When an email dropped into my Inbox offering a place on Dave Chawner’s workshop 'How To Engage Non-academic Audiences With Your Research' I snapped up the opportunity. Since finishing my PhD, I’d felt that my findings – in fact, the whole story of my drama-ridden research journey – would be of interest beyond the bounds of academia. But how to break through to that audience? Perhaps Dave Chawner, writer, presenter, TED-talker and stand-up comedian, would have some suggestions.
In his introduction, Dave highlighted the value of humour as an effective vehicle in communicating ideas. If people are laughing, they are listening, and they will continue to listen for more. Humour can be the spoonful of sugar which makes the medicine go down. But it can be a double-edged sword and must be used sensitively: we should know our audience and avoid potential triggers. In particular, we should avoid the common comedic route of ‘punching down,’ whereby jokes are used to belittle and invalidate those in less powerful positions. On the contrary, we should focus on ‘punching up’. Dave demonstrated how this can be done with a comedy in which autistic comedian Joe Wells turns the tables on our usual perceptions with a witty rundown of all the extraordinary – ie, non-autistic! – characteristics of his neurotypical brother. Point taken and thoroughly enjoyed!
Next came the three C’s, the need to speak clearly, concisely and confidently, and to avoid the ‘erm’’s and ‘uh’’s with which speeches are so often peppered. To let us experience just how difficult this can be, Dave invited us to take part in a round of Just a Minute, the Radio 4 panel game in which participants are given a topic which they have to talk about for 60 seconds without repetition, deviation or hesitation. The topic given was ‘dogs’. The first person invited to speak on that subject held forth for a mighty 45 seconds before being disqualified for hesitation, the second managed only ten seconds, while the third cantered home an easy winner with only five seconds to fill. And that was the end of Just a Minute. I was disappointed not to have been chosen to take part; I love a verbal challenge.
This was followed by the need to simplify your ideas, a point hammered home with a quote from Albert Einstein: ‘If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, then you don’t understand it yourself’.  Then came a task, based loosely on the Just a Minute format, designed to discipline our thinking along those lines: present your research in 30 seconds. I was the one invited to do it. (How glad I was now that I hadn’t been asked to talk about dogs!) 
This was certainly far more challenging than Just a Minute. It would probably take me more than 30 seconds to read one of the longer sentences from my PhD thesis, never mind summarise the whole thing. I took a deep breath and plunged in. Freud was a charlatan, I began, and I had unearthed proof positive of this, in the form of hitherto unknown autobiographical material written by one of his most important patients, Anna von Lieben. Included with this material were the diaries of her husband and other family documents, all of which I found in the possession of a great-grandson in Israel.  Analysis of those documents revealed that von Lieben suffered throughout her adult life from gynaecological disease, probably endometriosis or something similar, which could account for most of her symptoms. Freud, far from curing her, brought about no improvement whatsoever in her condition. And what’s more, he never even mentioned any of her gynaecological symptoms. 
Then I was cut short. My 30 seconds were up and the baton was passed on to the next person who was given 15 seconds to summarise what I had just said. She made a pretty good job of it before she too was stopped and the game finished with what was probably the most difficult task of the three – summing up my research in just five seconds. She boiled it down to the idea that Freud was a fraud. This, said Dave, is your soundbite. 
The soundbite is the attention-grabbing phrase which will reel in the reader. It can be the basis for the headline of a press release, for the title of a talk or a magazine article, for anything designed to attract the interest of the wider public. It is the short and snappy sentence which encapsulates your research in a nutshell and renders it accessible to the average Joe and Jane. 
I wasn’t entirely satisfied with this end result, however, as it put the emphasis on Freud as a charlatan. After all, many people already believe this so what had I achieved that was new? The answer to that is this: I had found, for the first time, first-person narratives of a Freud patient and of her family, written at the time of the illness and treatment in question; my analysis of those documents completely contradicted Freud’s report of the case; and I had opened up a whole new channel of exploration for the history of gynaecological illness. 

My recently completed PhD explored the illness experience of Freud’s patient Anna von Lieben, using a qualitative research methodology – Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis – to analyse her previously undiscovered autopathographical poetry. The analysis, supplemented by a reading of her husband’s diaries and other family documentation, indicated that the patient’s pathology was due primarily to a longstanding gynaecological condition, possibly endometriosis. The overall findings led to the identification of several new avenues of research which I would like to offer for the consideration of researchers in the field of Medical Humanities/Narrative Medicine. My proposals also draw on the work of Nezhat, Nezhat and Nezhat (2012)* who suggest that, throughout history, many of the women diagnosed with hysteria were in fact suffering from endometriosis, or something similar.
On this basis, I have formulated the following ideas:

• a study of ‘hysterical’ patients of the 19th century to identify and further explore those with gynaecological co-morbidities 
• a qualitative analysis comparing the lived experiences of 19th-century ‘hysterical’ patients manifesting gynaecological symptoms and those of present-day endometriosis sufferers  
• a historical investigation over several millennia designed to find evidence in support of the Nezhat theories.

