Michael Schmicker's Blog - Posts Tagged "hilda-reilly"
Freud, Nietzsche and Bertha Pappenheim (Book Review)
Women baffled Freud.
“What does a woman want?” the frustrated founder of psychoanalysis complained towards the end of his thirty years of research into the recesses of the feminine mind.
Freud already knew what women were. They were inferior to men. They “oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.” They suffered from “penis envy.” Their achievements outside the home were negligible. “It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented – that of plaiting and weaving.” Freud’s contemporary, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, spoke for many 19th century men (and some today) when he declared “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy.”
In Guises of Desire, Hilda Reilly engagingly illuminates this miasma of misogynist fin-de-siècle attitudes through her deeply researched and richly nuanced portrait of Bertha Pappenheim, an unmarried and suitor-less 21-year-old Jewish woman rebelling against the rigid expectations of her gender, religion, social caste, and family.
“Hysteria,” a handy 19th century catchall diagnosis masking medical ignorance and male chauvinism, was frequently trotted out to explain symptoms often exhibited by unhappy or unconventional women of the era – insomnia, lack of appetite, nervousness, irritability, sexual forwardness, a desire to masturbate, a “tendency to cause trouble” – for which no organic cause could be identified. Bertha manifested many of these, as well as hallucinations, amnesia, neuralgia, limb paralysis, a visual disorder, and a persistent cough.
Reilly skillfully recreates, from the inside out, Bertha’s three year struggle (1880-1882) to survive and overcome her “hysteria,” taking the reader inside her head, into her troubled thoughts and wild imaginings, as she copes with a succession of shocks, temporary improvements, and discouraging setbacks . As Bertha spirals downward, she hallucinates snakes, suspects people are planning to incarcerate her, develops a morphine addiction, and finally attempts suicide by throwing herself from a bedroom window. Reilly weaves into this 19th century soap opera a slew of details and incidents which help us better understand the weltanschauung which shaped Bertha’s conflicted personality – the family’s strictly observed religious rituals; her unsympathetic brother Willi who mocks her desire to attend university (women lack the reasoning power of men) and cruelly quotes Aristotle (women are “deformed males”); her mother’s annoyance at Bertha’s unmarried, semi-liberated cousin Anna, for giving Bertha ideas about “women’s rights and girl’s education.”
Her primary physician, Josef Breuer, does his best to mitigate her “hysteria” using a novel “talking cure” (psychoanalysis) – and eventually claims success on behalf of the new therapeutic technique. Pappenheim is iconic in psychoanalytical literature as the famous “Anna O,” whose litany of physical and mental disorders are described in detail by Freud and Breuer in Studies in Hysteria (1895).
Ironically, some medical historians wonder if Breuer misdiagnosed her – neurological science being in its infancy. Reilly, who holds a Master’s of Science in Consciousness Studies, believes that “many of the Bertha’s symptoms can be accounted for by a form of temporal lobe epilepsy.” Breuer himself seriously entertained the possibility of a neurological disorder.
Whatever caused and cured her myriad of afflictions, Bertha Pappenheim survived her ordeal to become a famous social worker, feminist (Founder of the League of Jewish Women) and writer (novellas, plays. poetry, children’s’ stories). In 1954, Germany posthumously honored her with a postage stamp as a “Benefactor of Mankind.”
Guises of Desire is a multifaceted, masterful recreation of Bertha at her nadir – an intellectually-satisfying medical mystery; a vivid portrait of Jewish life in Vienna a century ago; and a humbling reminder of the au courant cultural biases which inevitably infect the theory and practice of psychology.
“What does a woman want?” the frustrated founder of psychoanalysis complained towards the end of his thirty years of research into the recesses of the feminine mind.
Freud already knew what women were. They were inferior to men. They “oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.” They suffered from “penis envy.” Their achievements outside the home were negligible. “It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented – that of plaiting and weaving.” Freud’s contemporary, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, spoke for many 19th century men (and some today) when he declared “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy.”
In Guises of Desire, Hilda Reilly engagingly illuminates this miasma of misogynist fin-de-siècle attitudes through her deeply researched and richly nuanced portrait of Bertha Pappenheim, an unmarried and suitor-less 21-year-old Jewish woman rebelling against the rigid expectations of her gender, religion, social caste, and family.
“Hysteria,” a handy 19th century catchall diagnosis masking medical ignorance and male chauvinism, was frequently trotted out to explain symptoms often exhibited by unhappy or unconventional women of the era – insomnia, lack of appetite, nervousness, irritability, sexual forwardness, a desire to masturbate, a “tendency to cause trouble” – for which no organic cause could be identified. Bertha manifested many of these, as well as hallucinations, amnesia, neuralgia, limb paralysis, a visual disorder, and a persistent cough.
Reilly skillfully recreates, from the inside out, Bertha’s three year struggle (1880-1882) to survive and overcome her “hysteria,” taking the reader inside her head, into her troubled thoughts and wild imaginings, as she copes with a succession of shocks, temporary improvements, and discouraging setbacks . As Bertha spirals downward, she hallucinates snakes, suspects people are planning to incarcerate her, develops a morphine addiction, and finally attempts suicide by throwing herself from a bedroom window. Reilly weaves into this 19th century soap opera a slew of details and incidents which help us better understand the weltanschauung which shaped Bertha’s conflicted personality – the family’s strictly observed religious rituals; her unsympathetic brother Willi who mocks her desire to attend university (women lack the reasoning power of men) and cruelly quotes Aristotle (women are “deformed males”); her mother’s annoyance at Bertha’s unmarried, semi-liberated cousin Anna, for giving Bertha ideas about “women’s rights and girl’s education.”
Her primary physician, Josef Breuer, does his best to mitigate her “hysteria” using a novel “talking cure” (psychoanalysis) – and eventually claims success on behalf of the new therapeutic technique. Pappenheim is iconic in psychoanalytical literature as the famous “Anna O,” whose litany of physical and mental disorders are described in detail by Freud and Breuer in Studies in Hysteria (1895).
Ironically, some medical historians wonder if Breuer misdiagnosed her – neurological science being in its infancy. Reilly, who holds a Master’s of Science in Consciousness Studies, believes that “many of the Bertha’s symptoms can be accounted for by a form of temporal lobe epilepsy.” Breuer himself seriously entertained the possibility of a neurological disorder.
Whatever caused and cured her myriad of afflictions, Bertha Pappenheim survived her ordeal to become a famous social worker, feminist (Founder of the League of Jewish Women) and writer (novellas, plays. poetry, children’s’ stories). In 1954, Germany posthumously honored her with a postage stamp as a “Benefactor of Mankind.”
Guises of Desire is a multifaceted, masterful recreation of Bertha at her nadir – an intellectually-satisfying medical mystery; a vivid portrait of Jewish life in Vienna a century ago; and a humbling reminder of the au courant cultural biases which inevitably infect the theory and practice of psychology.
