Success of Treatment
After Breuer ceased treating her, both he and Freud continued to follow the course of Pappenheim‘s illness. Among Freud‘s disciples the dubiousness of the assertion of “treatment success” was discussed. In a private seminar Carl Gustav Jung said in 1925:
So the famous first case he treated together with Breuer and which was vastly praised as an outstanding therapeutic success was nothing of the sort.
And Charles Aldrich reports:
But in this famous case the patient was not healed. Freud told Jung that all her old symptoms returned after he had given up the case.
Opponents of psychoanalysis use this statement as an argument against this therapeutic approach.
How Pappenheim herself assessed the success of her treatment is not documented. She never spoke about this episode of her life and vehemently opposed any attempts at psychoanalytic treatment of people in her care.
Aspects of Bertha Pappenheim‘s biography (especially her role as Breuer's patient) were treated in the film Freud by John Huston (along with elements of other early psychoanalytic case histories). The film is based on a screenplay by Jean-Paul Sartre who, however, distanced himself from the film version.
Read more about this topic: Anna O.
Famous quotes containing the words success and/or treatment:
“Priests and physicians should never look one another in the face. They have no common ground, nor is there any to mediate between them. When the one comes, the other goes. They could not come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the one’s profession is a satire on the other’s, and either’s success would be the other’s failure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)