Josef Breuer

Josef Breuer was an Austrian physician working in neurophysiology when, during the 1880s, his treatment of a patient named Bertha Pappenheim — later called Anna O. — led him to what he termed the "cathartic method." Pappenheim's symptoms eased when she spoke through her distress; Breuer called it the talking cure. The method became the seed for psychoanalysis, developed further by Breuer's friend and collaborator Sigmund Freud. But while Freud rode the idea into a new field, Breuer stepped back. He died in Vienna in 1925, long after the discipline he'd helped birth had moved on without him.