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Logout Jones, E. (1972). Sigmund Freud Life and Work, Volume One: The Young Freud 18561900. London: The Hogarth Press.

Jones, E. (1972). Sigmund Freud Life and Work, Volume One: The Young Freud 1856-1900. , 1-444. London: The Hogarth Press. Sigmund Freud Life and Work, Volume One: The Young Freud 1856-1900

Ernest Jones Sigmund Freud, 1891, aet. 35

Preface
This is not intended to be a popular biography of Freud: several have been written already, containing serious distortions and untruths. Its aims are simply to record the main facts of Freud's life while they are still accessible, anda more ambitious oneto try to relate his personality and the experiences of his life to the development of his ideas.

It is not a book that would have met with Freud's own approval. He felt he had already in many passages of his writings divulged enough of his personal lifewhich, indeed, he later regretted having doneand that he had a right to keep private what remained: the world should get on with making use of his contributions to knowledge and forget about his personality. But his repentance of the self-revelations came too late. Ill-natured people were already at work distorting isolated passages with the object of disparaging his character, and this could be rectified only by a still fuller exposition of his inner and outer life. Freud's family understandingly respected his wish for privacy, and indeed shared it. They often sheltered him from a merely inquisitive public. What changed their attitude later was the news of the many false stories invented by people who had never known him, stories which were gradually accumulating into a mendacious legend. They then decided to give me their wholehearted support in my endeavour to present as truthful an account of his life as is in my power. It is generally agreed that great men by their very eminence forfeit the privilege granted to lesser mortals of having two lives, a public and a private one; often what they have withheld from the world proves to be of equal value to what they have proffered. Freud himself had often expressed regret about the paucity of detail recorded in the lives of great men so worthy of study and emulation. The world would have lost much if nothing were known of his own. What he gave to the world was not a completely rounded-off theory of the mind, a philosophy which could then perhaps be debated without any reference to its author, but a gradually opening vista, one occasionally blurred and then again re-clarified. The insight he disclosed kept changing and developing in accord not only with his growing body of knowledge but also with the evolution of his own thought and outlook on life. Psycho-analysis, as is true of any other branch of science, can be profitably studied only as an historical evolution, never as a perfected body of knowledge, and its development was peculiarly and intimately bound up with the personality of its founder. As we shall see, Freud took elaborate measures to secure his privacy, especially concerning his early life. On two occasions he completely destroyed all his correspondence, notes, diaries and manuscripts. Both times there were, it is true, external reasons for the clearance: once just before he left his hospital quarters for a homeless existence, and the other time when he was radically altering the arrangements of his domicile. Fortunately the latter occasion, in 1908, was the last; after then he carefully preserved his correspondence. The former one he described in an interesting letter to his betrothed in a passage that follows; he was then twenty-eight years old (April 28, 1885). I have just carried out a resolution which one group of people, as yet unborn and fated to misfortune, will feel acutely. Since you can't guess whom I mean I will tell you: they are my biographers. I have destroyed all my diaries of the past fourteen years, with letters, scientific notes and the manuscripts of my publications. Only family letters were spared. Yours, my dear

one, were never in danger. All my old friendships and associations passed again before my eyes and mutely met their doom (my thoughts are still with the history of Russia); all my thoughts and feelings about the world in general, and in particular how it concerned me, have been declared unworthy of survival. They must now be thought all over again. And I had jotted down a great deal. But the stuff simply enveloped me, as the sand does the Sphinx, and soon only my nostrils would show above the mass of paper. I cannot leave here and cannot die before ridding myself of the disturbing thought of who might get at the old papers. Besides, everything that fell before the decisive break in my life, before our coming together and my choice of calling, I have put behind me: it has long been dead and it shall not be denied an honourable burial. Let the biographers chafe; we won't make it too easy for them. Let each one of them believe he is right in his Conception of the Development of the Hero: even now I enjoy the thought of how they will all go astray. While appreciating Freud's concluding chuckle in this interesting phantasy we nevertheless dare to hope that the last words may prove to have been exaggerated. The task of compiling a biography of Freud's life is a dauntingly stupendous one. The data are so extensive that only a selection of themthough it is to be hoped a representative onecan be presented; there will remain ample room for more intensive studies of particular phases in his development. The reasons why I nevertheless yielded to the suggestion that I should undertake it were the considerations pressed on me that I was the only survivor of a small circle of coworkers (the Committee) in constant intimate contact with Freud, that I had been a close friend for more than thirty years and also during that period had played a central part in what has been called the psycho-analytical movement. My having passed through the identical disciplines as Freud on the way to psycho-analysisphilosophy, neurology, disorders of speech, psychopathology, in that orderhas helped me to follow the work of his pre-analytical period and its transition into the analytical one. Perhaps the fact of my being the only foreignerand, incidentally, the only Gentilein that circle gave me an opportunity for some degree of greater objectivity than the others; immeasurably great as was my respect and admiration for both the personality and achievements of Freud, my own hero-worshipping propensities had been worked through before I encountered him. And Freud's extraordinary personal integrityan outstanding feature of his personalityso impressed itself on those near to him that I can scarcely imagine a greater profanation of one's respect for him than to present an idealized portrait of someone remote from humanity. His claim to greatness, indeed, lies largely in the honesty and courage with which he struggled and overcame his own inner difficulties and emotional conflicts by means which have been of inestimable value to others. There are several specially important sources of my indebtedness to other people in pursuing this work, without which the book would have been far poorer. First of all the Freud family, all of whom, including his late wife, have given me freely all possible information and literary

