ABSTRACT
In The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), and again in An Autobiographical Study (1925), Freud tells the story of his rupture with Josef Breuer some time after their joint publication of Studies in Hysteria (1893-5). The chief cause for this separation, Freud suggests, was their disagreement over the matter of sexuality: Breuer could not accept Freud’s growing conviction that there was invariably a sexual component in the aetiology of hysteria. This was true of almost everyone, Freud implies; but in Breuer’s case there was a particular and paradoxical reason for his disbelief: he had discovered it himself at first hand, and did not want to know what he none the less knew only too well.
