With Bertha in Vienna
Anna O’s Anti-Zionism
Leora Fridman
It was the summer of optimism, or an optimistic wave I did not catch. I was looking into time, studying a time before mine that also believed cheerily in its superiority and came crashing into global fascism. From the summer before the 2024 US presidential election in New York City, we argued about what counted as fascism in our context. We thought we could predict it all, assuming ourselves better, more “rational” than those elsewhere, those who had come before.
I questioned the meaning of “rational” for several reasons. I’d been writing for years about chronic illness and disability, and specifically how these experiences might help us disinvest in resolution-oriented narratives of “getting better,” of healing as capitalist-driven productivity. Since the rise of COVID-19, I’d gotten obsessed with the term “brain fog”—why it was so prevalent and what it was standing in for. I began seeking out other examples of collective social experience that were inscribed on individuals as discrete pathology. Among these, I found “hysteria,” or found how hysteria stood in for gendered and classed somatic and psychological experiences, and there I came across Bertha Pappenheim, most often referred to by her pseudonym of Anna O., the first case study in Studies in Hysteria. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer credit Pappenheim with the invention of the term “the talking cure” and—through Breuer’s experimentation on her and Freud’s narrative of said experimentation—possibly being patient zero of psychoanalysis.
Pappenheim was born into fin-de-siècle Vienna, a prosperous intellectual and cultural milieu about to be decimated by the social and moral destruction of the two World Wars. I felt echoes in our times and in our experiences of illness, so I went to Vienna to read about Pappenheim and her world. As is perhaps apt for a person whose story has been co-opted so many times, it is difficult to find Pappenheim’s version of her own life. There are not a lot of primary sources to examine, but I spent time with Pappenheim’s collections and papers held at the Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK), time reading related materials and existing research on Pappenheim at the Library of Psychoanalysis at Vienna’s Freud Museum, time wandering places which she may or could have inhabited.
There are many layers to the story of Anna O., of Pappenheim and the refractions between patient, case study, person, persona. For several years, Breuer treated the patient’s hallucinations, mysterious paralyses, and other “torments” (her language) with a combination of medication, hypnosis, and talking—about visions she saw that others did not, about her time taking care of her father as he ailed and passed away, of domestic and daily anxiety and distress. Breuer writes that the patient was aware of the relief she found when speaking freely. “Her moral state was a function of the time that had elapsed since her last utterance,” he writes. Breuer operates under one understanding of “morality,” primarily concerned with the social normativity of the patient’s behavior. When she hasn’t spoken in a while, Breuer writes, the patient is “irritable” and “less agreeable.”
The gendered connotations of agreeableness are not subtle here. Breuer’s account describes the patient as stuck in a “monotonous family life” with “an unemployed surplus of mental liveliness and energy,” a busy brain and not enough to do with it. Even as he notices these realities, the doctor treats the patient within the social conditions of her time, trying to get her back to “pleasant” feminized behavior. We can of course question these motives now, but it was “rational” for his time, and for the problems the patient’s family hired him to solve.
At times Anna O. loses the capacity to speak, and at times she will speak only in English, not in her native German. She speaks nonlinearly. This is where psychoanalysis comes in, or where it begins to build itself. What becomes important to Breuer and then Freud is that her words have been blocked and also can be used to release. Breuer writes: “As I knew, she had felt very much offended over something and had determined not to speak about it. When I guessed this and obliged her to talk about, the inhibition, which had made any other kind of utterance impossible as well, disappeared.” Anna O. refers to her own reparative speech as “chimney sweeping” and “the talking cure.” Freud together with Breuer proposes that the initiating, structuring presence of the doctor allows the patient to draw the lines between what happened to her in the past and why she is behaving “irrationally” now.
“I felt echoes in our times and in our experiences of illness, so I went to Vienna to read about Pappenheim and her world. As is perhaps apt for a person whose story has been co-opted so many times, it is difficult to find Pappenheim’s version of her own life.”
Though she had moments of recorded clarity and improvement in her somatic and psychological symptoms, the patient unfortunately worsened overall during her treatment by Breuer. Though Breuer and later Freud describe Breuer’s experimentation on this patient as successful, we also know that after a few years of treatment, Breuer recommended institutionalization because his treatment wasn’t working. The patient was in and out of institutions for many years struggling with addictions to morphine and chloral hydrate, medications Breuer had administered to get her to sleep and to address her symptoms.