material. Among the latter are more than two thousand five hundred early family letters, the greater number written by Freud himself, including a batch of twenty-five written between 1876 and 1894 to his favourite sister Rosa which were luckily retrieved from Budapest. By far the most precious were some fifteen hundred love letters exchanged between Freud and his future wife during the four years of their engagement. A Secret Record they both wrote in those years had also been preserved. The Fliess correspondence, which Marie Bonaparte daringly rescued from destruction, is a most important source book, the value of which has been greatly heightened by Ernst Kris's illuminating preface and detailed editorial notes, and I wish to thank the Imago Publishing Press for their generous permission to quote freely from it and Anna Freud for giving me access to the important unpublished part of the correspondence. Contemporary evidence such as has just been mentioned has, of course, a very special value. Freud's memory, like everyone else's, could be treacherous at times, and the contemporary data enable one to render more precise, or even rectify, the accounts of events he described many decades later. To Siegfried and Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld's painstaking researches, aided by their friends in Vienna, every student of Freud's early life and environment will be permanently indebted. Furthermore, in the course of a regular correspondence they have generously placed at my disposal all their stores of knowledge; discussion with them has unravelled many obscure puzzles. I have to thank the Editors of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, the American Imago, the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic and the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis for permission to quote from the Bernfeld writings. Then I extend my warm thanks to James Strachey, whose unrivalled familiarity with the literary aspects of the Freudian corpus gives him a unique authority, for reading my manuscripts attentively and making a number of most useful suggestions; his meticulous accuracy has saved me from many errors of detail. I also wish to thank the Deuticke Verlag for their courtesy in making available their records of the royalties and sales of Freud's books, from 1886 to 1950, and Mrs. Hans Breuer for lending an etching of her father-in-law. Last, and very far from least, I wish to thank my wife for her devoted day-to-day collaboration, without which this book would assuredly not have been written.

Contents
Preface PAGE vii

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 0 1 1 1 2 1 3 1 4 1 5 1 6 1 7

Chronology List of Abbreviations CHAPTER Origins (1856-1869) Boyhood and Adolescence (1860-1873) Choice of Profession (1873) The Medical Student (1873-1881) Medical Career (1881-1885) The Cocaine Episode (1884-1887) Betrothal (1882-1886) Marriage (1886) Personal Life: 1880-1890 The Neurologist (1883-1897) The Breuer Period (1882-1895) Early Psychopathology (1890-1897) The Fliess Period (1887-1902) Self-Analysis (1897-) Personal Life: 1890-1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (1895-1899) Freud's Theory of the Mind (1900)

xiii xv 1 17 30 40 65 86 109 153 169 217 243 295 316 351 361 384 400

Illustrations
Sigmund Freud, 1891, aet. 35 Freud's birthplace Freud with his Father, aet. 8 Freud, aet. 12 Frontispiece Facing page 4 Facing page 18

Freud with his Mother, aet. 16 Freud's room in hospital, 1883 Proposal letter, 1882 Martha Bernays Freud with Martha Bernays, 1885 Charcot lecturing at La Salptrire, 1885 Josef Breuer, 1897, aet. 55 Freud with his wife and Anna, 1899

Facing page 32 page 74 page 118 Facing page 145 Facing page 228 Facing page 244 Facing page 370

Chronology
Jakob Freud born Emmanuel Freud born Amalie Nathansohn-Freud born Philipp Freud born Jakob's second marriage John Freud born Sigmund Freud born Julius, Freud born Julius Freud died Anna Freud-Bernays born screen memory Jakob, Emmanuel and Philipp leave Freiberg for Saxony circa Amalie, Sigmund and Anna arrive in Leipsic Rosa Freud born in Vienna Freud enters Gymnasium visits Freiberg love episode with Gisela Fluss in Freiberg enters University visits England researches in Trieste first researches published changes name from Sigismund to Sigmund 1815 1832 1835 1836 July, 1855 1855 May, 1856 April, 1857 December, 1857 December, 1858 Summer, 1859 June, 1859 October, 1859 March, 1860 1865 1870 1872 1873 1875 1876 1877 1878

research work under Brcke medical qualification meets Martha Bernays date of betrothal Martha leaves on visit to Wandsbek Freud visits Wandsbek enters Vienna General Hospital becomes Resident in Hospital hears description of Breuer's Anna O. case adumbration of neurone theory becomes Assistant to Meynert Martha goes to live in Wandsbek Freud decides to specialize in neurology researches on medulla writes essay on cocaine Freud spends month in Wandsbek Koller announces local anaesthesia Freud obtains travelling grant leaves Hospital and destroys manuscripts becomes Docent spends six weeks in Wandsbek arrives in Paris visits Wandsbek leaves Paris for Wandsbek studies in Berlin starts private practice Army manuvres in charge of children's department at Kassowitz Institute marriage makes acquaintance of Wilhelm Fliess begins to use hypnotic suggestion visits Bernheim at Nancy begins to use cathartic method moves to Berggasse 19 publishes books on Aphasia and Children's Paralyses Preliminary Communication with Breuer published

1876-1882 1881 April, 1882 June 17, 1882 June 19, 1882 July, 1882 July 31, 1882 October 12, 1882 November, 1882 1882 May, 1883 June, 1883 September, 1883 1883-1885 June, 1884 September, 1884 September 15, 1884 June, 1885 August 31, 1885 September, 1885 September, 1885 October 13, 1885 Christmas, 1885 February 28, 1886 March, 1886 April 25, 1886 August, 1886 Summer, 1886 September 14, 1886 November, 1887 December, 1887 Summer, 1889 1890 Summer, 1891 1891 1893

separation from Breuer Studies in Hysteria published first dream-analysis develops free association method writes Project of a Psychology term psycho-analysis first used intense friendship with Fliess self-analysis begun First analysis of everyday slips writes Interpretation of Dreams Interpretation of Dreams published break with Fliess

1894 May, 1895 July 24, 1895 1892-1898 Autumn, 1895 March, 1896 1895-1900 August, 1897 August, 1898 1898-1899 November 4, 1899 August, 1900

List of Abbreviations
Anf.: Aus den Anfngen der Psychoanalyse, Redigiert von Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris. (Imago Publishing Co. London.) 1950. Aph.: Freud, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. (Deuticke, Wien.) 1891. Auto.: Freud, An Autobiographical Study. Translated by James Strachey. (Hogarth Press, London.) 1935. Bf. (1): Siegfried and Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, Freud' Early Childhood, Bull. Mennin. Clinic., July, 1944, vol. VIII, pp. 107-15. Bf. (2): Siegfried Bernfeld, Freud's Earliest Theories and the School of Helmholtz, Psychoanal. Q., July, 1944, vol. XIII, pp. 341-62. [] Bf. (3): Siegfried Bernfeld, An Unknown Autobiographical Fragment by Freud, The American Imago, August, 1946, vol. IV, pp. 3-19. [] Bf. (4): Siegfried Bernfeld, Freud's Scientific Beginnings, The American Imago, September, 1949, vol. VI, pp. 162-96. [] Bf. (5): Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, Freud and Archaeology, The American Imago, June, 1951, vol. VIII, pp. 107-28. []

