Hilda Reilly's Blog: The Writing of Guises of Desire - Posts Tagged "anna-o"

As I neared the end of my novel, the need to decide on a title grew pressing. I had already been through several working titles: Bertha P (unlikely to attract attention, in fact, guaranteed not to); The Story of Bertha P (not much better); A.K.A. Anna O (well, I suppose the name Anna O is more recognizable than Bertha P, but not widely so, and there was also the problem of punctuation: should it be aka, AKA, a.k.a., A.k.a or A.K.A?).

Then the phrase The Various Guises of Desire came to me out of the blue. Now this I really liked. Pleasingly euphonious, with subtle hints of eroticism; perhaps the thinking woman's Fifty Shades of Grey. But could I be accused of misrepresentation? After all, my novel isn't a bodice ripper.

I didn't think so. In fact, it seemed to me highly apt. I don't agree with a lot of Freud's thinking but I do believe he was onto something with his ideas about what he unfortunately termed 'polymorphous perversity', which looms large in my version of the Bertha Pappenheim story. It also chimed with my thesis that Bertha's absence states were associated with a form of temporal lobe epilepsy and that during them she experienced states of mystical rapture.

I put it to the vote on my blog and on facebook. To my disappointment, no one came out in favour of The Various Guises of Desire. On the other hand, several people suggested Guises of Desire as a better alternative.

In the meantime, I had been toying with other ideas.

The Viennese Patient. Catchy enough but what about its significance? Bertha Pappenheim was undoubtedly Viennese - or was she? Her mother was born in Germany and her father in Hungary - but so too were most of the patients of early psychoanalysis. Bertha does not stand out particularly by virtue of her Viennese-ness. Once I'd realised this, the title lost its attraction for me.

I next considered Becoming Anna O. Incorporating Anna O into the title would make it meaningful to a wider range of readers and throw it up more frequently on Google searches. Then I discovered a book titled Becoming Anna. It's not a good idea to give a book a title which is the same as, or similar to, that of another book. Plus, this title was open to the same arguments made against the following one, suggested by a blog reader:

From Bertha P to Anna O.

I thought carefully about this one before deciding that it only covered part of the story. Yes, it summarises Bertha's passage from normal (for the time, place and social setting) young woman to patient treated for a multi-stranded medical condition as depicted by Breuer. But the novel goes beyond that, postulating more than is suggested in the case study and ending when Bertha is nearing the end of her later, and highly successful, professional life. I didn't want her identity to be subsumed into that of the case study.

At the same time I was thinking about the kind of artwork I'd like to see on the cover. That, along with the title, is crucial to getting a book noticed.
The first idea that came to mind was Klimt, a Viennese artist of about the same period as Bertha. I started looking at his paintings. Much as I liked them I felt that they were too well known and too 'strong' in a way which would risk eclipsing the image of the novel itself. Then I came across his sketches. I knew at once that here I would find something which encapsulated the essence of my story. Most of all it was the eroticism conveyed by many of his drawings of naked or semi-nude young women. It struck me that this, above all, is what my novel is about. I was reminded of writer Terri Marie's advice on choosing a title, that it was awaiting discovery and when recognized would instill you with confidence and catalyse the energy of the book - 'like a light shining through the window'. So it was with the Klimt sketches.

I hadn't realised until this point how important the undercurrents of eroticism in my novel are. I had seen it more as simply a many-faceted story. Now I could see that the main driving force is the steadily increasing erotic charge (albeit not always in guises which we would immediately recognise) which leads to the dramatic culmination.
The whole process of searching for title and artwork was like subjecting the content of my novel to study under a microscope. It homed in on what it is principally about, clarified it and enabled me to sum it up.

