporary
1
We would like to thank Professor Leigh of the Department of Plant Sciences for
permission to quote from the letter and other documents, and the Department's Librarian Dr.
David Briggs and the Assistant Librarian, Mr. Richard Savage, for their help in working with the
manuscripts. We would also like to thank Dr. Kurt Eissler for permission to see the transcript of
his interview with Tansley and the other papers Tansley sent him which are on Restricted Access
at the Library of Congress; we would also like to thank the Library of Congress for their help in
this research.
2
While there has developed considerable historiographical controversy concerning the fate
of Anna O. and her place in the development of psychoanalysis, this is not the place to review all
the nuances of this debate. (For information concerning these debates, see Rosenbaum and
Muroff (1984) and Borch-Jacobsen (1996).) The full reasons for attributing the letter to Freud
are given in the final section of this paper. Further evidence, involving a more detailed account
of Tansley’s life and work within the field of psychoanalysis can be found in our paper on ‘“A
nice type of the English scientist”: Tansley, Freud and a Psychoanalytic Dream’ (Cameron and
Forrester (1999)), based upon the study of his papers as deposited in Cambridge, in Washington,
transcription of this letter, and for pointing out errors of transcription that Tansley almost
certainly made in his own transcription, and also Andreas Mayer for advice on the translation.
For the record, the above transcription departs from the hand-written Ms. in the following points:
Second para, sixth sentence: in the original Ms., ‘sozusagen’ is written ‘so zu sagen’
Second para, sixth sentence: in the original Ms., ‘hinweggeholfen’ is written ‘hin weggeholfen’
Second para, final sentence: in the original Ms., there is no comma after ‘Es ist interessant’
Fichtner notes that in transcribing Freud’s handwriting, it is easy to overlook the commas.
4
By JF.
5
Breuer and Freud (1895) 41: “After this she left Vienna and travelled for a while; but it
was a considerable time before she regained her mental balance entirely. Since then she has
It also coincides with the account given by Marie Bonaparte in her Notebooks, reproduced in
Borch-Jacobsen (1996, 100), but contradicts the version of Bonaparte’s notes transcribed by
Swales and endorsed by Borch-Jacobsen in his reasoned footnote (1996, 36 n 14), which
interpreted Freud as implying that Dora Breuer’s questioning of her father took place in 1914 or
shortly thereafter.
7
In contrast with other documents, whose tone is oppositional, such as the account,
according to Swales’ transcription, that Marie Bonaparte gave of what Freud told her about his
‘break’ with Breuer over the misleading nature of Breuer’s case history of Anna O. in its final
published version of 1895; see Borch-Jacobsen (1996, 98): “Freud said that the real reason he
broke with Breuer was over his misrepresentation of what really had happened in publishing the
case of Anna O. in 1895. Freud quoted the line about Anna’s mental equilibrium... and declared
that Anna O. was not in fact cured but remained ill for some time after.” The fact that Freud is
said by Bonaparte to have cited this particular passage from the Studies and does so (again) in
his letter to Tansley is a strikingly convincing detail - convincing of two things: 1. that Swales’
30
memory was in this instance reliable; 2. that the other element of Bonaparte’s story - the break
over Anna O. - is rendered more convincing. Nonetheless, without further textual evidence, one
should treat this account with circumspection. It should also be noted that Strachey reported
Freud as having pointed to exactly the same passage in a conversation with him (unfortunately
not possible to date - and it could not have been when Strachey translated Studies on Hysteria,
since he and Alix Strachey translated it for the first time in 1955): “At this point (so Freud once
told the present editor, with his finger on an open copy of the book) there is a hiatus in the text.
What he had in mind and went on to describe was the occurrence which marked the end of Anna
O.’s treatment.... it is enough to say here that, when the treatment had apparently reached a
successful end, the patient suddenly made manifest to Breuer the presence of a strong unanalysed
positive transference of an unmistakably sexual nature.” (Breuer and Freud (1895) 40-1n1)
8
Note that this view of Anna O. as suffering from two different conditions is in conformity
with a persistent feature of Freud’s published expositions of her illness: his emphasis on the
relation between Breuer’s cathartic work with Anna on her memories and the removal of the
symptoms. Nearly all of Freud’s account emphasize symptoms, not a disease, and he highlights
the removal of specific symptoms, and rarely talks of her overall cure. Typical of this judicious
passing over in silence of the prolonged illness of Anna O. is the following exposition, which
ends his account of her treatment, from the Five Lectures: ““When the patient had recollected
this scene [of the hallucination of a snake at her father's bedside] in hypnosis, the rigid paralysis
of her left arm, which had persisted since the beginning of her illness, disappeared, and the
treatment was brought to an end.” (Freud (1910) 15) Even one of the most enthusiastic accounts
of Breuer’s success, written in 1923, appends a caution about the enduring character of the
efficacy: ““By consistently repeating the same laborious process, he succeeded in freeing her
31
from all her inhibitions and paralyses, so that in the end he found his trouble rewarded by a great
therapeutic success as well as by an unexpected insight into the nature of the puzzling neurosis....
It soon appeared that the therapeutic hopes which had been placed upon cathartic treatment in
hypnosis were to some extent unfulfilled. It was true that the disappearance of the symptoms
went hand-in-hand with the catharsis, but total success turned out to be entirely dependent upon
the patient's relation to the physician and thus resembled the effect of ‘suggestion’. If that
relation was disturbed, all the symptoms reappeared, just as though they had never been cleared
of success: “Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental
and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few
queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone is too