Bf. (6): Siegfried Bernfeld, Sigmund Freud, M.D. 1882-1885, Int. J. Psycho-Anal., July, 1951, vol. XXXII, pp. 204-17. [] Bf. (7): Siegfried and Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, Freud's First Year in Practice, 1886-1887, Bull. Mennin. Clinic., March, 1952, vol. XVI, pp. 37-49. C.P.: Freud, Collected Papers, vol. I-V. (Hogarth Press, London.) 1924-1950. G.C.: Geheime Chronik. Secret Record kept by Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays during their engagement. G.S.: Freud, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I-XII. (Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Wien.) 1925-1934. G.W.: Freud, Gesammelte Werke, vol. I-XVIII. (Imago Publishing Co., London.) 1940-1952. I. J.: Int. J. Psycho-Anal.. (Baillire, Tindall and Cox, London.) Internationale Zeitschrift fr Psychoanalyse. (Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Wien.) M.: Correspondence between Freud and Martha Bernays, later Martha Freud. An asterisk indicates that the letter referred to is from her. Only those letters are listed here where the date or source seems important, but a full list will be sent to the Freud Archives for reference puposes. Studien: Breuer und Freud, Studien ber Hystrie, (Deuticke, Wien.) 1895.

Chapter I Origins (1856-1869)

Sigmund Freud was born at 6.30 p.m. on the sixth of May,1 1856, in House Nr. 117, Schlossergasse, Freiberg, in Moravia, and died on the twenty-third of September, 1939, at 20, Maresfield Gardens, London. That Schlossergasse has since been re-named Freudova ulice in his honour. In his short autobiography (1925) Freud wrote: I have reason to believe that my father's family were settled for a long period in the Rhineland (at Cologne), that in the fourteenth or fifteenth century they fled to the east from an anti-semitic persecution, and that in the course of the nineteenth century they retraced their steps from Lithuania through Galicia to German Austria.2 When the Nazis promulgated their racial doctrines he would, half-jestingly, half-sorrowfully, complain that the Jews had at least as much right to be on the Rhine as the Germans, having settled there in Roman days when the Germans were still engaged in pressing the Celts

westward. As a young man Freud was interested in his family history, but it is not known now what evidence he had for the Rhineland story, or for his choice of Cologne, beyond the historical knowledge of a Jewish Settlement there in Roman times. It appeared to be curiously confirmed by the discovery in 1910 of a fresco, signed Freud of Cologne, in the Cathedral of Brixen, now Bressanone, in the South Tirol. Freud and his brother went there to inspect it, but whether the painter was an ancestor, or indeed a Jew at all, has not been established. The earliest one knows of the family is at Buczacz,3 a town a 1 Further investigation has shown that Bernfeld's story of a clerical error in the registering of this date was incorrect (Bf. (1), 108). His mistake arose from the clerk using the old-fashioned spelling of May for Mai which in Gothic script would make the word closely resemble Mrz. 2 G.W., XIV 34. 3 Information from Mrs. Lilly Freud-Marl, daughter of Moritz and Marie.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. -1little to the east of Stanislav in Galicia. Here it divided, one part going west to Moravia, the other to Roumania. Some contact was maintained between the two branches, and in his correspondence Freud makes several allusions to Roumanian relatives who called on him in Vienna and Paris. One of them, Moritz Freud, married Freud's sister Marie, in March, 1886. Freud's great-grandfather was called Rabbi Ephraim Freud, and his grandfather Rabbi1 Schlomo Freud. The latter died on February 21, 1856, i.e. shortly before Freud's birth; it was after him that he received his Jewish name of Schlomo.2 His father, Jakob Freud, who was born in Tysmenitz, Galicia, and whose life extended from December 18, 1815,3 to October 23, 1896,4 was a merchant, engaged principally in the sale of wool. He married twice. Of the first marriage, contracted at the age of seventeen, there were two sons, Emanuel, born in 1832, and Philipp, born in 1836. When he was forty, on July 29, 1855,

three years after the death of his first wife, Saly Kanner, he married Amalie Nathansohn in Vienna;5 her span of life was even longer, from August 18, 1835, to September 12, 1930. With a father who lived to be eighty-one and a mother who lived to be ninety-five, therefore, Freud would normally be destined to a long life, and he certainly had vitality enough to transcend considerably the eighty-three years allotted to him had it not been for his cancerous affliction. Of Jakob Freud one knows that he was slightly taller than his son, that he bore a resemblance to Garibaldi and that he was of a gentle disposition, 1 The word Rabbi was often only a title of politeness, and does not necessarily imply an ecclesiastical status. 2 From the family Bible in the possession of Ernst Freud. 3 After his second marriage he and his wife changed from the Jewish to the Gregorian calendar, and he chose April 1 for his birthday. 4 (Unpublished) Fliess correspondence, Aug. 1, 1898. 5 Data from Harry Freud, who possesses the marriage certificate. Several writers on Freud, the latest being Rachel Baker (Sigmund Freud, 1952, p. 1), have given 1851 as the date of this marriage, the bride then being only sixteen years old. It would have been strange had such a fruitful woman borne no children until Sigmund came five years later. The error has arisen from a misinterpretation of a passage in The Interpretation of Dreams (G.W., II/III 437, 440) where the date 1851 has been taken as the date of the marriage; actually it was a composition in Freud's dream, the number 51 representing the age at which Fliess predicted he would die.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. -2well loved by all in his family. Freud remarked that he was the duplicate of his father physically, and to some extent mentally.1 He also described him in rather Micawber-like terms as being always hopefully expecting something to turn up.2 At the time of his second marriage he was already a grandfather, his elder son, who lived near by, being by then in the twenties and himself the father of a baby son, John, to be soon followed by a daughter, Pauline. The little Sigmund, therefore, was born an uncle, one of the many paradoxes his young mind had to grapple with.