The patient did eventually get better, at least in the sense that she was able to re-enter the social life of her time without being viewed as an unwell person. Pappenheim went on to an accomplished career, especially for a woman of her time and position. She achieved in ways that upper-class Jewish women of her time did not: soon after beginning to volunteer in soup kitchens in Frankfurt, she started a social work organization run by and for women, then initiated the first Jewish feminist movement in Germany, the League of Jewish Women. Pappenheim also published multiple works of literature under a male pseudonym, translated feminist texts into German, was one of the keynote speakers at the First World Congress of Jewish Women in Vienna in 1923, and became acutely concerned with the plights of women being sex trafficked from Eastern into Western Europe and established residences for these women and their children. Her crowning achievement, by her own estimation, was a home for Jewish women born out of wedlock or at risk of prostitution and trafficking at Neu-Isenburg, near Frankfurt am Main.
We cannot know how much of a role psychoanalysis played in Pappenheim’s achievements, and what we do know does not point to it having been especially helpful. The case study of Anna O does not follow her throughout her life, limited by the understandable timeline of its scope. It also does not include its own failures, because this case study is first and foremost intended to support one methodology in the development of psychoanalysis. For the sake of resolution, Freud and others took up one aspect of a patient’s story and categorized it, built language around it, language that is undeniably useful as a foundation for future study and development of therapeutic practices. Yes, there are exploitative activities aplenty to critique in these methods, but because of my own path into Pappenheim, I perceive this as one of many exploitative, tainted methods in the history of human liberatory inquiries, instead of one singularly problematic one. I want to think not exactly against but with the problematics of psychoanalytic history, because I wouldn’t be able to do much of the thinking I do now without what psychoanalysis and its derivations have offered and made possible.
When I go looking for Pappenheim, I am looking to frame something of my own choosing—collective experiences of illness. So when I go looking, I find the person who developed her own experiential theories of healing, belonging, and home through her feminist activities, her work as a public intellectual, and her modeling of a full life unmarried and without children. My version of Pappenheim is not more correct than anyone else’s, but still, consciously the one I seek out to learn from. Every researcher applies their own bias through the desire that drives them into a project, and I work this way intentionally, seeking to counteract any remaining belief in objectivity, welcoming the bias so it can infuse any project I make with people with an understanding of persona and how we take it up in order to learn.
*
As an American-born Jew of Mexican, Polish, and Ukrainian descent, some elements of Pappenheim’s history were familiar to me, and others not. To my knowledge, none of my family is Austrian nor passed through Austria—my ancestors were spread across the Pale of Settlement, the shtetl, and the small city, not the assimilated refinement of Viennese Jewry of Pappenheim’s time. I wanted to understand how Pappenheim formed power within the particular constraints of her time, to see what I might learn from her differential logics, what she came to believe in and what she was taught to believe.
I questioned the rational because the rational always has its context. In studying what passed for rational in Pappenheim’s time, I hoped also to see more clearly what passed for rational in my own. My own inherited ancestral narratives dealt heavily in panic and victimhood, tones I found increasingly unhelpful given white Jewish assimilation in the United States and the immense military power and violence of the Israeli state. “We” had access to power now in ways we did not in Pappenheim’s time, and I needed us to acknowledge when we did, so we could take up less space—and cause less harm—with our insistence on danger and threat.
There was much bigger work to do, need for a more fine-tuned understanding of when and how to distrust state power. It was a summer in which no one could ignore any longer the global trend toward authoritarian and populist governments. In Vienna I talked with European friends about how little of the Europe they knew was left. I told them that at home in Brooklyn my friends were looking into EU passports, and my wealthiest friends were moving money to Spain. “Tell them all not to bother,” Nikolai said, a German friend delivering advice, as if I were the only one who could get this message across the Atlantic, as if the sense of threat to democracy threatened also to seize the digital field so that messages would have to be delivered by physical carrier or mouth to mouth. “Nowhere is good anymore,” Nikolai continued, “except maybe Portugal, and who knows how long that will last.” This was before election results in France and the UK veered left and before Joe Biden ducked out of the 2024 presidential running, allowing Kamala Harris’ grin to take his place. I drove by a blue-and-red-hued image of Harris’ face topped by the words “YES WE KAM” and reeled for a moment, unsure what year it was.
