A close friend, mentor, and collaborator with Sigmund Freud, Breuer is perhaps best known for his work with Anna O. (the 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 were reduced or disappeared after she described them to him. Anna O. humorously called this procedure chimney sweeping. She also coined the more serious appellation for this form of therapy, 'her talking cure', which is widely regarded as the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis.

Ernest Jones considered that 'Freud was greatly interested in hearing of the case of Anna O, which...made a deep impression on him'; and in his 1909 Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud generously pointed out that '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., along with other case studies, in their 1895 book, Studies on Hysteria. These discussion of Breuer's treatment of Anna O. became 'a formative basis of Freudian theory and 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'.

The two men became increasingly estranged at the same time, however, and from a Freudian standpoint, 'While Breuer, with his intelligent and amorous patient Anna O., had unwittingly laid the groundwork for psychoanalysis, it was Freud who drew the consequencies from Breuer's case'.

Breuer, working under 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 a departure from previous physiological understanding, and changed the way scientists viewed the relationship of the lungs to the nervous system. The mechanism is now known as the Hering-Breuer reflex. Breuer, Josef (1842-1925) | Encyclopedia of Psychology | Find Articles at BNET at www.findarticles.com

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.

In 1894, Breuer was elected a Corresponding Member of the Vienna Academy of Science. (Robert S. Steele, Freud and Jung p. 50)

Breuer married Mathilde Altmann in 1868, and they had five children. His daughter Dora later committed suicide rather than be deported by the Nazis. Likewise, one of his granddaughters died at their hands.

A series of meetings between Josef Breuer and Friedrich Nietzsche was fictionally created in the book When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom.

The 1968 TV film Prescription: Murder, which introduced the character of Columbo, begins with the murderer (Gene Barry), an arrogant psychiatrist, stumping party guests in a game of Botticelli by choosing Josef Breuer.

In 1992, the relationship between Josef Breuer and Anna O. was fictionalized in the play "The Mystery of Anna O". Spanning 3 time periods, the play questions whether Anna O was actually Bertha Pappenheim. The play was written by Jerome Coopersmith.

He appears as a minor character in Joseph Skibell's 2010 novel, A Curable Romantic.