Neurologist Sigmund Freud, his interest in hysteria stimulated by Joseph Breuer’s successful use of therapeutic hypnosis and by Freud’s studies with celebrated French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot in Paris, takes up Breuer’s “cathartic method".

In 1895, Freud and Breuer publish their findings in Studies in Hysteria , which outlines their “talking cure” and inaugurates psychoanalysis.

Freud describes the evolution of his clinical method and sets out his theory of the psychogenetic origins of hysteria, demonstrated in several case histories,

Josef Breuer loses interest in psychoanalysis when Sigmund Freud makes sexuality central to his view of neurosis.

This defection, compounded by the death of Freud’s father in 1896, leads Freud to enter a period of self-analysis in which he explores his fantasies and dreams for clues to his childhood sexual passions.