“I feel alive again,” my friend Danielle said, “like there’s something to get excited about.” Many people I knew seemed to feel this way, but I was still mired, failing to be lifted by belief. Aside from being comparatively youthful, Harris stood for many things I did not and had failed many of our most vulnerable populations, as Hala Alyan detailed. The Democrats wouldn’t save us, or most of us. They had failed to end the genocide in Gaza or put up any significance resistant to Netanyahu’s regional wars. In the face of desperation and apocalypse, they presented flat conformity and acquiescence.
I questioned the rational because I saw it first as a form of force, whether coercion into a status quo of colonialist militarism or coercion into medical narrative. I needed a more updated, continuously formulating knowledge, one prepared to participate in confusion, replacing our pretensions that we knew exactly how to parse.
*
Pappenheim’s outspoken antizionism is also under-studied, under-explored. She responded to the possibility of a Jewish state with scorn and vigorously advocated for integrating Jews into European life as opposed to sending them elsewhere. Her modes for integration are assimilatory and classed—she taught former Jewish sex workers the skills she understood to be “proper” and demure, for example, because she believed that adaptation to mannered European culture was the best sphere for Jewish lives to thrive. “You are traveling to a desolate land,” she wrote in 1925 to a young Zionist on his way to Palestine, “the Promised Land is here.” Pappenheim’s antizionism relies here on a misinformed reality, centering only Euro-centric cultural advances. We know “the land” was not desolate but inhabited. Freud himself also expressed significant hesitation about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, concerned as he was about the people who already lived in the area. When violent clashes occurred in the region, he wrote: “the unworldly fanaticism of our fellow Jews must bear some responsibility for awakening the mistrust of the Arabs.”
This wasn’t exactly a radical position at the time—just one of many in the discussion of answers to the “Jewish Question.” Pappenheim’s correspondence participates in lively consideration of how to deal with antisemitism. Her own opinions adapt over time with new information. One of my favorite Pappenheim quotes comes in her reflections after a visit to Palestine. She writes: “I saw much of interest and beautiful things, but the most interesting—those buildings which are under the soil, supposed to be from the days of King Solomon—are not to be shown because Englishmen are supposed to have done ‘scientific research,’ which means they have been stealing.”
She can be funny. I like imagining her giggling at plundering colonialists. Though when I picture this, I notice that my fantasy image also includes a looming darkness. Little did she know… I recognize this as a strongly ingrained narrative arising from my childhood, one I know was implanted by American Holocaust education tinged with Zionism. I was educated to understand nonzionist intellectuals like Pappenheim as doomed unrealistic dreamers, unable to see the horrors awaiting the Jews in Europe. The idea being that these Europhilic Jews were the dumb ones, clinging to a Europe that didn’t love them, unable to see where the story was inevitably going. Doomed to dispossession, mass murder, and concentration camps. This narrative is suffused with blame or superiority. If only they’d known better. If only they’d gone to Zion.
“The nation became the new God,” writes theorist Jacqueline Rose in The Question of Zion. Rose describes how religious faith was replaced by nation-worship throughout and after the Enlightenment, and then specifically how Zionism replaced other forms of Jewish observance and identity. Becoming a “new God,” as I understand it now, means also to believe in something as an unquestioned rationale. “As soon as destinies and values become secure possessions, they serve to legitimate power,” Rose writes. Looking back from my current reality, I can see how other paths were occluded to simplify, shield, and energize the Zionist story. In that story, people like Pappenheim were dangerously foolish, a recital of stupidity that also occludes all the rest of their intelligence—and the fact that they may have been making the best choices available to them with the information they had at the time.
The more I root around in Pappenheim, the more I question how this rationale works, along with how rationale works more generally, because Pappenheim as a figure seems so pervious to the desires and acculturations of others, those who mined her story, and those who thought alongside her. Pappenheim lived among many Jews of her time who felt that “civilized” political and intellectual life was to be found exclusively in Europe. Her attitudes around Zionism bely her unfortunate snobbiness. Like many brilliant people, she held some (now) problematic beliefs influenced by the politics of her time. She saw the sex trafficked as victims of a poor social environment that had not taught them proper morals nor domestic skills. She warned Zionists that the Jewish state would fail if Galician Jews were settled en masse in Palestine because they were “uneducated,” and needed to be “prepared” by more refined educators before they could be good citizens anywhere. Pappenheim believed that oppressed people should prove their value along normative standards to deserve or gain equal rights. She gave little indication of trying to burst through the gendered or classed socializations of her time.
