ONE evening in May 1896, Freud addressed the Vienna Medical Society. His collaboration with Josef Breuer had ended three years before. In the meantime he had discovered that one could in the long run work more effectively, though more slowly, with patients awake and unhypnotized; he had learned the elementary principle of psychoanalytic technique, free association, and had been pursuing his pioneer investigations by its use. On this evening he was prepared to offer some of his discoveries to the scientific world. The response of the members of the Vienna Medical Society was the bitterest disappointment of his career. Instead of enthusiasm for the new light on human maladies which had hitherto baffled the medical world, or even skeptical interest, Freud's announcement was received with coldness. "I understood that from now onwards I belonged to those who have troubled the sleep of the world," he later wrote.