Sigmund Freud and the Birth of Psychoanalysis

An arm that will not obey commands, a cough that will not clear, a vision problem with no visible cause: in late-19th-century Vienna, medicine had little to offer against symptoms like these. It was a clinical case followed by Freud’s older colleague, Josef Breuer, that gave shape to the method from which psychoanalysis eventually grew.

From medical school to meeting Breuer

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in 1939. During his training, he enrolled at the Vienna medical school in 1873 and graduated in 1881. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Freud worked out the first theories of psychoanalysis in close collaboration with Josef Breuer.

The case of Anna O. and the cathartic method

Breuer’s treatment of Anna O., the name under which Bertha Pappenheim became known, began near the end of November 1880; a later and critical phase ran from December 1881 to June 1882. Among the symptoms of her condition were a nervous cough, a squint, partial paralysis, visual disturbances, and loss of sensation in her right arm, with shifting states of consciousness over the course of the illness.

It was Anna O. herself, according to Encyclopedia.com, who named this early method the “talking cure.” She also jokingly called it “chimney sweeping.”

Practical example: in one episode of the treatment, Anna O. stopped drinking liquids for a period; under hypnosis, the symptom was traced back to the disgust she felt at the sight of her governess’s dog drinking from a glass. Once she had recounted the episode, the refusal eased. The source does not spell out the exact psychological mechanism behind this reaction: what remains is the episode itself, not a general theory of how recalling a memory heals a symptom.

Anna O.’s real identity was only made public in 1953, by the biographer Ernest Jones in his biography of Freud. For more than seventy years, the most cited clinical case in early psychoanalysis had carried only a single initial.

From Breuer to Studies on Hysteria

Breuer described his treatment method to his younger colleague Freud on two occasions, on 18 November 1882 and again in July 1883. According to Encyclopedia.com, psychoanalysis has its roots in the cathartic method Breuer developed.

Working together, Freud and Breuer arrived at the idea that many neuroses originate in deeply traumatic experiences: a clinical hypothesis, grounded in the observation of real patients more than in philosophical reflection. A precise written record of that work survives in Studies on Hysteria, published jointly by Freud and Breuer in 1895: it is there that the cathartic method first takes classic shape, with the case of Anna O. as the book’s first clinical example.

From hypnosis to free association

Freud’s clinical path began with the use of hypnosis, in the early years of psychoanalysis, and led to what became his “golden rule”: the method of free association. Freud argued that even behavior that looks irrational or unconscious deserves to be treated as something with a traceable cause, rather than dismissed as meaningless. The idea already had an echo in philosophy before Freud: Schopenhauer had described a blind, pre-rational will underlying human experience, though his framework was wholly philosophical, far removed from the clinical one Freud would build.

Within the logic of free association, Freud found the same principle he would later apply to dream interpretation. In 1900 he published The Interpretation of Dreams: its specific mechanics deserve a separate treatment, in the Recap on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and here the book stands only as the destination of the clinical path that began with Breuer.

Freud welcomed followers such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung, and the disappointment came only later, once both went on to build currents of thought distinct from his own. Vienna, across those same decades, remained a workshop of ideas about science and rationality that would also produce the Vienna Circle, a project of a different kind of rigor born out of the same cultural setting.

Meeting Jung, and the break

In 1906 the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung received a collection of essays from Freud: their first contact. Freud and Jung met in person for the first time in Vienna in 1907, and their first conversation lasted more than 13 hours.

Despite shared interests and mutual respect, the relationship between Freud and Jung broke down abruptly in 1913. Many of the collaborators who drifted away from Freud did so, according to this source, chiefly over a disagreement about sexuality, and Jung followed the same pattern: from the start he doubted that sexuality was the sole source of psychic energy, the libido, and came to think of it instead as a broader psychic energy. Freud, for his part, traced phenomena such as religiosity and the occult back to the sexual libido as well. The theoretical rift between the two was already widening by 1912; after a congress in Munich in 1913, Freud and Jung rarely spoke again. The dispute over the libido remained the main strand behind the break, though not the only one.