In some ways Pappenheim is disappointing as an activist model. But her porousness to classism and racism also makes her just the imperfect organizing figure I’ve been needing—one who brings about significant change and new ideas but who lacks an unquestionable rationale or a flawless, concluded story. “[…] I have to say that I never thought of a special direction for myself,” Pappenheim wrote when asked to reflect on her career. “I never wanted to organize.”
I look into Pappenheim from an intentionally disorganized position. I feel invited to do so because many parts of her earlier life were used and mythologized—even, at their most extreme, bluntly lied about. In Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen writes, “the very myth that forms the basis of our modern belief in the redemptive value of recollection and narration has stubbornly resisted historicization. Everyone knows perfectly well that the cure of Anna O. is a myth.”
But if Freud hadn’t tried to smooth out and thus mythologize her story, I wouldn’t be able to see, now, the falsities in his attempt. If he hadn’t tried to write about hysteria, generations of analysts and theorists would not have been able to write in the way that they have, after him, with him. I have affection for the Freud who believes in resolving a story—it’s a strategy humans fall back on to make the world (and our lives) make sense. I can see it as a useful strategy, as long as we can concurrently see that it often fails us. Story-making can be useful if it is not the only mode we rest our faith in, or work with to the exclusion of all else.
It’s the with, over and over, that I find in Pappenheim. She goes with. If we take her story with a grain of salt, with doubt, the story continues with Freud somewhere off beyond them both, a crucial imaginative creation. Pappenheim went with, not apart-from—in her politics, in the way I understand she lived her life. With Zionists, too. She collaborated with and sought to learn from them in her organizing projects, even as she criticized their ideas. “I am in despair about these Zionistic discussions,” Pappenheim wrote, “Is there nothing else, nothing wider, nothing bigger in the entire world?” I latch onto this “wider,” with its willing scope, keen to accommodate from a stance of related despair.
*
When I write with Pappenheim, I also write intertextually, with others. I often move across many texts at the same time, seeking unorthodox parallels and relevances—even more so in politically devastating times, when my reading attitude can veer toward seeking guidance, almost a devotional or divination practice.
The same summer I go to Vienna, I read How to Tell When We Will Die, the much-anticipated book by Johanna Hedva, whose thinking on the fecundity of loss has greatly influenced my own. If we begin by considering that we are going to lose (an election, our faith in government, our civil rights), we will not then give up when this loss comes to bear, Hedva explains, when our political aims fail us—we will instead cultivate fruits from this reality. How can we face failures and erosions and continue from a place of generative, messy relations—not to throw up our hands and blame one another, but recognize the space of narrative failure as one filled with potential? Hedva turns me away from the search for exemplary political ancestors and instead toward a genuine desire for impure, fragmented models. Where Pappenheim fits: an endlessly fractured person, by which I do not mean her hysteric symptoms, but her persona, her use and re-use as a Rorschach test of sorts, her story explaining whatever each generation wants to see.
She is everyone’s myth, Anna O. Analysts reinterpret her case, biographers attempt to categorize her feminism, playwrights and artists reimagine what links the early illness and the later innovator. I’m not so interested in presenting a new version of how she did it. I’m more interested in what I can learn from her as such a popular prism. We’ll never explain her completely. Only when we lose can we always construct more.
Through the summer in Vienna and after, these ideas pour into my politics, a final dissolution of belief in salvation by electoral politics or candidate as savior. I find myself more able to consider the small elements of deliverance offered in each person, each organization or movement, even as we infight about whether direct action matters, to protect migrant shelters or not draw further attention to them, to organize our own sources of hormones or attempt to convince hospitals to keep providing them. We disagree, we continue, and it does not all make coherent sense. What matters is that we piece it together. No. That we know we’re piecing it together, in constant attempt.
