Josef Breuer

Neurophysiology

Breuer, working for Ewald Hering at the military medical school in Vienna, was the first to demonstrate the role of the vagus nerve in the reflex nature of respiration. This was different from previous physiological belief, and changed the way scientists considered the relationship of the lungs to the nervous system. The mechanism is now known as the Hering–Breuer reflex.

Independent of each other in 1873, Breuer and the physicist and mathematician Ernst Mach discovered how the sense of balance (i.e. the perception of the head's imbalance) functions: that it is managed by information the brain receives from the movement of a fluid in the semicircular canals of the inner ear. That the sense of balance depends on the three semicircular canals was discovered in 1870 by the physiologist Friedrich Goltz, but Goltz did not discover how the balance-sensing apparatus functions.

Anna O.

Breuer is known best perhaps for his work during the 1880s with Anna O. (the case pseudonym of Bertha Pappenheim), a woman suffering from "paralysis of her limbs, and anaesthesias, as well as disturbances of vision and speech". Breuer observed that her symptoms reduced or ended after she described them to him. Anna O. humorously called this procedure chimney sweeping. She also invented the more serious appellation for this form of therapy, talking cure. Breuer later referred to it as the “cathartic method”.

Breuer was then a mentor to the young Sigmund Freud, and had helped establish him in medical practice. Ernest Jones recalled, "Freud was greatly interested in hearing of the case of Anna O, which ... made a deep impression on him"; and in his work of 1909, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud stated, "I was a student and working for my final examinations at the time when ... Breuer, first (in 1880-2) made use of this procedure ... Never before had anyone removed a hysterical symptom by such a method."

Freud and Breuer documented their discussions of Anna O. and other case studies in their 1895 book, Studies in Hysteria. These discussions of Breuer's treatment of Anna O. became "a formative basis of psychoanalytic practice, especially the importance of fantasies (in extreme cases, hallucinations), hysteria [...], and the concept and method of catharsis which were Breuer's major contributions". Louis Breger has observed that in the Studies, "Freud is looking for a grand theory that will make him famous and, because of this, he is always fastening on what he thinks will be a single cause of hysteria, such as sexual conflict...Breuer, on the other hand, writes about the many factors that produce symptoms, including traumas of a variety of kinds. He also gives others, such as Pierre Janet, credit and argues for “eclecticism”; he is open to many different ways of understanding and treating hysteria."

The two men became increasingly estranged. From a Freudian consideration, "while Breuer, with his intelligent and amorous patient Anna O., had unwittingly laid the groundwork for psychoanalysis, it was Freud who drew the consequences from Breuer's case". However, Breger notes that Breuer, while he valued Freud's contributions, didn't agree that sexual issues were the only cause of neurotic symptoms; he wrote in a 1907 letter to a colleague that “Freud is a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations: this is a psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive generalization”. Freud later became hostile to Breuer, no longer giving him credit and helping spread a rumour that Breuer had been unable to manage erotic attention from Anna O. and had abandoned her case, though research indicates this never happened and Breuer remained involved with her case for several years while she remained unwell.

In 1894 Breuer was elected a Corresponding Member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences.

Family

Breuer married Mathilde Altmann in 1868, and they had five children. His daughter Dora later committed suicide rather than be deported by the Nazis. Another one of his daughters, Margarete Schiff, perished in the ghetto of Theresienstadt on September 9, 1942. Breuer's granddaughter, Hanna Schiff, died while imprisoned by the Nazis.