by Anna Vaught
I am sorry, Violet is so very entertaining, so clever, she makes me digress! The book about Freud: it revealed that Anna O was Bertha Pappenheim, a Jewish social worker—founder of fine things, creator of a home, Neu-Isenburg, for young Jewish women and their babies, their children—educator. I think she was a ball of kindness and duty.
Bertha died when I, Lucia Anna, was twenty-nine and, again, memory tugs at me. I was not well then, not always. That was 1936, as I said, and we were in Zurich; Daddy had consented to my treatment under Jung—call me Carl, dear, or Gustav—and shortly before this I had been diagnosed with schizophrenia at the Burghölzli clinic. I felt my body tremulous; felt the strings were false. What I thought, I could not communicate, so dark it was. But I was not convinced by what they said, the specialists. Over the years, I overheard so many things of what was wrong with me, what was not. Doctors could not agree.
In 1936, Violet had been here, at St Andrew’s, nearly ten years. And Daddy, though he swore to the barnacle (sorry, my mother. Did I explain this already? Well I shan’t recant!) that he would never have me incarcerated among the English, well he sent me here, to St Andrew’s, for blood tests. Yes, here. Sedated, sleepy, day and night eliding, I came to this place before and I thought... as we entered... I thought I saw her, then. On the way to a corner of the day room, or the dining room, watched by a nurse: a tiny figure, ancient-seeming, but immaculate in her black crêpe dress. The Honourable Violet Albina Gibson. I did not know I would come back. My father had heard of her, the would-be assassin of Mussolini. I heard him talking about the hospital’s infamous inmate. Now, there would have been a book for him.
Little did I know!
They could not—I heard them talking to my father on the telephone: it could even have been Dr Griffith. In fact, it must have been—keep me here, after my blood tests, for very long because I wanted out. No, Mr Joyce, we do understand your concern, but Miss Joyce would like to leave now and we are not obliged to insist she stay. Yes, Mr Joyce, that is the case and we have done all we can and please reassure Mrs Joyce of this. I had a sense of home being elsewhere, then. Perhaps home was just with him.
And Daddy, as I said, told them again, Quite, but no: I will not have her incarcerated among the English and back to Paris I went. I stayed in Neuilly sur Seine, with Maria Jolas, wife of my father’s literary friend, Eugene Jolas. Oh, she was a remarkable woman, strong and brave; from Kentucky, that was it! I thought, in this pretty place, I could strengthen, but I felt myself sink and it was frightening. I screamed and then I remember the straitjacket, the camisole de force, as we say. At Vésinet they kept me in isolation; said I was a danger. I rocked shut.
Have you the faintest notion what such separation, such schism, can do to you? There, I sat all day, isolated for two months, howling, raging and nursing images; trying to build a storied imagination so that I could survive. I think this is what Violet has done too. War came, I heard. Then I was shuffled off to the hospital of Dr Delmas at Ivry-sur-Seine. He kept us safe (and here is another story) from the Nazis; such feebles to experiment on. I don’t know how he kept us safe, but he did.
Mother did not come.
Then Daddy was dead. 1941. I heard on my little radio, at Ivry. I could have rotted away there, never met Violet. They would have left me. But there were friends, you know. And they called me here, to you, to England, and to you, Lady Gibson. From France, in the end, to my forever home (though Violet says I should not think of it in those terms, not any more). What with the new world she has in store for me and all.
I did not mean to talk so much about myself. I am trying to show you who and what I am, as far as I know. And I’ve come to see the little threads that bind me to Violet, through time, and to other women who were also desperately ill but madly, madly sane.
And so I say to Violet that I am tired of talking about myself and she says: Well, yes, you have been running on rather a lot, dear girl! Also that it is time to tell of Anna O, who was really Bertha Pappenheim and who had, in our time together at St Andrew’s, just been revealed to the world for who she was—and what she was was remarkable, of course. But oh, the sorrow. I learned that Bertha never fully got better and that her loss was prolific. And Violet began:
They called me Anna O, but the O is oblique, hinting at a glamour and a mystery I might despise, or hiding me. I did not choose it and I will not take it with me: I refuse.