Of the mother's lively personality the present writer has many recollections, both from Vienna and from Ischl where she used to spend every summerincidentally, enjoying there card-parties at an hour when most old ladies would be in bed. The Mayor of Ischl would greet her birthday (incidentally, the same day as the Emperor's) with a ceremonious gift of flowers, though on her eightieth birthday he jokingly announced that these semi-royal visits of his would in future take place only every ten years. When she was ninety she declined the gift of a beautiful shawl, saying it would make her look too old. When she was ninety-five, six weeks before she died, her photograph appeared in the newspapers: her comment was, A bad reproduction; it makes me look a hundred. It was strange to a young visitor to hear her refer to the great Master as mein goldener Sigi and evidently there was throughout a close attachment between the two. When young she was slender and pretty and she retained to the last her gaiety, alertness, and sharpwitted intelligence. She came from Brody3 in North-East Galicia near to the Russian frontier. She spent part of her girlhood in Odessa, where two brothers had settled. Her parents had moved to Vienna when she was still a child, and she had vivid memories of the 1848 revolution there; she had preserved a picture with shot holes dating from that event. Under twenty at her marriage, the bore her first-born, Sigmund, at the age of twenty-one, and subsequently five daughters and two other sons; in order: 1 M., July 19, 1883. 2 M., Jan. 1, 1884. 3 Helen Puner (vide infra, p. 11) would trace Amalie's descent from a famous Talmudic scholar, the eighteenth-century Nathan Halvy Charmatz of Brody, but none of the many Jewish authorities I have consulted have any knowledge of this famous scholar. Actually he was a rich merchant who was a patron of scholars (Bernfeld).

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. -3Julius, who died at the age of eight months; Anna, born when Freud was two and a half years old (on December 31, 1858), Rosa, Marie (Mitzi), Adolfine (Dolfi), Paula, Alexander, the lastnamed being just ten years younger than Sigmund. All who grew up married with the exception of one daughter, Adolfine, who stayed with the mother. What with grandchildren and great-

grandchildren, the Freud clan became a considerable size, so plainly he came of a prolific stock. From his father Freud inherited his sense of humour, his shrewd scepticism about the uncertain vicissitudes of life, his custom of pointing a moral by quoting a Jewish anecdote, his liberalism and free-thinking, and perhaps his uxoriousness. From his mother came, according to him,1 his sentimentality. This word, still more ambiguous in German, should probably be taken to mean his temperament, with the passionate emotions of which he was capable. His intellect was his own. Freud had five uncles. Since Freud attached much importance to neuropathic heredity, much more than we do nowadays, the following details should be mentioned. One of the uncles, younger brother of his father, who lived in Breslau and whom Freud knew very slightly, had four children. Only one of them was healthy. Of the others one was a hydrocephalic imbecile, another, a promising young man, became insane at the age of nineteen, as did also a sister in the twenties. A son of the Uncle Josef2 whose conflict with the law3 turned his brother's hair grey, and who lived in Vienna, died of epilepsy. Freud commented on these facts as follows: So I have to admit to having a regular neuropathological taint, as it is called. Fortunately very little of it has shown itself in our family, except that Rosa and I have a pronounced tendency to neurasthenia.4 Uncle Josef was the only one he mentions by name. Incidentally, this was a name that often played a part in his life. His student years (1875-83) were spent in the Kaiser Josefstrasse in Vienna, Josef Paneth (my friend Josef in the Traumdeutung) was his friend and colleague in the Institute of Physiology and his successor there, and Josef Breuer was for years an important personage to himthe man who led him along the path to 1 M., Apr. 18, 1885. 2 G.W., II/III 143. 3 He could only have been fined for this, since the Austrian police archives contain no record of imprisonment. 4 M., Feb. 10, 1886.

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-4Freud's birthplace (117 Schlossergasse, Freiberg)

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 4a psycho-analysis. It was Josef Popper-Lynkeus who had come nearest to anticipating him in his theory of dreams. Above all, the biblical Joseph as the famous interpreter of dreams was the figure behind which Freud often disguised himself in his own dreams.1 At birth the baby had such an abundance of black ruffled hair that his young mother nicknamed him her little blackamoor.2 In adult life his hair and eyes were very dark, but his complexion was not swarthy. He was born in a caul, an event which was believed to ensure him future happiness and fame. And when one day an old woman, whom the young mother encountered by chance in a pastry-shop, fortified this by informing her that she had brought a great man into the world, the proud and happy mother believed firmly in the prediction. Thus the hero's garb was in the weaving at the cradle itself. But Freud, the sceptic, did not wear it lightly. He wrote: Such prophecies must be made very often; there are so many happy and expectant mothers, and so many old peasant women, and other old women who, since their mundane powers have deserted them, turn their eyes towards the future; and the prophetess is not likely to suffer for her

prophecies.3 Nevertheless, the story seems to have been repeated so often that when, at the age of eleven, it was strengthened by a new prophecy he was willing to be slightly impressed. This he described later as follows: One evening, at a restaurant in the Prater, where my parents were accustomed to take me when I was eleven or twelve years of age, we noticed a man who was going from table to table and, for a small sum, improvising verses upon any subject given to him. I was sent to bring the poet to our table, and he showed his gratitude. Before asking for a subject he threw off a few rhymes about myself, and told us that if he could trust his inspiration I should probably one day become a Minister. I can still distinctly remember the impression produced by this second prophecy. It was in the days of the bourgeois Ministry; my father had recently brought home the portraits of the bourgeois university graduates, Herbst, Giskra, Unger, Berger and others, and we illuminated the house in their honour. There were even Jews among them; so that every diligent Jewish schoolboy carried a ministerial portfolio in his satchel. The impression of that time must be responsible for the 1 G.W., II/III 488n. 2 Ibid., 342n. 3 Ibid., 198.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. -5fact that, until shortly before I went to the University, I wanted to study jurisprudence, and changed my mind only at the last moment.1 In a dream he described years later, he appeared as a Cabinet Minister at a time when that particular ambition must have completely vanished from his waking thoughts; in adult life he had no more than the average interest in politics and modes of government. Another effect of the mother's pride and love for her firstborn left an intenser, indeed indelible, impression on the growing boy. As he wrote later: A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.2 This self-confidence, which was one of Freud's prominent characteristics, was only rarely impaired, and he was doubtless right in tracing it to the security of his mother's love. It is worth mentioning that, as one would expect, he was fed at the breast.

