Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story;

Imagine growing up at the tail end of the hysteria epidemic that swept Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You are sexually attracted to other girls, a proclivity that medical doctors of your era consider a symptom of hysteria. Your world-renowned father is one of them. Worse, he has built much of his reputation on his “discovery” that your sort of hysteria is always caused by the father and is curable by psychoanalysis.

Then he analyzes you.

Anna Freud (1895-1982) harbored a secret that could have shaken the foundations of her father’s growing legacy. Suspecting as much, Sigmund psychoanalyzed her. Was that “conversion therapy” the erotic echo chamber that he warned analysis always is? Who was Dorothy Burlingham, a figure that most of Sigmund’s and Anna’s biographers have tirelessly ignored? How did Anna manage to live a full life, raise a family with Dorothy, and become a guiding force for analysts, educators, and humanitarians—all while devoting herself to her homophobic father as he aged and died? HYSTERICAL is the fact-based, fictional autobiography of Anna Freud. In it, she tells her story for the first time.

HYSTERICAL has been named a 2015 “Over the Rainbow” book by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgnder Round The American Library Association.

Author Rebecca Coffey is an award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, and radio commentator. Also a humorist, she is the author of NIETZSCHE’S ANGEL FOOD CAKE: And Other “Reci
“Journalist Coffey . . . presents an avidly researched, shrewd, and unnerving first novel that purports to be the lost autobiography of Anna Freud. . . . Coffey offers some truly shocking disclosures about the Freud family in this complexly entertaining, sexually dramatic, acidly funny novel of genius and absurdity, insight and delusion, independence and loyalty.”—Booklist

“Like a therapy session, HYSTERICAL tunnels very deeply into Anna’s childhood experiences—thoughts, events, dreams, fantasies—and like a therapy session, the facets of what are revealed are at times disturbing and uncomfortable. Add to all that the inherent struggle between Sigmund and Anna, which twists and deepens as they both age, especially as Anna comes into her sexuality, and you’ve got a plot so rife with tension it’ll make you squirm. . . . Hysterical approaches its subject with remarkable, even agile, tenderness and understanding—Coffey gives Anna a voice, one that history has thus far not allowed her.” —LAMDA Literary

“Completely absorbing and entirely believable, HYSTERICAL is both a lovely work and a treasure. This is the book we all wish Anna Freud had had the courage to write.” —Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory and former Projects Director of The Freud Archives

“Rebecca Coffey’s imagination knows no bounds. She makes you believe this is exactly the way it all happened. HYSTERICAL is sad, funny, painful, strange, outrageous, and disturbing. If we can’t have Anna’s diaries, this is the next best thing.”—Ellen Bass, author of The Courage to Heal