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Hirschmüller's book first appeared in Germany in 1978, and ever since then it has enjoyed a special status as the definitive discussion of Freud's early collaborator, the Viennese physician Josef Breuer. The excellence of The Life and Work of Josef Breuer makes one's mouth water for the author's forthcoming study of the period Freud spent in Theodor Meynert's clinic.
It will be remembered that in his Clark Lectures of 1909 Freud (1910) maintained:
If it is a merit to have brought psychoanalysis into being, that merit is not mine. I had no share in its earliest beginnings. I was a student and working for my final examinations at the time when another Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer, first (in 1880-82) made use of this procedure on a girl who was suffering from, hysteria. (p. 9)
One naturally wonders what Freud was doing by so uncharacterically withdrawing himself on the one occasion he ever received an honorary degree. In any event, by 1923 Freud appended a footnote to the first of his sentences that I have quoted here; he told the reader then: “See, however, in this connection my remarks in ‘A History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,’ where I assumed the entire responsibility for psychoanalysis” (p. 9).