In the case of Anna O., Freud's collaborator Breuer makes no mention of when Anna coined the phrase "private theater". The abstraction reveals within itself two personalities distinct, and therefore remarkable self-awareness. It cannot be that in the midst of a daydream he described the experience, because then he would no longer be daydreaming. Nor does the thought seem very random refined that reveals at least a partial understanding of the nature of her fantasies, if not the nature of her illness. It is a coherent and astute German, the product of intelligent reflection. It is surprising that she was capable of this level of understanding after three pages , whether the invisible hand of Breuer and Freud never tells us exactly how far they traveled to get there. Say no to plagiarism Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? the history of the case hides the context, the only way to make sense of the sentence is to trust Breuer's explanation. He writes: "The girl, overflowing with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanical-minded family. She embellished her life in a way that probably influenced her decisively in the direction of her illness, indulging in systematic practices of dreaming and eyes open, which she described as her "private theater". While everyone thought she attended, she lived on fairy tales in her imagination... She carried out this activity almost continuously while she was busy with housework, which she performed unexceptionally.. ."The long quote is the best way to understand the relationship of the sentence to the patient. What emerges first is a world of opposites: "intellectual vitality" contrasted with a "monotonous existence"; “fairy tales” versus “dating”; “activities” versus “household duties.” So “private theater” is more than just “daydreaming.” It is an escape from a specific environment, a fortress strengthened against his "Puritan-minded family". Yet her “household duties” are still “fulfilled.” Unlike the "final direction of his illness", the daydream is a silent and imperceptible rebellion. At this point, in the initial phase, the patient is "always on the spot when spoken to". Daydreaming is such a moderate activity, shows such moderation, that Breuer calls it a mere "embellishment" of life, a game of solitaire played for the same purpose. Only later will he act "badly" while "hallucinating." For now the affliction is artistic, not violent. Hence the expression “private theatre”, as opposed to the public nuisance it will become. However, the expression did not reveal its full meaning. Breuer compares plays to "fairy tales," an analogy that strips the phrase of its realism while emphasizing its vividness: a play is subject to rules that a fairy tale is not. Exact parody of real life is equally inessential, but a play is condemned to a stage where the characters must move just as we do. Magic is possible, but it depends on the audience's capacity for abstraction. On a stage, a frog cannot actually transform into a prince. In this sense the "private theater" prefigures the real symptoms of Anna's hysteria. This is therefore a clue to the fact that she daydreams about "throwing pillows at people", about "ripping buttons off blankets", since, obviously, she cannot assume supernatural ability. After the idea, we find that it is unclear whether Anna is the author or the audience or, as is likely, both. In fact, he wrote the work in his unconscious and looks at it with the utmost awareness. Withher “great poetic and imaginative gifts,” Anna creates plays that exist in some impossible realm, as a play is by definition public. It's a show for everyone to enjoy. So a “private theater” is as confusing an oxymoron as a “public diary.” This contradiction is perhaps the subtext of every work of art that the artist creates only for himself. In case of hysterics, however, the seats in the theater must fill up. Like the suicide note that Dora hides in the desk for her father to find, the characters must say their lines to someone, even if the speech is so confusing that only a psychoanalyst can be an honest critic. Hysteria is therefore the means of making that private theater public. Anna was visited by a compulsive need to play her own characters. The curtain of his psyche slowly rose and out came the attacks, the cough, the strabismus and the whole series of symptoms that were no longer content to toil only for the director's eyes. As Breuer says in his conclusion, "daydreaming... prepared the ground on which the affect of anguish and terror could establish itself." This implies that the greater the tension between the work and reality, the greater the tendency towards hysteria. Dora also suffers from the tyranny of the kitchen. "She was", writes Freud, "on very bad terms with her mother, who wanted to convince her to take part in the housework". She attended "girls' classes" to escape, it seems, the lure of the dishcloth. Once again, the two worlds are too distant to be coherent. Hypnoid states take their cue from there. Now that plays are accessible to our viewing, stories capture our attention. Anna no longer "dates". Instead, he falls prey to "deafness caused by shaking" or "fright at noise". Both plots have "origins" in Anna's past. Both are re-enactments. Dora also stages events that happened years before, in reality or in fantasy. So, if hysteria is theatre, then there are only stories on the bill. "Hysterics", Freud and Breuer teach us in their "Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena", "suffer mainly from reminiscences". The treatment must therefore establish a clear relationship between the memory and the person who remembers, between the play and the playwright. Just as an artist can say of his most disturbing work, “I didn't really write that,” so too does he make a hysterical appeal to the unconscious principle. “I haven't really experienced that.” Implicit in the "private theater" is Anna's impossible belief that she has no role in the productions; we do theatre, always in a passive form. The psychoanalytic method requires the absolute attribution of the paternity of daydreams, nocturnal dreams and their physical expression, the hysterical "scenes". The means to achieve this goal is the word. Anna "talks" about her hysteria. Just when his "poetic vein dried up" due to the opening of his reserves, his symptoms disappeared after explaining their origin. The work of Freud and Breuer was to allow Anna to understand what each symptom represented, to explain the functioning of the work to its creator. It goes without saying that authors are notoriously resistant to criticism. There is, however, a problem with pursuing Anna's metaphor as much as I have. How exactly is the concept of abreaction reconcilable with the model of private theater becoming public? It would seem that here the director/playwright suddenly dissolves into his main character; the stage folds; the audience is a part of the dialogue. “The particular symptom,” Breuer writes of Anna, “emerged with greater force as she spoke of it.” Memory no longer runs wild on set, as abreaction is by its nature a proportional reaction to the original event. It's not so easy to say.