Breuer, Josef

(1842–1925)

   An internist and physiologist, Breuer was born in Vienna, the son of a Jewish religious teacher. A graduate of one of the capital city’s most prestigious secondary schools, the Academic Gymnasium, he was the first to locate the autonomic control of breathing in the vagus nerve. An abidingly modest man, Breuer’s place in medical history is largely the result of his relationship, which dated from the late 1870s, with the young Sigmund Freud. It was Breuer who encouraged his junior colleague to move from physiology into general practice and from there to psychiatry.

   Breuer developed the so-called talking cure for neuroses while treating a Vienna-born Jewish girl, Bertha Pappenheim, later to become famous as Anna O. Though periodically lucid, she frequently suffered from crippling episodes of sleepwalking, paralysis in her limbs, and numerous false pregnancies. Encouraging her to speak while he had her under hypnosis, Breuer discovered that her symptoms and the fantasies associated with them subsided after she talked about them. Working from the hypothesis that his patient’s troubles stemmed from long-repressed inner conflicts, he concluded that by bringing these issues to the level of the conscious, he could free the young woman from their worst effects. He himself became so distressed by listening to these outpourings that, after she left his treatment, he turned all similar cases over to Freud. The two men continued to collaborate however, publishing their Studies on Hysteria in 1895.

   See also Vienna school of medicine.