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An aging Joseph Breuer walking the streets of Vienna suddenly encounters Sigmund Freud, with whom he had little contact in recent years. He sees his old friend and once-trusted collaborator approaching. Breuer had coached and financed, encouraged and advised him, spent endless hours discussing cases and made referrals to his protégé in those crucial first years of practice, effectively launching his then young disciple's career. Freud so admired his mentor that he named his first daughter Matilda after his wife (p. 25). He wrote to his fiancée that to talk with Breuer is “like sitting in the sun … He radiates light and warmth.” Breuer, recognizing his old cohort, and with his hallmark affection for engagement, instinctively stretches out his arms in greeting. Freud passes him by as if he did not exist (p. 84). This callous, chilling, and crude reaction is a paradigm of all Freud's failed relationships; relationships that ended with impulsive suddenness, rejection, expulsion, and derision. Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Sándor Ferenczi, and Wilhelm Fliess are on the short list. Striking is the over-idealization and quick intensity of intimacy often tinged with erotic emotions (particularly with men) that eventually are brutally split off and denied. Merged with Fliess, for example, in narcissistic grandiosity, he develops a twinship (p. 87) transference à la Kohut, referring to him in
correspondences as my “Dearest Wilhelm” and my “Only Other” (p. 88), and he was closer to this compañero than to his wife (p. 87). As soon as his access to fame is secured, there is no longer a need for this friend, who was now a burden. Thirteen years of correspondence comes to an end, and bickering over who originated which concepts bring an ignoble halt to their mutual passions (p. 98).
In this book along with Breger's biography, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision, the Freud that emerges is a flawed character, obsessed with aspirations toward