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Josef Breuer's treatment of Anna O is rightly regarded as the crucial first step in the evolution of psychoanalysis. Yet Breuer's truly exceptional dedication to the understanding and welfare of a most difficult patient seems to have attracted less attention than the report handed down by Freud of the case's termination.
Writing to his friend Stefan Zweig in June of 1932, Freud (1970, pp. 412–3) limned a scenario that has become standard lore: on the evening of the day when all of her symptoms had been resolved, Anna O developed a hysterical pregnancy, claiming that her devoted physician was the child's father. Breuer responded by immediately abandoning his patient to the care of a colleague, thus dropping the key that would have unlocked the mysteries of transference—the 'doors to the Mothers' in Freud's allusive language. Ernest Jones's portrayal is even more dramatic. According to Freud's eminent biographer, Breuer calmed his hysterical patient by hypnosis, guiltily left her premises in a cold sweat, and the very next day embarked on a second honeymoon with his morose and jealous wife, during which he conceived his daughter Dora (Jones, 1953, pp. 224–5).
Dr Albrecht Hirschmüller effectively dispels this account as myth, and it is a credit to his outstanding biography that a sharply defined characterization of Breuer can emerge from the obscuring mists of legend. The Life and Work of Josef Breuer, which was first published in German in 1978 and updated to include new information, is a model of the 'descriptive' biography: it spares no pains to uncover the ascertainable facts about its subject's life, accurately presented in the context of the times, and admirably disdains to employ the sort of pseudo-analytic interpretation that has marred so many recent Lives. When explanations or inferences are made they are solidly grounded, the unforced outcome of meticulous research. Hirschmüller's highly condensed book is as much a history of nineteenth-century medici