And in the end I went with the crowdsourced option:
Guises of Desire

There is no record of Sigmund Freud ever having met Bertha Pappenheim, certainly not in a professional capacity. However, this has proved no obstacle to the common misapprehension that she was his patient.
Often when I mention that I’ve written a book about Anna O, people will say something along the lines of: ‘Oh, yes, she was one of Freud’s patients, wasn’t she?’ This isn’t really surprising as she is so intimately connected with the history of psychoanalysis. In a sense, she was, as she is sometimes described, ‘Freud’s Anna O’. Her case is the foundation stone on which Freud started to build his theories; and without Freud, Bertha Pappenheim would be known only for her later success as a pioneering feminist and social worker.
Some people may think that it doesn’t matter whether or not Freud was her doctor, in the same way that some people think that it doesn’t matter whether Shakespeare or someone else wrote his plays and sonnets. It matters very much, in fact, and this is why it’s surprising that the misconception about Anna O even extends to the psychotherapy community.
A cursory Google search threw up a few interesting items.
A webpage titled Student Resources in Context has Bertha being treated by both Freud and Breuer simultaneously. In this version the collaboration starts with Breuer telling Freud about Bertha. It goes on to say that ‘during daily visits to Freud and Breuer, the doctors discovered that some of her symptoms were alleviated merely by discussing her memories and the feelings they created in her’. Finally, Freud alone is given credit for the cure with the claim that: ‘When Freud encouraged Anna O to recall a given situation and express the reaction she had earlier repressed, her symptoms vanished.’
Psychotherapist Humair Hashmi goes further. Anna O, he claims, began to express affection for Breuer and tried to put her arms round him. This so alarmed Breuer that he passed the case on to Freud. Nothing daunted, Freud, ‘the fearless pioneer that he was’, regarded this as a challenge and interpreted it as a manifestation of transference which could be used as a means of effecting a cure. Hashmi goes on to say:‘This is what Freud did in Anna’s case.’
An even more surprising misrepresentation is one I discovered when I came across a Wall Street Journal review of a show called Dr Freud’s Cabaret in which Freud takes to the boards with a number of his most famous patients. The show starts with an Anna O number called Chimney Sweeping (Bertha Pappenheim’s term for the talking she did with Breuer) and the review describes how ‘Anna O would hold Freud’s hand while she told him fairy stories and dark fantasies that helped alleviate her psychosis.’ Investigating this further I found that the idea for the show had germinated when the writer was reading Studies in Hysteria as research for a novel. So far so good, but the fact that she had done this research makes it even more puzzling that she could then flout the truth by portraying Anna O’s treatment as being with Freud rather than with Breuer. Artistic licence, you might say. Perhaps. But what really takes the biscuit is that the show was put on at the Freud Museum in London which seems to have been quite comfortable with helping to perpetuate the myth that Freud was Anna O’s patient. It would all be so much neater if she had been, after all. The fact that she was not is possibly, for them, what Al Gore might term ‘an inconvenient truth’.

A recent Good Reads reviewer wrote that she had some problem with the ending of Guises of Desire. Her difficulty was that, although the Author’s Note at the end had explained what my thinking had been regarding the causes of Bertha’s illness, the explanation had not been clear in the novel itself. In other words, she felt that readers would not be able to work out a diagnosis for themselves, or guess at the kind of diagnosis I had based my interpretation on.
I can understand why the reviewer felt this and I’ve been wondering what I could have done to avoid this kind of dissatisfaction – if dissatisfaction it is.
Perhaps the explanation can be found in the views of another reader who has commented that I never slip into a contemporary frame of reference, that the setting is pre-Freudian and that nothing of Freudian theory creeps into my character’s words or reflections. I would add that the setting is also pre-modern-neurology and that the kind of diagnosis I have in mind would therefore not form part of it. It’s difficult therefore to see how, while remaining resolutely in the 19th century and with the narrative perspective being that of the characters rather than omniscient, I could have created a picture which would have led the reader, unless a medical professional, to think: Oh yes, Bertha Pappenheim clearly has such and such a condition. As it is, readers are drawn rather into the world of Bertha herself, experiencing the same confusion as Bertha, her family and her doctors, totally perplexed as to what’s going on and trying to figure out their own explanation.
Of course, I could have written a different kind of book, one which would have demonstrated quite clearly where I was coming from. I’d thought, for example, of doing one of those split-time novels which are popular now in historical fiction, with perhaps the parallel story of a modern neurological researcher working on the Anna O case, or something similar. Or I could have done something more avant-garde, interspersing the narrative with fragments of contemporary analysis of the case, with excerpts from case studies of later patients displaying similar syndromes, and so on.
It’s interesting to compare Guises of Desire with the novel Lying Awake by Mark Salzmann which tells the story of a contemplative Catholic nun who has mystical experiences associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. Because the setting is a contemporary one, a full depiction of her condition, both subjective and medical is possible. Of course, this could give rise to a whole new set of questions. Does the corresponding electrical activity of the brain create the content of the mystical experiences or does it provide a conduit to a supernatural dimension. The answer to this is likely to depend on the religious views, or lack thereof, of the reader. And it’s still pretty much true that one’s interpretation of the Bertha Pappenheim case depends on which school of psychological thought one subscribes to.
Guises of Desire