In the household there was also a Nannie, old and ugly, with the nurse's normal mixture of affection for children and severity towards their transgressions; she was capable and efficient. Freud several times refers in his writings3 to what he called that prehistoric old woman. He was fond of her and used to give her all his pennies, and he refers to the memory of the latter fact as a screen memory; perhaps it got connected with her dismissal for theft later on when he was two and a half years old.4 She was a Czech and they conversed in that language, although Freud forgot it afterwards.5 More important, she was a Catholic and used to take the young boy to attend the Church services. She implanted in him the ideas of Heaven and Hell, and probably also those of salvation and resurrection. After returning from Church the boy used to preach a sermon at home and expound God's doings.6 The half-brother Emanuel's family lived so near and was so intimate that the two families might be regarded as almost one.7 The psychological complications arising from this are evident. Close by there lived also a family by the name of Fluss, whose 1 G.W., II/III 199. 2 G.W., XII 26. 3 G.W., II/III 253. 4 Loc. cit. 5 G.W., II/III 201. 6 Anf., 236. 7 I know of no evidence for Kris's statement (Anf., 39) that they lived under one roof; the indications are to the contrary. Emanuel lived in House Nr. 42.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. -6importance will appear later. The parents were close friends of Freud's parents. We know of six children, four boys (Richard, Alfred, Emil and Viktor) and two girls, Sidonie and Gisela. The latter, Gisela, we shall presently meet. The family weathered the economic storm of 1859,

remained in Freiberg, and became affluent. They moved, however, to Vienna in 1878 and the family friendship was unbroken. Nearly all the data about Freud's childhood are derived from numerous allusions in his writings. Among them is an extremely valuable one which is anonymous. It is the analysis of a screen memory1 published in 18992 as part of the analysis of a supposed ex-patient who may be called Mr. Y., and Dr. Bernfeld's perspicacity3 has revealed it as certainly a part of Freud's own analysis which he chose to ascribe to someone else. It was not the only occasion of anonymous writing; his first essay on Moses (1914)4 was another example; so was the short paper on Brne (1920).5 The insight displayed by the so-called patient, the way he imparts as fresh information matters that would have been long familiar in his alleged analysis, the highly characteristic expressions and style he employs, and the detailed correspondence of the facts related with the known ones of Freud's earliest surroundings, make its provenance quite certain. Freud had only a few conscious memories of his first three years, as indeed of his first six or seven, but in his self-analysis he undoubtedly recovered a great many of the important ones that had been forgotten; he mentions that he was forty-two when he did so. Among the forgotten ones was some knowledge he then had of the Czech language. Among the (consciously) remembered ones are a few, banal enough in themselves, which are of interest only in standing out in the sea of amnesia. One was of penetrating into his parents' bedroom out of (sexual) curiosity and being ordered out by an irate father.6 At the age of two he would still wet his bed and it was his father, not his indulgent mother, who reproved him. He recollected saying on one of these occasions: Don't worry, Papa. I will buy you a beautiful new red bed in Neutitschein (the chief town of the district).7 It was from such experiences that was 1 An unimportant memory recalled in place of an important one associated with it. 2 G.S. I, 472 et seq. 3 Bf. (3). 4 G.W., X 172 5 G.W., XII 307. 6 G.W., II/III 462.

7 Ibid., 221.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. -7born his conviction that typically it was the father who represented to his son the principles of denial, restraint, restriction, and authority; the father stood for the reality principle, the mother for the pleasure principle. There is no reason to think, however, that his own father was sterner than fathers usually are. On the contrary, all the evidence points to his having been kindly, affectionate, and tolerant, though just and objective. If, however, like other boys at that age he regarded his father as the most powerful, wisest and wealthiest man,1 he was soon to be disillusioned in a specially painful manner. An incident which he could not recollect was of slipping from a stool when he was two years old,2 and receiving a violent blow on the lower jaw3 from the edge of the table he was exploring for some delicacy. It was a severe cut which necessitated sewing up, and it bled profusely; he retained the scar throughout life. A more important occurrence, just before this, was his young brother's death when Freud was nineteen months old and the little Julius only eight months. Before the new-comer's birth the infant Freud had had sole access to his mother's love and milk, and he had to learn from the experience how strong the jealousy of a young child can be. In a letter to Fliess (1897) he admits the evil wishes he had against his rival and adds that their fulfilment in his death had aroused self-reproaches, a tendency to which had remained ever since.4 (In the light of this confession it is astonishing that Freud should write twenty years later how almost impossible it is for a child to be jealous of a new-comer if he is only fifteen months old when the latter arrives.5) In the same letter he relates how his libido had been aroused towards his mother, between the ages of two years and two and a half, on the occasion of seeing her naked. So we see 1 G.W., X 207. 2 In one account Freud gives of this he says he was between two and three years of age (G.S., III 164, 279), in another not yet two (G.S., I 474). The former is the more trustworthy. 3 Helen Puner, in her book on Freud, would connect this injury with his later cancer of the jaw (Freud, His Life and His Mind, 1949, p. 254), but she is in error when she adds: the cancer