Now, history will tell you that, amongst other things, I am a fine case study and, if you were to look me up, you should see that I am most closely associated with the Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. I am in his book, with Dr Josef Breuer. It is called Studies in Hysteria. How do I know that? Oh, we shall see, we shall see! But then I took my stage name, Anna O, in which I had no say; it was not my book. I did not meet him, Freud. I saw him, I would say, in passing, but it was with Dr Breuer that I worked and so, at first, you came to know me. I became important, though not, as it turned out, as myself, because Dr Breuer relayed my case to Freud and the rest is history.
Anna O.
O.
Oh!
The name: do you want to know, do you? A little bird told me that not until I was dead nineteen years would the world know the other self. It’s true. In all my work, in all my years, I never breathed a word, although I went back and back again, for help, to make me better. I was not ashamed, but I feared the world would shame me, as it does its mad women. In all my time, in the home I built for those in need, as Bertha Pappenheim, I would not let the doctors come for these kinds of talking cures for the girls we looked after. We listened, nursed and supported, but Leave them to our care, said I. They meant well you see, just as Freud, after Breuer, but I was not convinced. He might have thought, Dr Freud, that I was the spark, the flower, the I-don’t-know-what of his psychoanalysis, and the methods worked, but yet I was ill, again and again. I did not, as these doctors might have thought, get fully well. Yet I did not give up: I had purpose and there was work, so much work, to be done.
Oh yes, the name. Do you want to know? A comes before B for Bertha and O comes before P for Pappenheim. I suppose it’s a sort of code, but it’s not a hard one, is it?
What do you want to know and what do you expect? My parents were good, I had a brother and two sisters; we adhered to Orthodox Judaism and we had a pretty little silver cat. Does this sum up my early years for you? I read my Torah; I thought, prayed and observed and I was clever; not that I said so aloud, but it was just that I watched from the window as a counterpane of gorgeous colours began to unfold; there it went. So much to see. Smiles; a look that meant a world, a history; poetry, the man who walked past every morning, quietly narrating the story of his life because he had nowhere else to tell it. I decided, for this lonely lonely man, that I would tell a story, one day.
Always, I felt the compulsion to tell a tale and do you know, when Dr Breuer helped me, it was often with the beginning of a story to help me speak, to communicate my distress and see its seed—and he gave each line the same tone, same words: he said There was a boy... and I continued. I told the story of this man I mentioned, as the boy, but made his story different where he was surrounded by love and friends to support him and let his imagination and his wants fly free. I said: There was a boy who was lonely, playing with his hoop and ball but he found someone to tell and, as he grew up, his wits got sharper and more confident and he understood who to trust and, though his world was not safe, he had friends and confidants and so he was a fine man, confidence and bearing. And I said that if his confidence became brimming too much with pride, then he could become like the hoopoe in the stories of my faith, full of judgement: judgement and bearing. But then I wasn’t thinking of the sad boy who became a sad man, against the gorgeous colours of the world. I was thinking of these eminent folk, these doctors. I’ve heard other stories: they think they know it all! That they are indispensable. I’d say they are, at best, a conduit to better health.
Yes, he made me begin my stories with THERE WAS A BOY.
And really, sometimes I was thinking THERE WAS A GIRL.
A GIRL.
There was me and I know there are others, silenced and chastened. It is not right.
But as I was saying!
Dr Breuer had me perfekt in his notes: who I was and what was happening. I had stages and my first was Latent Incubation.
But as I was saying! Make yourself clear Bertha, to keep your narrative before it’s stolen.
THERE WAS A GIRL!
Henriette, sister, dead at eight from tuberculosis and so it began; things shifted and I became aware. Death; judgement; last things; eschatology, not that this was a word I knew as a girl, but I knew I was clever and I glimpsed what was in store. It was the time it was. My schooling did not last long, but I learned to sew and it was as much leisure as labour, but I never got over that first harsh death, with the rasps of sour breath and the clear eyes of my sister and Mother’s drear cries.
