Invention of the term Breuer found that Pappenheim's symptoms—headaches, excitement, curious vision disturbances, partial paralyses, and loss of sensation, which had no organic origin and are now called
somatoform disorders—improved once the subject expressed her repressed trauma and related emotions, a process later called
catharsis.
Peter Gay considered that, "Breuer rightly claimed a quarter of a century later that his treatment of Bertha Pappenheim contained 'the germ cell of the whole of psychoanalysis'."
Sigmund Freud later adopted the term
talking cure to describe the fundamental work of
psychoanalysis. He himself referenced Breuer and Anna O. in his Lectures on Psychoanalysis at
Clark University, Worcester, MA, in September 1909: "The patient herself, who, strange to say, could at this time only speak and understand English, christened this novel kind of treatment the 'talking cure' or used to refer to it jokingly as 'chimney-sweeping'."
Locus classicus There are currently three English translations of
Studies on Hysteria, the first by
A. A. Brill (1937), the second by
James Strachey (1955), included in the
Standard Edition, and the third by Nicola Luckhurst (2004). The following samples come from Breuer’s case study on “Anna O...” where the concept of
talking cure appears for the first time and illustrate how the translations differ: ==Current status==