struck the area of the jaw he had injured as a child, since the former was in the upper jaw on the right side whereas the scar was on the lower jaw on the left side. (Personal observation when Freud was shaved for an operation.) 4 Anf., 233. 5 G.W., XII 20.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. -8that the infant Freud was early assailed by the great problems of birth, love, and death. There is every reason to think that the most important person in Freud's early childhood was, next to his parents, his nephew John, a boy only a year older than himself. They were constant companions, and there are indications that their mutual play was not always entirely innocent. Affection and hostility between them alternated, as one would expect, but it is certain that, at least on Sigmund's side, the feelings aroused were much more intense than is usual. He wrote later, when speaking of his boyhood ideals, Hannibal and Marshal Massna: Perhaps the development of this martial ideal may be traced yet farther back, to the first three years of my childhood, to wishes which my alternately friendly and hostile relations with a boy a year older than myself must have evoked in the weaker of the two playmates.1 John was naturally the stronger of the two, but little Sigmund stood up well to him and gave as good as he got. He was certainly endowed with a fair amount of pugnacity, though this became quite subdued with maturity; one could know him pretty well without suspecting what fires burned, or had burned, below his contained demeanour. When Freud came to review his childhood he repeatedly indicated how his ambivalence towards John had conditioned the development of his character. Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable; we had loved each other and fought each other, and, as I have already hinted, this childish relation has determined all my later feelings in my intercourse with persons of my own age. My nephew John has since then had many incarnations, which have revivified first one and then another aspect of a character that is ineradicably fixed in my unconscious memory. At times he must have treated me very badly, and I must have opposed my tyrant courageously.2 Furthermore: An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy have coincided in the same person;

but not simultaneously, of course, as was the case in my early childhood.3 He soon learnt that this companion, of nearly his own age, 1 G.W., II/III 204. 2 Ibid., 427. 3 Ibid., 487.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. -9was his nephew, the son of his brother Emanuel, and that he addressed father Jakob as grandfather. The older and stronger boy should surely have been the uncle, not he. Freud's mental endowment was doubtless native to him, but the complexity of the family relationships must have afforded a powerful incentive to his budding intelligence, to his curiosity and interest. From earliest days he was called upon to solve puzzling problems, and problems of the greatest import to him emotionally. For that reason it is worth while laying further stress on that complexity and trying to imagine what it must have signified to the growing child's mind. When in later life (probably at nineteen) his half-brother Emanuel remarked to him that the family had really consisted of three generationsthat is, that Jakob should be Sigmund's grandfatherFreud found the remark illuminating.1 It evidently accorded with his own early feelings. The problem of the family relationships came to a head with the birth of the first sister, Anna, when he was just two and a half years old. How and why had this usurper appeared, with whom he would have once again to share his mother's warm and previously exclusive love? The changes in her figure2 told the observant child the source of the baby, but not how it had all come about. And at the same moment, when his mother was in bed with the new baby, his Nannie disappeared. As he learnt later, she had been caught stealing his money and toys, and Philipp3 had insisted on her being apprehended; she was sent to gaol for ten months.4 Having reason to suspect Philipp's implication in the disappearance, he asked him what had become of her and received the jokingly ambiguous answer: Sie ist eingekastelt. An adult would have understood this as meaning,

 1 G.W., IV 245. 2 Ibid., 58. 3 Most people, including even Dr. Bernfeld, have assumed that this anecdote, related in The Interpretation of Dreams, referred to the elder brother, Emanuel. Emanuel was twenty-three years older than Freud, and Philipp just twenty. In a letter to Fliess, however (ibid.), he says twice over that the half-brother in question, twenty years older than himself, was Philipp. One would remark on the coincidence (?) that the boy from whom Freud derived early sexual knowledge in the Freiberg period was also called Philipp (G.W., II/III 589.) It seems odd that he should have remembered, and also troubled to record, this name, but it was from his brother Philipp that he had learned something about pregnancy. 4 Anf., 236-7.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 10 She has been locked up in prison, but the child's mind took it more literally as She has been put in a chest. This connects with a fascinating analysis Freud made forty years later of an apparently unintelligible memory from his childhood.1 He saw himself standing before a chest and tearfully demanding something of his half-brother, Philipp, who is holding it open. Then his mother, notably slender (i.e. not pregnant), comes into the room, presumably from the street. At first he supposed the memory must refer to some teasing on the brother's part, interrupted by his mother's appearance. The psycho-analysis of the memory, however, gave a very different picture of the episode. He had missed his mother, who had probably gone out for a walk, and so had anxiously turned to the naughty brother who had put his Nannie in a chest, and begged him to release his mother from the same fate. The brother obligingly opened the chest to reassure him that there was no mother there, whereupon he began to cry. Further analysis revealed that the chest was a womb symbol and that the anxious request to the brother concerned not merely the mother's momentary absence but the more agitating question whether another unwelcome little brother had been put into that all-important locality. Philipp was the one who had to do with putting people in chests and the boy had formed the phantasy that his half-brother and his mother, who were of the same age, had co-operated in producing the usurping Anna.

The experience seems to have had a lasting effect, since Freud never liked that sister. But he evidently reconciled himself to such occurrences, and the next one drew out the affectionate side of his nature; Rosa became his favourite sister, with Adolfine (Dolfi) a good second. As seen through a child's eyes it was not unnatural that he should pair off Jakob and Nannie, the two forbidding authorities. Then came Emanuel with his wife, and there remained Philipp and Amalie who were just of an age.2 All this appeared very tidy and logical, but still there was the awkward fact that Jakob, not Philipp, slept in the same bed as Amalie. It was all very puzzling. What we have called the logical pairing off would have a deeper psychological advantage and motivation. By removing his father to a more remote order in the household he would 1 G.W., IV 59. 2 See Anf., 237.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 11 absolve him from rivalry about the mother and from the mischief of creating unwelcome children. There is every reason to think that Freud's conscious attitude to his father consistently remained, despite the latter's representing authority and frustration, one of affection, admiration, and respect. Any hostile component was thoroughly displaced on to the figures of Philipp and John.1 It therefore came as a great shock to Freud when forty years later he discovered his own Oedipus complex, and had to admit to himself that his unconscious had taken a very different attitude towards his father from that of his consciousness. It was no chance that this insight came about only a year or two after his father's death. In tracing, as best we can, the genesis of Freud's original discoveries we may therefore legitimately consider that the greatest of themnamely the universality of the Oedipus complex was potently facilitated by his own unusual family constellation, the spur it gave to his curiosity and the opportunity it afforded of a complete repression. Freud never alluded in his writings to Emanuel's wife.2 Pauline, his niece, was on the other hand of some emotional significance. In the screen memory that Dr. Bernfeld unravelled an amorous attachment to her is manifest, and beyond that an unconscious phantasy of her being raped by