*
One of the most recent Anna O. interpretations is Gabriel Brownstein’s The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim (2024), a book that claims Pappenheim as the patron saint of functional neurologic disorder (FND), an illness that Brownstein identifies as the true reality of hysteria. Hysteria is not, Brownstein argues, a social phenomenon, but rather a very specific neurological one in which patients’ brains make more connections than someone without FND, particularly in the way their brains connect emotional experiences to physical experiences. “They are violating the script the rest of us follow, a script that says consciousness is separate from the flesh, that says our bodies are tools over which we exert the mind’s agency,” Brownstein writes.
I’m not convinced that all eras of hysteria can be fully explained by one neurological condition, but I do love Brownstein’s formulation that patients fail to function because they are making too many connections, and the way he phrases this as working counter to medical models of dominance. I take this personally—as a writer who most often works in citational autotheoretical modes, I want support for threaded tapestries of thought, for ideas strengthened by anomalous reaches across genre and expertise. The psychoanalytic frame is supportive here, too: I decline traditional frames of prowess in search of a more lyric interest in negative capability and the capacity of intergenre forms to bring out the possibilities of collective voice, even when written by an individual author. Maybe I’m not being exclusively narcissistic in my search for an ancestor in Pappenheim. I write intertextually to point at my experience of how knowledge and thought are built: in interweaving conversation between text and human, as analyst and analysand, evolving as language influences itself and its audiences.
Pappenheim beckons with her overwritten, incomplete, and at times fictitious story. We know that Freud made up a lot about her case, including possibly the much-examined phantom pregnancy at the genesis of early descriptions of transference. But psychoanalysis also teaches us to pay close attention to when narrative fails or cracks, because those are moments from which living and understanding can expand.
Freud used Pappenheim to build the narrative healing needed and possible in his time. I think of that activist phrase “building the new in the shell of the old,” and how this automatically involves some sacrifice. The shell of the old is always constraining. Still, it provides shadow, structure, or compost for the new. It provides that which we press up against, deny, the attempt we must make before another strategy becomes available to us. Less than critiquing Freud’s flattening or lubrication of Pappenheim’s story into a narrative arc, I am interested in understanding it as a strategy of its own context which we now use to converse with and build from. In my time, I am also able to use the strategies of fragmentation, disjunction, endless questions, etc.—because I am living in a time, fed by prior times, when these are possible and useful for me.
*
In Vienna I feel a kind of permission that I rarely feel. Unrushed in my approach to research, patiently awaiting the associations that I trust will eventually arise from disparate objects. I walk slowly from the archive to lunch, to meet with a curator at another Viennese museum who says he is so sorry they do not have more in their collections about Pappenheim—what a shame, he tells me, but he will meet with me, anyway, gladly. I do not think twice about this meeting and whether it will be a good use of time—I simply take it, and stay at it for hours, the leisurely meals I stereotypically associate with Europe.
“You and I, we went a lot of places,” the curator tells me as we get the bill. He jots down the podcasts I’ve recommended that I imagine might help inform his next exhibition, the one about antisemitism that he seems lukewarm about, the one, he confesses, he is concerned will be one-dimensional. I have recommended a few sources that I consider more precise in their definitions of antisemitism as distinct from the IHRA definition that includes critiques of Zionism and of the Israeli government.
“Pappenheim beckons with her overwritten, incomplete, and at times fictitious story.”
“It’s easy to muddle those together,” I tell him. I glance down at the table, trying to give myself a moment to articulate this well. “But even in Viennese history you have plenty of people—” I brush a crumb from the table, “—plenty of thinkers who knew these were distinct.”
“You’re right,” the curator says, “we don’t tend to highlight those people in our museum.”
“Even Herzl,” I tell him, lowering my voice before I realize I am doing so. “He shifted.” Just before he wrote The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl had an alternate idea that all Jews should convert to Christianity, as Shaul Magid has described. Schemes to solve antisemitism were in flux around the turn of that century and continued to be through the early days of the establishment of the State of Israel. This history has been intentionally suppressed to support Zionism and because it is easier to grasp the clean, clear account in which an Israel arose in a man (Herzl), was popularized in a people (European Jews), then affirmed and supported by existing sources of power (especially the British Empire).
