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JOSEF BREUER

On June 20, 1925, there died in Vienna, in his eighty-fourth year, Josef Breuer, the creator of the cathartic method, whose name is for that reason indissolubly linked with the beginnings of psycho-analysis.

Breuer was a physician, a pupil of the clinician Oppolzer. In his youth he had worked at the physiology of respiration under Ewald Hering, and later, in the scanty hours of leisure allowed by an extensive medical practice, he occupied himself successfully with experiments on the function of the vestibular apparatus in animals. Nothing in his education could lead one to expect that he would gain the first decisive insight into the age-old riddle of the hysterical neurosis and would make a contribution of imperishable value to our knowledge of the human mind. But he was a man of rich and universal gifts, and his interests extended in many directions far beyond his professional activities.

It was in 1880 that chance brought into his hands an unusual patient, a girl of more than ordinary intelligence who had fallen ill of severe hysteria while she was nursing her sick father. It was only some fourteen years later, in our joint publication, Studies on Hysteria (1895d) - and even then unluckily only in a much abbreviated form, censored, too, from considerations of medical discretion - that the world learnt the nature of his treatment of this celebrated ‘first case’, with what immense care and patience he carried out the technique when once he had discovered it, till the patient was freed from all the incomprehensible symptoms of her illness, and what insight he obtained in the course of the work into the mental mechanisms of the neurosis.

We psycho-analysts, who have long been familiar with the idea of devoting hundreds of sessions to a single patient, can form no conception of how novel such a procedure must have seemed forty-five years ago. It must have called for a large amount of personal interest and, if the phrase can be allowed, of medical libido, but also for a considerable degree of freedom of thought and certainty of judgement. At the date of the publication of our Studies we were able to appeal to Charcot’s writings and to Pierre Janet’s investigations, which had by that time deprived Breuer’s discoveries of some of their priority. But when Breuer was treating his first case (in 1881-2) none of this was as yet available. Janet’s Automatisme psychologique appeared in 1889 and his second work, L’état mental des hystériques, not until 1892. It seems that Breuer’s researches were wholly original, and were directed only by the hints offered to him by the material of his case.