In recent years historians of psychoanalysis have come to view Freud's case of Anna O. as a failure and have cast doubt on the very foundations of psychoanalysis itself. This new study challenges existing historical scholarship by providing an unparalleled review of the available evidence on the case and reaches new conclusions about its outcome.

Richard Skues finds the existing interpretation and literature on Anna O.--the leading case in Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria--to be in all fundamentals wrong, representing a modern-day fiction about the origins of psychoanalysis. This book offers a new appraisal, sensitive to the historical context, with the original documents re-examined.