She attended a Roman Catholic girls' school and led a life structured by the Jewish holiday calendar and summer vacations in Ischl.

The slow and laborious progress of what Breuer called her "remembering work", in which she recalled individual symptoms after they had occurred, thus "dissolving" them, came to a conclusion on 7 June 1882 after she had reconstructed the first night of hallucinations in Ischl.

Pappenheim was treated by Breuer for severe cough, paralysis of the extremities on the right side of her body, and disturbances of vision, hearing, and speech, as well as hallucination and loss of consciousness.

Medical historian Elizabeth Marianne Thornton suggested in Freud and Cocaine (1983) that Pappenheim had tuberculous meningitis,[9] a view supported by professor of psychology Hans Eysenck, but not by neuropsychiatrist and professor of neurology Richard Restak who describes the theory as "simply preposterous" since the mortality rate for tuberculous meningitis at the time was virtually 100 percent and those who survived were severely disabled (Pappenheim lived for another 55 years).

[12][8][11] According to one perspective, "examination of the neurological details suggests that Anna suffered from complex partial seizures exacerbated by drug dependence.

"[15] An initial therapeutic approach was suggested by the observation that her anxiety and language difficulties seemed to dissolve whenever she was asked to tell stories that had arisen from her daydreams.

Examples include: Breuer noticed that systematic remembering and spontaneously describing the occasions when hysterical symptoms first occurred had a therapeutic effect on Pappenheim.

Breuer described his final method as follows: in the morning he asked Pappenheim, whom he had put under light hypnosis, about the occasions and circumstances under which a particular symptom occurred.

The first possible account is that this therapy came to a conclusion when they had worked their way back to a black snake hallucination which Pappenheim experienced one night in Ischl when she was at her father's sickbed.

On the final day she reproduced the anxiety hallucination which was the root of all her illness and in which she could only think and pray in English, helped along by rearranging the room to resemble her father's sickroom.

Immediately thereafter she spoke German and was then free of all the innumerable individual disorders which she had formerly shown.An alternate story is that on the eve of his final analysis with her, he was called back to her home to find her experiencing severe stomach cramps and hallucinating that she was having his child.

[18] One of the most discussed aspects of the case of Ana O. is the phenomenon of transference, in which the patient, Bertha Pappenheim, developed ambiguous feelings toward her doctor, Josef Breuer.

Sigmund Freud, who discussed the case with Breuer, recognized transference as a fundamental aspect of the therapeutic process, interpreting it as the manifestation of unconscious desires toward the figure of the therapist.

In a private seminar Carl Gustav Jung said in 1925 that Freud's "famous first case he treated together with Breuer and which was vastly praised as an outstanding therapeutic success was nothing of the sort.

[25] On 12 July 1882, Breuer referred Pappenheim to the private Bellevue Clinic in Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance, which was headed by Robert Binswanger [de].

Shortly after moving to Frankfurt, she first worked in a soup kitchen and read aloud in an orphanage for Jewish girls run by the Israelitischer Frauenverein ('Israelite Women's Association').

At the first German conference on combating traffic in women held in Frankfurt in October 1902, Pappenheim and Sara Rabinowitsch [de] were asked to travel to Galicia to investigate the social situation there.

In her 1904 report about this trip, which lasted several months, she described the problems that arose from a combination of agrarian backwardness and early industrialization as well as from the collision of Hasidism and Zionism.

Pappenheim was elected the first president of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (JFB; 'League of Jewish Women') and was its head for 20 years, contributing to its efforts until her death in 1936.

Kleine Geschichten für Kinder ('Little Stories for Children') appeared anonymously in 1888, to be followed in 1890 by a volume of tales, In der Trödelbude (In the Junk Shop).

Pappenheim refused to have the play performed at a JFP assembly of delegates in 1933, "since the 'Tragic Moments', which I wrote without an ulterior motive, would certainly give rise to objections in Zionist circles because of their timeliness."

Among the scattered texts are the so-called Denkzettel ("Memoranda"), short maxims and sayings, some of which are dated and some of which she later had her secretary Lucy Jourdan collect and copy.

And in the foreword to the Ma'assebuch she wrote: In the hands of parents, educators and teachers the Allerlei Geschichten (All Kinds of Stories) can be a bridge to a new understanding of the meaning of traditional Jewish culture and beliefs.

Breuer describes her as a woman "of considerable intelligence, astonishingly astute reasoning and sharp-sighted intuition..."[15] After her mother died in 1905 Pappenheim lived alone for many years without a private attachment.

Despite her illness she traveled, at the end of 1935, to Amsterdam in order to meet Henrietta Szold, the head of Youth Aliyah, and again to Galicia, to advise the Beth Jacob Schools.

[41] When the first volume of Ernest Jones' Freud biography appeared in 1953, in which Anna O. was identified as Pappenheim, her friends and admirers were outraged; they only knew her from her time in Frankfurt.

One of the reasons for Dora Edinger's [de] biography was to contrast her identification as being "mentally ill", which at the time was considered defamatory, with a depiction of Pappenheim as a philanthropist and advocate of women's rights.

New facts only became known based on research by Henri Ellenberger and subsequently by Albrecht Hirschmüller, who were able to find Breuer's case history of Pappenheim and other documents in the archives of the Bellevue Clinic in Kreuzlingen.

[44][45] Aspects of Pappenheim's biography (especially her time as Breuer's patient) were treated in the film Freud: The Secret Passion by John Huston (along with elements of other early psychoanalytic case histories).

Based on this case study the assertion that "those with hysteria suffer for the most part from their reminiscences", in other words from traumatic memories which can be "processed" by relating them, was formulated for the first time.