Anna O.
Anna O. was the name given to a patient of the physician and physiologist Josef Breuer in his book "Studies on Hysteria", written in collaboration with Sigmund Freud. Her actual name was Bertha Pappenheim. Her sister, Marie Pappenheim, as a medical student, wrote the libretto, depicting a woman's mental breakdown, for Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung.
She suffered from hysterical paralysis, where one of her arms was paralyzed even though there was nothing medically or physically wrong with it. After study, it was discovered this was the arm she had cradled her dying father with. It was theorised that she was unconsciously stopping the use of the arm as punishment because she blamed herself for her father's death.
Through analysis with Breuer, it was discovered that by talking about what had happened when the symptoms started, she would recover a repressed fact and then recover a bit. This is what Pappenheim called her "talking cure". Breuer called the act of recovery through this method catharsis. This case was the beginning of psychoanalysis, which would be later heavily developed by Freud.
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