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In the first chapter I suggested that the fate of the creative scientist, as compared with the intuitive crank, is to be ‘wrong’ in all his conclusions. Freud knew this very well and for this reason never hesitated to publish his current ideas nor to abandon them for later approximations. If we try to take the measure of the history of psycho-analysis from the theoretical point of view, we would be in the maelström of swirling ideas, models, imagery, from which we would only escape by an arbitrary grasping at what Freud said - in the ‘Introductory Lectures’ for instance but not in the ‘Ego and the Id’ - or, worse still, to establish our own reading of Freud as the correct one: i.e. an orthodoxy.
But science (and art, for that matter) is not carried forward by theories but by advances in method, in technique. Jokingly one may say that the inventor of psycho-analysis was Anna O. with her ‘talking cure’ and ‘chimney sweeping’, and I would think that Freud was sincere when in the 1910 lectures at Clark University he gave credit for the origin to Breuer.
Although this famous case is so badly presented, compared with the flow and lucidity of Freud's writing, one is struck with the immense time, interest, concern, ingenuity, patience - and modesty - with which the clinical work and collection of data were carried out. This is perhaps the best evidence we can obtain in order to understand why Breuer stood so high in the younger Freud's esteem and to give him his rightful place in psycho-analytic history. Remember that the therapeutic methodology of the day was utterly different: sedation, warm baths, faradic current stimulation for the paralyses, massage for the contractures - anything but attention to the mind of the patient. One might say that the phenomenology of hysteria was dealt with as mental by the hypnotists, but only in the sense of ‘trauma’ impinging on a defective apparatus, not as experience affecting a sensitive person. Breuer's admiration for Anna O.'s characte