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In an era when a century of rich psychoanalytic writing is increasingly elided from our curricula, Louis Breger's latest work, A Dream of Undying Fame: How Freud Betrayed his Mentor and Invented Psychoanalysis, brings a dash of fresh drama to a familiar figure and is sure to engage new followers of the psychoanalytic story.
The charm of this slim and readable volume is its captivating recounting of Sigmund Freud's relationship with Joseph Breuer, and also with Ernst Fleischl, Wilhelm Fleiss, and members of the Freud family. Breger paints pithy and humane thumbnail portraits of the patients in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1895) bringing to life the people behind the symptoms. Readers readily envision the doctor at work, nervous, sweating, confident, competitive, hostile, and funny, struggling to help his rich, fat, smart, manipulative, and otherwise human patients with a variety of medications and interventions. The text, as seductive as its subjects, piques interest and further study. Educators responsible for undergraduate and medical student curricula in which relatively brief readings are desired may find it particularly useful.
Breger picks up and elaborates upon ideas that he outlined in his psychobiography of Freud, Darkness in the Midst of Vision (2000), magnifying his inspection of the Freud-Breuer relationship.
Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud became friends in the late 1870s. Breuer, 14 years older than Freud, was a highly successful physician and scientist. A genial, sociable, happily married man, Breuer took the young struggling Freud under his wing. He referred patients to Freud, and, mindful of his own affluence and Freud's poverty, tactfully helped the younger man financially from time to time, a habit Freud came to resent.