The God of Zion reorganized this history in its organization of what would save the Jews, of the Jews as having been saved only and exclusively by a nation-state. But there are many other modalities that have kept Jews alive across different nations and eras. There are also many modalities that have inflamed antisemitism, and not all of these peak and dissipate during and after the Nazi Holocaust. I am reminded again of that Freud quote: “the unworldly fanaticism of our fellow Jews must bear some responsibility….” I am drawn to Freud’s use of “unworldly” here, an adjective carrying the meaning both of a naïve, unsophisticated position and a sense of the otherworldly, mystical, more-than-human. Freud isn’t known for favoring religiosity, and we can see here how he casts this same suspicion onto a dedication to the God of Zion.
“The community here, they just want to believe what they believe,” the curator sighs. I wonder how to incorporate Freud’s “responsibility” into what we now believe. I can understand the desire for a selective reality organizing one’s sense of safety. I too think with Zionist ideology, because I was raised in it and I know well the sense of security it offers, even with its narrative occlusions and horrific costs. This also feels psychoanalytic to me: I surface hidden narratives to integrate instead of repressing.
I think with because I cannot bear total withdrawal from people I know and love. I cannot bear enacting superiority as if I am a doctor or researcher who knows already where the conclusion will land. This kind of position has shown me its limitations and I am looking for something else. This kind of thinking is not participatory, nor new in the sense of building on what’s been presented thus far.
When I ask the curator to explain both “the community” and “what they believe,” he tells me that Vienna’s contemporary Jewish community is politically conservative, largely made up of immigrants to Vienna from Russia and Eastern Europe after the World Wars, and tends to hew very closely to the established narratives of Israel as triumphant solution.
“That’s interesting,” I tell him, “given how much of the conversation was here.” I mean, in Vienna—how much of the arguments about Zionism occurred here, amidst the public intellectuals alive during Pappenheim’s time. Pappenheim argued that what Jews held in common was a shared religious history, not a national one. She believed in a religious Jewish identity, even as she argued that faith was a private matter. Even in her Eurocentricity, she did not support one singular conclusion to how all Jews should live, or whether they should live together.
Pappenheim’s thinking turns me away from resolution—I’d even say, “trains” me away from it. She’s a both/and kind of gal. A snob who holds a now-outdated view of social work, explicitly stating that she and other wealthy Western European Jews know better than oppressed women themselves about what will heal and support them. She collected decorative objects that it seems she hoarded in her home to show off to other wealthy friends and visitors. I spend much of my time in Vienna examining her collection of lace and cast-iron objects: in the MAK basement the archivists take out one piece of delicate lace at a time from its wax paper, then wait for me to make notes. I feel plenty of imposter syndrome, looking at objects about which I have no expertise. Like many things of determined value, each piece needs to be handled with blue rubber gloves by a professional. I stare at a white lace flower with very pronounced stamens and wait for it tell me something.
“You are an anthropologist?” The archivist asks.
“Oh no,” I say, “a nonfiction writer.” An open category that I imagine will be unsatisfying in this world of curatorial expertise. From what I can see of her collections, there is a formalism and fussiness to Pappenheim’s aesthetics that I’ve never related to. But I don’t need to like these objects. I just need to think with them.
It is a separate appointment to see Pappenheim’s cast-iron objects: pins and brooches and necklaces, delicate jewelry made from small links of metal and wire mesh.
“The metal warms to your skin,” this archivist tells me. He holds a bracelet over his own arm. We squeeze close together to one side of a drawer, pressed between the rolling shelves. The archivist points to a pendant demonstrating a cross, heart, and anchor and explains that these are the three Christian theological virtues.
“Do you know why she would have collected this?” I ask him.
“Well, they wanted everything Roman then,” he says, holding up a plate showing the mythological Psyche sitting by the River Styx. He tells me that the Viennese of this time were fascinated by early excavations of Roman ruins.
“They love empire,” I say. He nods.
“They wanted to look at other empires,” he says, “as theirs was ending.” I have learned how important this frame is here—the tail end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the early emergence of an Austrian nation-state. The grandeur of this empire, its stubborn commitment to resplendent imperial culture in music, in architecture, in matters of “taste.”
“This city is a walking snob,” Andrea says, my one friend from the US who now lives in Vienna. Snobbery feels inextricable also from these basements, having “collections” to look at and attempt to understand.