John and himself together. Freud himself related3 how he and his nephew used to treat the little girl cruelly, and one may assume that this included some erotic componentwhether manifest or not. The latter feature is the first sign that Freud's sexual constitution was not exclusively masculine; after all, to hunt in couples means sharing one's gratification with someone of one's own sex. This memory was part of a rural scene.4 From it and other ones it is evident that the boy Sigmund was already affected by the beauty of nature. The impressions of country scenes made at this early age were lasting. Throughout life his appreciation of landscape afforded one of his keenest aesthetic enjoyments. He was brought up close to meadows; and the forest itself, where he used to toddle with his beloved father, was but half a mile away. 1 G.W., IV 60n. 2 Except when she was an old lady (G.W., II/III 217; XIII, 167). 3 Anf., 233 4 This can be exactly dated as the summer of 1859.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 12 Freiberg is a quiet little town in the south-east of Moravia, near the borders of Silesia, and one hundred and fifty miles north-east of Vienna. Pbor, to give it its Czech name since it was of Czech origin, was founded in 1215 by the Earl Yaroslav of Sternberkthe man who was to defeat the Tartars in the year 1241; King Vladislav II had proclaimed it a free town in 1493. It was one of a trio, with Brieg and Brnn, that was proud of the stand they had made against the Swedes in the Thirty Years War. Czech was the predominant language, but the Jews would speak German (or Yiddish) among themselves. The town was dominated by the steeple, two hundred feet high, of St. Mary's Church which boasted the best chimes of the province. The population, which at the time of Freud's birth was about five thousand, was almost all Roman Catholic, only two per cent being Protestants and an equal number of Jews. A child would soon observe that his family did not belong to the majority and never attended the church, so that the chimes rang out not brotherly love but hostility to the

little circle of non-believers. Perhaps there was an echo of these chimes in that night long after when his sleep was disturbed by church bells so that, to put an end to the annoyance, he dreamed that the Pope was dead. For the man responsible for the welfare of this little family group the times were more than anxious. Jakob Freud was a wool merchant and, for the past twenty years, textile manufacture, the town's staple source of income, had been on the down grade. As elsewhere in Central Europe, the introduction of machines had increasingly threatened hand work. In the forties the new Northern Railway from Vienna had by-passed Freiberg, dislocating trade there and leading to considerable unemployment. The inflation following the Restoration of 1851 increased the poverty of the town further and, by 1859, the year of the Austro-Italian war, it was pretty well ruined. Jakob's business was directly affected. But there were still more sinister portents to add to his anxiety. One result of the 1848-9 revolution had been to establish Czech nationalism as a power in Austrian politics and consequently to fan Czech hatred against the German-Austrians, the ruling class in Bohemia and Moravia. This easily turned against the Jews, who were German in language and education; in fact, the revolution in Prague had started with Czech riots against

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 13 Jewish textile manufacturers. The economic distress combined with the rising nationalism to turn against the hereditary scapegoats, the Jews. Even in little Freiberg the grumbling clothmakers, Czech to a man, began to hold the Jewish textile merchants responsible for their plight. No actual attack appears to have been made on them or their property, but in a small and backward community one could never feel sure. Even had all this not been so, the educational facilities in a small and remote decaying town did not hold much prospect of the peasant woman's prediction of the young Sigmund's future greatness being fulfilled. Jakob had every reason to think that there was no future for him and his in Freiberg. So, in October, 1859, when Sigmund was three years old, the ancient march of the familyPalestine, Rome, Cologne, Lithuania, Galicia, Moraviawas resumed, as he himself had to resume it once more nearly eighty years later. He remembered the long ride in the horsedrawn vehicle and his first sight of a railway. This took him from his beautifully rolling country with its meadows, hills, and forests, to the town of Leipsic. Jakob spent some months there,

doubtless sounding the chances of trade, and then they moved on to Vienna. On the way to Leipsic the train passed through Breslau, where Freud saw gas jets for the first time; they made him think of souls burning in hell!1 From this journey also dated the beginning of a phobia of travelling by train,2 from which he suffered a good deal for about a dozen years (1887-99) before he was able to dispel it by analysis. It turned out to be connected with the fear of losing his home (and ultimately his mother's breast)a panic of starvation which must have been in its turn a reaction to some infantile greed. Traces of it remained in later life in the form of slightly undue anxiety about catching trains. On the journey from Leipsic to Vienna, a year later, Freud had occasion to see his mother naked: an awesome fact which forty years later he related in a letter to Fliess3but in Latin! Curiously enough he gives his age then as between two and two and a half, whereas he was in fact four years old on that journey. One must surmise that the memories of two such experiences had got telescoped. 1 Anf., 252 2 G.S., I 474. Anf., 228, 234, 252, 304, 327 3 Ibid., 233.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 14 Emanuel, with his wife and two children and his brother Philipp, went to Manchester, where his knowledge of cloth manufacture stood him in good stead and brought him some success. His half-brother never ceased to envy him for this migration,1 and England remained to him for life his country of preference. It is good to think that his last days were spent there, cheered by the warm reception and comfort that awaited him. Freud has taught us that the essential foundations of character are laid down by the age of three and that later events can modify but not alter the traits then established. This was the age when he was taken away or, when one thinks of the circumstances, one might almost say torn away from the happy home of his early childhood, and one is drawn at this moment to review what

