Josef Breuer

Josef Breuer (1842-1925) was an Austrian physician with whom Freud co-wrote Studies in Hysteria in 1895. Their findings were based on Breuer's work with a patient, referred to by the pseudonym "Anna O.," who suffered from hysteria. Breuer found that Anna O.'s symptoms were relieved after he put her in a state of mind resembling hypnosis and she described an early childhood experience that had brought on her illness. Anna O. called this process the "talking cure," a term that Freud and Breuer adopted to describe their new method. By the late 1890s, Freud, in his characteristic way, found that his intense ten-year-long friendship with Breuer had cooled, in part due to differences regarding psychoanalytic theory. However, Freud considered Breuer, and not himself, to be the true father of psychoanalytic theory. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud refers to Breuer by the pseudonym "Dr. M." in describing...