Bertha Pappenheim (27 February 1859 – 28 May 1936) was an Austrian-Jewish feminist, a social worker pioneer, and the founder of the Jewish Women's Association (Jüdischer Frauenbund). Under the pseudonym Anna O., she was also one of Josef Breuer's best-documented patients because of Sigmund Freud's writings on Breuer's treatment of her.
The Talking Cure and chimney sweeping were terms Bertha Pappenheim, known in case studies by the alias Anna O., used for the verbal therapy she engaged in under her physician, Josef Breuer. The case study of her treatment was first published in Studies on Hysteria (1895).
As Ernest Jones put it, "On one occasion she related the details of the first appearance of a particular symptom and, to Breuer's great astonishment, this resulted in its complete disappearance," or in Lacan's words, "the more Anna provided signifiers, the more she chattered on, the better it went".
Josef Breuer (/ˈbrɔɪər/ BROY-ur; Austrian German: [ˈbrɔʏɐ]; 15 January 1842 – 20 June 1925) was an Austrian physician who made discoveries in neurophysiology, and whose work during the 1880s with his patient Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O., led to the development of the "cathartic method" (also referred to as the "talking cure") for psychiatric disorders. The method was a major initiatory factor for psychoanalysis, as developed by Breuer's friend and collaborator Sigmund Freud.