‘I didn’t hear of that case. Poor woman.’

‘Do you know what Freud’s comment was on hearing of her death?’

‘No.’

‘He said, “It only goes to show what an adaptable disease hysteria is.”’

Anton had discovered this case history the day before he left Vienna, in the papers of a psychological society, and had been shocked by it.

Martha looked out of the window. ‘I’m glad I didn’t follow too closely in that school, though there were times in Vienna when I came under its influence. People push you into one camp or another. They mock if you won’t follow. They say you lack courage or conviction.’

‘But you held out against the bullies?’

‘What helped me was that I met one of Freud’s early patients. In fact, she had been treated by Breuer, his colleague, but Freud concerned himself with the case. Her name was Bertha Pappenheim. This was when I was just starting my training. Bertha was in her sixties, I suppose. She was a wonderful old lady. She’d founded an orphanage and several women’s charities. She didn’t recover from her treatment while in Vienna, as Freud claimed, but eventually got better in a sanatorium in Switzerland. She’d been very ill with morphine addiction and some form of epilepsy. She’d seen many doctors, but from Vienna she remembered only a neurologist who smoked incessantly and tried to persuade her she had sexual feelings she’d never imagined.’

‘That must have put you off the Viennese School.’

‘It put me off all schools. I finished my training in a less … doctrinaire place. In Salzburg.’

‘You didn’t want to go to your father’s homeland? To London?’

‘London was rather slow off the mark. There wasn’t much on offer there. But by treating the British soldiers suffering from what they call “shell shock”, they’re starting to catch up. So my mother tells me. She lives there. It seems we can all learn a lot from shell shock.’

Anton felt Martha’s gaze on him, deliberately unblinking, it seemed to him, as if implying that the term, and the condition, might be familiar to him. Since his time at the Gymnasium, he had disliked this form of silent suggestion, which had in those days come from a schoolmaster. At least Martha hadn’t added a theatrical cough.

He looked down at his notebook. ‘At the start you said something like, “doctors have tried to apply methods from one discipline to another”. Could we go back to that?’

‘Well, it’s clear to me that talking to people is always helpful,’ said Martha. ‘By talking, you can help them to ask the right questions of themselves. But I’ve no doubt that some forms of acute mental distress are caused by an inheritance that leads to the brain being wrongly wired. When neurodevelopment is complete, the faulty circuit is joined. This in turn leads to delusions. Heard voices. And no amount of sympathetic talking can help the chemistry of the brain at that molecular level, I’m afraid. The voices will still deafen them.’