My New Year Wishes to all who are suffering from dissociative symptoms or are significant others to those with the same afflictions.
Amid suffering and failure, hope abides
Remembering Bertha Pappenheim
Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) is best known outside of Germany by the pseudonym “Anna O.” Freud used for her case history in his early book, co-written with Breuer, Studies in Hysteria (1895). In her own name, she is known in Germany as a pioneering social reformer in the early part of the 20th Century.
Between 1880 and 1882, Pappenheim suffered from severe symptoms that today are associated with Dissociative Identity Disorder, (formerly termed Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD) including hallucinations, paralysis, and alternating personalities. At the time, which was prior to the development of psychoanalysis, she was considered an “hysteric”, the early broad, non-specific term once used to describe a wide variety of physical and psychological symptoms that lacked an identifiable medical cause.
During treatment with Breuer, she expressed aloud her anxieties as well as relayed her dreams to him which had the effect of pacifying some of her anxieties. This work, the basis of what became known as “talk therapy”, was referred to by Ms. Pappenheim as “chimney sweeping”. This method of verbalizing anxieties and traumatic memories to the listening therapist laid the foundation for psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Despite progress through talk therapy, her treatment with Breuer ended badly. Her symptoms worsened and she was institutionalized for periods of time. She ultimately overcame her illness, and, through her “self-reconstruction”, she channeled her experiences into compassionate and effective social activism.
She dedicated the rest of her life to the protection and empowerment of vulnerable women, particularly those displaced or exploited. In 1904, she founded the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women), leading it for 20 years to fight for gender equality and education. She was a fierce campaigner against sex trafficking, traveling internationally to Galicia, Russia, and the Middle East to expose the exploitation of Eastern European Jewish women.
In 1907, she established a revolutionary home for unwed mothers and “at-risk” girls in Neu-Isenburg, providing them with education and a safe Jewish environment. In short, she created an early model of what we now call a “safe house” to protect abused women as well as those at risk of abuse.
During and after World War I, she coordinated relief efforts for Jewish refugees and orphans. In 1934, despite her declining health, she personally escorted a group of orphans from Nazi Germany to safety in Great Britain.
On 14 November 1935, she wrote:
An Appeal
My God, Thou are not a weak God, of words and incense, not a God of the past. Thou are an omnipresent God. To me Thous are a demanding God. Thous sanctifiest me with thine “Thou shalt: Thou expectest me to differentiate between good and evil. Thou demandest that I prove I am strength of thy strength, struggle upwards toward thee, inspire others and help with all my might.
Demand demand, so that in every breath of my life my conscience makes me feel, there is a God.
By her death in 1936, Pappenheim had transformed from someone paralyzed by mental health issues into one of the most influential social actors of her time. In 1954, West Germany honored her legacy with a commemorative postage stamp as a pioneer of modern social work. Her work protecting Jewish women in danger is memorialized by the location of The Jewish Museum in Frankfurt Germany: in Bertha-Pappenheim-Platz.
