Josef Breuer

On June 20, 1925, Dr. Josef Breuer died in Vienna in his eighty-fourth year. His name is indissolubly connected with the beginnings of psycho-analysis, for it was he who created the cathartic method.

Breuer was a physician, a pupil of the clinician Oppolzer. As a young man he worked under Ewald Hering at the physiology of respiration and later, in the few leisure hours which a large medical practice permitted him, he conducted some successful experiments in relation to the function of the vestibular apparatus in animals. There was nothing in his training to suggest that he was destined to win the first really important piece of insight into the eternal riddle of hysteria and to make a contribution of imperishable value to our knowledge of the mental life of mankind. He was, however, a man of rich and many-sided gifts and his interests extended in many directions far beyond his special professional work.

It was in the year 1880 that chance threw in his way a particular patient, a girl of unusual intelligence, who whilst nursing her invalid father had fallen a victim to a severe hysteria. The method which Breuer employed on this famous 'first case, ' the indescribable care and patience with which he carried out the technique when he had once lighted upon it, till the patient was freed from all her incomprehensible symptoms, the understanding of the mental mechanisms of neurosis which he thereby acquired—of all this the world learnt nothing until about fourteen years later, when he and I together published our Studien über Hysterie (1895). Even then it was unfortunately necessary to present his findings in a greatly abridged form, and they had to be subjected to a rigid censorship from motives of medical discretion.

We psycho-analysts, who have for long now become accustomed to devote hundreds of hours to a single patient, can scarcely picture to ourselves how novel such an attempt must have seemed forty-five years ago. Probably a high degree of personal interest a