Chapter XI. The Breuer Period (1882-1895)

Just as the previous chapter overlapped in time the present one so will this one overlap the succeeding one. That overlapping enabled all the neurological work to be considered as a whole, although much of it—and in fact the most important part—was carried out in what is here termed the Breuer period. The beginnings and discoveries of psycho-analysis had better, for certain reasons, also be discussed in two divisions, artificial as this may seem. Freud's development from 1880 to 1900 naturally displays a continuity which schematically could be narrated as a whole, yet it can more comprehensibly be exhibited to the reader if it is grouped in some such way as is here attempted. It is proposed, therefore, to describe in the present chapter the dawn of Freud's interest in psychopathology, his growing interest in the sexual aetiology of neuroses and—most important—the elaboration of his technical method which was the foundation of everything else; and to reserve for subsequent chapters an account of his struggles to formulate a theoretical basis for mental functioning, and also his clinical findings. A paradoxical consequence of this arrangement is that the actual collaborative work between Breuer and Freud, since this was mainly theoretical, will be considered, not in the present chapter entitled ‘The Breuer Period’, but in a later one.

It has not been found easy to estimate Breuer's significance for Freud and his work. Freud certainly over-estimated it in the latter connection, though probably not in the former. When at times he would style Breuer the Founder of Psycho-Analysis he was for some reason modestly transferring that title to him from himself, since the essentials of psycho-analysis—both the method and the discoveries—belong entirely to Freud and were made at a time when the two men had already separated for good. Had he said that Breuer's communication to him of the famous case, Frl. Anna O., was one of the starting-points that led to psycho-analysis, it woul