Remembering Anna O.offers a devastating examination of the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory and practice, which was born with the publication of Breuer and Freud'sStudies on Hysteriain 1895. In his opening essay, Breuer described the case of Anna O., a young woman afflicted with a severe hysteria whom he had cured of her symptoms by having her recount under hypnosis the traumatic events that precipitated her illness. "Hysterics suffer from reminiscences," wrote Freud, and they heal when they remember these repressed or dissociated memories. "This discovery of Breuer's," Freud continued, "is still the foundation of psychoanalytic therapy." It is also the foundation of present-day "recovered memory therapy" and more generally, of our widespread belief in the healing and redemptive power of memory. However this belief, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen asserts, is based on a deceptive account of the founding case of psychoanalysis.

Drawing on the mostrecent Freud scholarship and on documents long kept from public view, Borch-Jacobsen demonstrates that Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) was never cured by Breuer's "talking cure" and in their claims that this was the case, both Breuer and Freud knowingly falsified the historical record. Borch-Jacobsen points out the numerous inconsistencies in Breuer's account that suggests that Anna O.'s symptoms were simulated to meet Breuer's theoretical expectations and that her famed "reminiscences" were in fact fictitious memories induced by Breuer in the course of a hypnotic treatment.Remembering Anna O.reads like a scholarly thriller and has already created a sensation in France. After having read Borch-Jacobsen's implacable demonstration of the facts, the reader will wonder what remains of this conceptual and institutional edifice that was built on the incredible "Story of Anna O."--and how so many people came to believe it.