A project based on any of the above might serve as a topic for doctoral or postdoctoral research. It might equally be possible to investigate all three suggestions for an interdisciplinary team-based project. It could also be of interest to language scholars, both modern and classical.
The amount of new primary material which I obtained from the von Lieben family archive would in itself be sufficient for a number of researchers. Added to this is the substantial bank of archival information which I have built up in the course of my own research. I would like therefore to offer the above ideas as a ‘provocation’ to stimulate further investigation. I will not be undertaking any more substantial academic activity myself, but I would be happy to act as a facilitator for others, putting my knowledge and resources at their disposal, and passing the baton on to the next generation of researchers.
My methods and findings are summarised in the Abstract of my doctoral thesis, In her own words: Exploring the subjectivity of Freud’s ‘teacher’ Anna von Lieben.
If you would like further information, or to engage in some exploratory discussion, please contact me at [email protected]
*Nezhat, C., Nezhat, F., & Nezhat, C. (2012). Endometriosis: Ancient disease, ancient treatments. Fertility and Sterility, 98(6), 1-62.

Feminists are keen to claim Bertha Pappenheim as one of their own, and rightly so. She would be happy to consider herself such. After recovering from her illness she was active for the rest of her life in the field of women’s rights – a prolific feminist writer and polemicist, the founder of the League of Jewish Women, and a pioneering social worker, fighting against white slavery and founding a home for Jewish prostitutes and unmarried mothers. As well as all this she even found time to translate Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman into German and to write a play called Women’s Rights.

Perhaps she would not be so happy, though, with the lengths to which some feminists go in justifying their claim.

In Hysteria Beyond Freud, Elaine Showalter tells us that ‘In her hysterical seizures, Anna became unable to speak her native German, and instead spoke either Yiddish, which she called “the woman’s German,” or a jumble of English, Italian and French.’ While it is true that Bertha’s aphasic disturbances resulted in her being unable to speak German, resorting instead to English, Italian and French, nowhere in the case reports does Breuer mention her speaking Yiddish.

Showalter uses this claim about Bertha’s Yiddish to bolster up a feminist theory about ‘the repression of women’s language or its impossibility within patriarchal discourse’. She quotes psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell who calls hysteria ‘"the daughter's disease," a syndrome of physical and linguistic protest against the social and symbolic laws of the Father’. Then, in an egregious example of post hoc, ergo propter hoc thinking, she states that in the case of Bertha Pappenheim ‘the connections between hysteria and feminism seemed particularly clear because after her analysis with Breuer in 1882, she went on to become a feminist’.

In Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, And Feminism: The Case Of Anna 0, Dianne Hunter expresses similar views. Although she makes no mention of Yiddish she still puts a feminist gloss on Bertha’s linguistic difficulties. Bertha, she says, refused to speak German because to do so would mean that she accepted ‘integration into a cultural identity [she] wished to reject’ and concludes that her hysteria was a ‘discourse of femininity addressed to patriarchal thought’. Hunter also reads a psychological significance into Bertha’ agrammatism, in particular the fact that she ceased for a while to conjugate verbs, using only infinitives or past participles which, she points out do not specify a person. She seems not to be aware that this is typical of people suffering from Broca’s agrammatic aphasia, often found in people suffering from strokes or other damage in the left cerebral hemisphere. The condition is characterised by, among other things, an inability to inflect verbs or to use subject pronouns.

Hunter goes on to analyse Breuer’s own use of language:  ‘Breuer refers to the pauses in Pap-penheim's speech by the French term absence.’ Not quite. Breuer was not referring to her aphasic symptoms when he used this term, but rather to the petit mal seizures which she experienced (although he did not recognise them as such). For Hunter, however, Breuer’s use of this term ‘suggests that for Breuer as well as for Pappenheim, the abnormal states of consciousness represented foreign parts of the self. Parts of Anna O were alien to signification in her native tongue.’

As for Bertha’s Yiddish, given that this would have been one of the languages with which she, as an Orthodox Jewish woman, must have been familiar, it’s perhaps of significance that she didn’t resort to it in her aphasia. But the explanation is more likely to lie in neural disturbances in the speech centres of her brain than in any kind of gender frustration.