So.
Anna O.
My father, 1880, a year of bed and washing him; lifting his head and feeling disgusted by, though ashamed to say so, the tart breath of the dying..
Going. Gone.
There came a morning, 1881. I was ill, stiff necked, dizzy and confused; sneezing, scant of breath, confused and mourning. Then, in grief and so lonely, I was frightened and I went to see Dr Breuer. I was unsure, then.
Caring took a toll on me. At one point, they would not let me see Father. I was too weak.
Manifest illness wrote Dr Breuer in his notes.
It stung; I had cared; I was exhausted; it was meant well, but to have failed him was death, judgement: the last... I forget the rest of the sentence.
I’ve read the notes. How? They don’t notice everything, these experts. Freud said I lived a healthy, active life; liked to daydream; good in the house; devoted. He said that Dr Breuer’s patient was a girl of twenty-one, of high intellectual gifts. Her illness lasted for over two years, and she developed a series of physical and psychological disturbances; oh yes—the tics and tremors moved around my body and then I suffered from a rigid paralysis, accompanied by loss of sensation, like a muting I would describe it, of both extremities on the right side of my body; and the same trouble from time to time affected me on my left side. Dr Freud said that the girl’s movements—and remember THERE WAS A GIRL!—were disturbed and her sight was restricted. Oh! But all the time I fought it. It was sight blindness; my inner eye was penetrating, but I did not have recourse to tell of what it saw. This was not in his notes. He said I, the girl, had an aversion to taking nourishment, but that was not quite it; inside I raged and fought to say I was hungry and thirsty: I called to the birds of the air. I said Come to me, beautiful passerines! that exquisite word, so poetical, but still I was mute.
The doctor went on.
They do, don’t they! This was I, Lucia, because I felt my gorge rising.
Hush, scribe, retorted Violet, and so Bertha began again.
He, the famous doctor, told how, on one occasion she, this poor, poor girl of high intellectual gifts, was for several weeks unable to drink in spite of a tormenting thirst. Her powers of speech were reduced, even to the point of her being unable to speak or understand her native language. But I did! I did understand and I knew! Finally, she, I, was subject to conditions of absence, confusion, of delirium, and of alteration of her whole personality. And at night, I slept, then walked; slept, then walked. My dreams were purple and full of the nightingale; the linnet: pretty birds who came to me. This, they could not see: walls made by my vibrant imagination keep me free, them out.
Intermittent somnambulism went the notes.
Oh but I was ill. Inside, though, Dr Freud, Dr Breuer, I knew who I was, but I could not speak it. And later, as Bertha, pronounced better, I was sometimes ill again. Your talking cures did not wrest this from me, but still I was strong! I have learned, and I won’t have been the only one, that you do not have to be completely well to care, love, or dance. To work. And anyway: define well. Then mad. I challenge you.
Freud spoke of Dr Breuer; knew and saw that he was kind (so much was true) and saw and knew that I was sharp-witted. And he spoke of my melancholy phantasies; the daydreams sometimes characterized by poetic beauty, and their starting-point was as a rule the position of a girl at her father’s sickbed. She was me, looking out of the window at the beautiful counterpane of life and back to the bed, to the sparrow on the window sill, the little nightingale I sometimes heard, so pretty, and out again to the sad man mouthing his story into the day when no-one heard. There was a boy... thought I. He was a kind man, Breuer, of course, and I could joke with him. I talked and talked and talked; polyglot, running through all my languages, some more natural than others at times, and we christened this novel kind of treatment the talking cure. I mentioned it before. It’s mine, you know! A catching sort of title, you might say. I also called our discussions chimney sweeping and made Dr Breuer laugh and I’m sure Dr Freud found it novel. I liked the idea of renewing: out goes the dust and soot and up burns a clear bright flame. I saw it. I heard the rush of fire up the chastened chimney on the lower floors of my house and I felt cleaner and brighter and I swept my mind clean.