“They are both things you can see through,” the archivist says, “the iron and the lace.” He unfurls an intricately detailed iron fan and waves it between our faces. His nose becomes slivers of color between the small rattling pieces of iron.
The catalogue of a 2008 exhibition at the MAK of Pappenheim’s collections includes essays about Pappenheim’s collections of lace and cast iron, each toeing a line between autobiography and mystery. “We are no longer able to elucidate today why the founder limited her range of collecting to two transparent materials, one soft and white, the other hard and black,” writes curator Elisabeth Schmuttermeier, “but it would indeed be very interesting to discover the reason.” Even when this essay attempts to explain a set of objects, it ends on the possibility of further consideration.
*
With all her contradictions, Pappenheim is an innovative thinker, a creator of spaces where marginalized women and children formed new systems of kin and new possibilities for agency and employment. Under her influence, I widen. I don’t choose to put away what I don’t like. I stay-with, noticing an increased capacity for what Hannah Zeavin has called the “qualities of immersion and devotion” that psychoanalysis can bring on. Staying-with as a tenacity that opens more avenues for affinity. If we aren’t asking our ancestors to be perfect—or perfectly comprehensible—what else can they do for us? Or with us?
When Pappenheim passed away, several Zionist women memorialized her with great respect. “Bertha Pappenheim has influenced us,” one wrote, “even without directly assisting us”—as she assists me now, allows me glimpses into her world without expectation that it will clarify itself entirely. I like to imagine that she was aware of her opacity—and her correlated capacity to become a character or case. Upon request, Pappenheim would make sense of herself. I think of this in two segments: first, when she is a patient who talks with Breuer, explaining where her hallucinations come from, and then, much later in life, when she writes a few sarcastic versions of her obituary based on things she knew certain groups disliked about her.
“She was a woman who for decades stubbornly fought for her ideas. Ideas of her times,” reads one of these obituaries. “But she did this by ways and means which tried to anticipate developments and were not to everybody's taste. What a pity!” And another: “[...] a woman of real gifts, indebted both to Jewish essence and German civilization; yet she remained consciously outside our ranks because she sternly rejected ideas she did not like. What a pity!” Each one of them ends with “What a pity!” As if… it could have gone another way, a better way, but instead we witness the alternative path, the wrong direction she chose.
We don’t know why Pappenheim chose the directions she did. We don’t really know why she was sick when other women in her situation were not, or why she became powerful in a time when other women could not find their own ways to work or channel their own skillsets. We don’t know if the multiple sections of her life are even related at all, though the Freudian inclination might wish us to think so. But Pappenheim keeps pointing at the something missing, that there is more in a life that we don’t see, other versions on the verge of invention. Instead of quitting at the gates of the unanswerable, feeling unqualified and futile, I choose to politicize futility as the rich ground it can be, one that allows us more capacity to think and act rather than less.
Psychoanalysis knows about this, too. On my first day at the Library of Psychoanalysis in Vienna, I meet with Research Director Daniela Finzi to discuss where to begin. “You might consider the history of the case study itself,” she suggests. She hands me a collection of essays including one in which Finzi herself challenges the stability of Freud’s case studies. Not to discredit them, but to emphasize that Freud knew he was constructing much of the material of these case studies and intended us to encounter them as such. I take this as an invitation to think more, to demand more of myself and comrades and conversants. To be continuous co-authors, to relentlessly re-engage the texts and histories we’ve been given. We take up personas because we require them to learn and interact. But we can become more aware of personification and thus invite broader participation when we do not require the performance of mastery.
Once Trump takes power again in 2025, everyone attempts to explain how it all happened, the perfect retrospective on democratic failure. To me, these attempts feel like yet another continuation of intellectual superiority, smoothing the story so as not to remain outside of it, sealed off. I look to Pappenheim—look into her, look with her, look alongside her—and I see a fractured and yet in its own way successful relationship to story: successful because it points at the branches and breaks in characterization, identity. We cannot rest on stories as stable, even those that fit the narratives we desire them to fit right now. The plot gets foiled, succeeding narratively in some ways and then not in others, looping back on itself to revise. We are strong enough to tolerate “failed” documents, “failed” selves, because and when we know that we can actually be lifted by this failure. Lifted not by optimistic belief in one given politician, but deriving energy to proceed from our active creative capacities.