The phrase ‘private theatre’ comes from Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria (1895), in which it is used by one of Breuer’s women patients, Bertha Pappenheim, known as ‘Anna O’:

One of the tasks Breuer and Freud set themselves in Studies on Hysteria was to demonstrate that the roots of hysteria lie ‘in an excess rather than a defect’. According to Breuer’s ‘energetic’ model of mental and ‘nervous’ life, affect or excitation liberated by active mental work is also used up by this work. In states of abstraction and dreaminess, on the other hand, ‘intercerebral excitation sinks below its clear waking level’, a state which passes over into sleep. If, in this ‘state of absorption’, ‘a group of affectively coloured ideas is active’, it is put at ‘the disposal of abnormal functioning, such as conversion [hysteria]’. While Anna O’s ‘private theatre’ is at one moment seen as an aspect of a creative and active imagination, in which ‘energetic mental work is carried on’, at the next it becomes identified with ‘habitual reverie’, the first step towards ‘pathogenic auto-hypnosis’. This double perspective indicates a more general uncertainty as to the normality or abnormality of creativity and imaginative life. This issue was explored in the numerous studies of genius, creativity and pathology at the turn of the century, as well as in psychoanalytic debates and writings, the best known of which is Freud’s essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1907).