Josef Breuer

Josef Breuer (1842 to 1925) was an Austrian physician from Vienna whose work with a patient known as Anna O., the case name of Bertha Pappenheim, led to the cathartic method, also called the talking cure. Observing that her symptoms eased once she described them to him, he developed a way of treating hysteria by speech that became an initiating factor in psychoanalysis. He was a friend and early mentor of Sigmund Freud, and the two published Studies on Hysteria in 1895 before drifting apart. Earlier in his career Breuer made discoveries in neurophysiology, showing the role of the vagus nerve in the reflex control of breathing, now called the Hering-Breuer reflex, and, independently of Ernst Mach in 1873, explaining how the semicircular canals of the inner ear give the sense of balance.