Under his hypnosis I could remember terrible things that were too filthy, perhaps. My hair strung around my face like cruel black snakes; a dog snuffling up a glass of water on a hot day, the drool around its mouth slapping back against the table and the cool elm boards: disgust. I was frightened of snakes and water I would not drink. Dr Breuer helped me to remember, but the work I did myself, through fear and fire. He gave me a glass of water in that long, hot summer and it repulsed me: my imagination was strong and I saw the ragged muzzle of the dog, saliva trailing in my cool drink. Disgust; horror? Does that not make sense to you? But I pushed through: my body relaxing under care from him, the glass pulsing on my lips, but instead I drank deeply from a luscious melon, told off the dog and the maidservant who let him stray where he should not and I took up more fruit and drank deeply from a fresh glass.
And oh, the sounds, the tics, the fear of thunder, the water—yes I was less scared and I did as asked and what was healthy, but, as Bertha, time and again, reading my Torah or feeding the birds, all those years, I would scent the fear again: a jag of cloud in a clear sky; a smirk from a man; a little mouse at the wainscot, pretty but errant, and I would feel again, in my heart, the thud and pound and know the black embolus of fear. When I was ill, when I was mad, when I was not. When I cried out Tormenting, tormenting! in German or English, French or Italian or when it came out as something different but meant the same; language beating on that raggedy drum. No, no, no.
And Freud said:
Ladies and Gentlemen, if I may be allowed to generalise—which is unavoidable in so condensed an account as this—I should like to formulate what we have learned so far as follows: our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are residues and symbols of particular (traumatic) experiences. And this was in his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis and I wanted to add: Dear Dr Freud, you know I am not convinced and perhaps you should have given four instead? but this I kept to myself.
Yes, says Violet, sotto voce. What a windbag!
And I, Lucia, add that, though all this theory was articulated by men, didn’t Bertha think of and name a good bit of it? I remember that Violet laughed at this: You’re learning, Lucy Light. Be mad as hell for that, now won’t you! She drew a croaky old breath, then.
So to return to Bertha’s account:
Recovery, Dr Breuer had written in his notes.
It was interesting. I didn’t feel better, but he had other ideas:
Your stories, these phantasies that you tell, always involving sitting by the bedside of a sick person, like those of Hans Christian Andersen, said Dr Breuer.
But of course. I loved tal
es. I loved my father with a will of fire and all ice. Love like crystal. Beyond simile. I loved poetry, so you see, and had an abundance of languages and ideas beyond the sewing box and a cross-stitch world. I loved a bird too, and so I said—and I am sure he wrote it in his notes, so I thought, Right I’ll give these men a story now—All at once... close to the window, there was a burst of lovely song; it was the living nightingale, perched on a branch outside. It had heard of the emperor’s need, and had come to bring comfort and hope to him. As it sang, the faces round became fainter and fainter, and the blood coursed with fresh vigour in the emperor’s veins and through his feeble limbs. Even Death himself listened to the song and said Go on, little nightingale. And Death gave back each of these treasures for a song, and the nightingale went on singing. It sang about the quiet churchyard, when the roses bloom, where the elder flower scents the air, or a peony shines—and where the fresh grass is ever moistened anew by the tears of the mourner. This song brought to Death a longing for his own garden, and, like a cold grey mist, he passed out of the window. And I am sure you know this story; it seems to me a beautiful story whose magic would have spread. A story of bird on wing, and captivation and a new day for the emperor with his passerine friend and helper!
And I bid Dr Breuer Good Morning, too, and then I thought, I’ll give you a story, Chara, doctor, you manyak—strike me down: these are Hebrew profanities—and out it came, in proper German!
Auf einmal... in der Nähe des Fensters…
And… C’était le rossignol vivant…
Oh, I had tried to be a good woman, but sometimes I recanted my desire.
You should have seen Breuer’s face. These languages spilling out. And what on earth did he, Josef, say to Sigmund when they talked about me?
Italian. I wonder if The Nightingale is best in its glories, don’t you, Doctor? So, listen!