little we know of that period, to ponder on its influence on his later development. Speculation is out of place here. We gather that he appears to have been a normal sturdy child, and we can only note the few features that distinguish his circumstances from those of the average run of children. They are few, but important. He was the eldest child, at least of his mother, and for a time therefore the centre of what may be called the inner family. This is in itself a fact of significance, since an eldest child differs, for better or worse, from other children. It may give such a child a special sense of importance and responsibility or it may imbue him with a feeling of inferiority as beinguntil another child appearsthe feeblest member of his little community. There is no doubt that the former was true in Freud's case; responsibility for all his relatives and friends became a central feature of his character. This favourable turn was evidently secured by his mother's love and, indeed, adoration. Self-confidence was built up to a degree that was very seldom shaken. On the other hand, this precious possession could not be altogether taken for granted. It was challenged, and he had to cope with the challenge. Although he was the only child, there was his nephew John who by rights should take a second place, but paradoxically was older and stronger. It needed all his vigour to contend with him and to maintain his position of primacy. 1 G.W., II/III 447n.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 15 Darker problems arose when it dawned on him that some man was even more intimate with his mother than he was. Before he was two years old, for the second time another baby was on the way, and soon visibly so. Jealousy of the intruder, and anger for whoever had seduced his mother into such an unfaithful proceeding, were inevitable. Discarding his knowledge of the sleeping conditions in the house, he rejected the unbearable thought that the nefarious person could be his beloved and perfect father. To preserve his affection for him he substituted his half-brother Philipp, against whom there was, besides, the other grudge of having robbed him of his Nannie. All this seemed more likely and certainly less unpleasant. It was early days to grapple with the inevitable problem of reality. And when the world that mattered was one where phantasy seemed more rational than fact, and appearance more congruent than actuality, then indeed it called for

every effort. It was an emotional solution he had found, not an intellectual one, and from the very beginning of his life to the end Freud was never satisfied with emotional solutions only. He had a veritable passion to understand. At the outset this need to understand was stimulated in a way from which there was no escape. His intelligence was given a task from which he never flinched till, forty years later, he found the solution in a fashion that made his name immortal.

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Chapter II Boyhood and Adolescence (18601873)

We know less of this period of Freud's life than of his childhood. He had not the same motive to investigate it or write about it as he had with his early development when he embarked on it at the age of forty-one.1 What little we know comes from his mother and sister2 and from occasional remarks of his in later life. From these impressions one gets a picture of him as having been a good boy, not an unruly one, and one much given to reading and study. His mother's favourite, he possessed the self-confidence that told him he would achieve something worth while in life, and the ambition to do so, though for long the direction this would take remained uncertain. The early years in Vienna were evidently very unpleasant. Freud said later that he remembered very little of the early period between the ages of three and seven: They were hard times and not worth remembering. He greatly missed the freedom and enjoyments of the countryside, which he was not to see again for thirteen years. There were the parks in Vienna, and later on occasional visits to a spa, Roznau, in Moravia, necessitated by his mother's tuberculosis, but all that was very different from the open country where he had once been so happy. It gave a good reason for his dislike of Vienna, to which two further powerful motives were added later.3 Freud's continuous memories began at the age of seven. There are only five incidents in the years between three and seven of which we have any record. The first, related by his mother,4 was of his soiling a chair with his dirty hands, but

 1 From memory Freud gives forty-two (G.W., IV 58), but the contemporary evidence is decisive. See chap. XIV. 2 Anna Freud Bernays: My Brother, Sigmund Freud, American Mercury, Nov., 1940. But one dare not attribute absolute accuracy to all of her memories, and many of her dates are demonstrably incorrect. 3 Anti-semitism and the reception of his work. 4 According to Anna Bernays. It is probably a distortion of the bed story (chap. I, p. 7).

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 17 consoling her with the promise that he would grow up a great man and then buy her another another example of what is nowadays called a restituting tendency, akin to the earlier promise to his father to buy him a red bed. It is an indication that love was stronger than aggression. The next, and more interesting one, he related himself.1 It was almost his sole recollection from this time. When he was five years old his father handed him and his little sister a book (a narrative of a journey through Persia) with the mischievous suggestion that they amuse themselves by tearing out its coloured plates: certainly not an austere father. It was a queer form of education, but it had an effect. Freud subsequently traced to this episode the earliest passion of his lifethat of collecting and possessing booksbut he also calls it a screen memory for something more primitive. Another memory was of his mother assuring him at the age of six that we were made of earth and therefore must return to earth.2 When he expressed his doubts of this unwelcome statement she rubbed her hands together and showed him the dark fragments of epidermis that came there as a specimen of the earth we are made of. His astonishment was unbounded and, for the first time, he captured some sense of the inevitable. As he put it later: I slowly acquiesced in the idea I was later to hear expressed in the words, Thou owest nature a death. This misquotation from Shakespeare's King Henry IV (First Part, Act V, Sc. I, and Second Part, Act III, Sc. 2) did not come about because Nature occurs in place of God with Goethe and several classical authors, since Freud ascribes it to Shakespeare himself in a letter to Fliess (Anf., 294).3 It may have been influenced by Tristram Shandy, of which Freud was particularly fond, since Sterne there makes the same substitution (Book V, chap. 3).

Another incident refers to the conscious recollection4 of having urinated (deliberately) in his parents' bedroom at the age of seven or eight, and being reprimanded by his father, who testily permitted himself the exclamation: That boy will never amount 1 G.W., II/III 178. 2 Ibid., 211. 3 An example of an unconscious mistake in quotation is that from the Emperor Josef's monument cited in the Non vixit dream in the Traumdeutung. Wittels (Sigmund Freud, 1924, p. 100) offered an ingenious interpretation of it which Freud accepted. 4 G.W., II/III 221.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 18 Freud with his Father, aet. 8

Freud, aet. 12

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 18a to anything, an estimate alien to his father's usual pride in his son. He wrote about it: This must have been a terrible affront to my ambition, for allusions to this scene occur again and again in my dreams, and are constantly coupled with enumerations of my accomplishments and successes, as if I wanted to say: You see, I have amounted to something after all. The last

memory was an anxiety dream, at the age of six or seven, which Freud analysed many years later and traced to a repressed incestuous wish. It seems to have been the last severe anxiety dream he ever experienced.1 The first abode in Vienna was in the Weissgrberstrasse, a small street in the (largely Jewish) quarter called the Leopoldstadt, near to fields and woods that adjoined the Prater. The rapid growth of the family led to a move to a larger flat in the Kaiser Josefstrasse, where they lived from 1875 to 1885. It consisted of a living-room, a dining-room, three bedrooms, and a cabinet.2 The sister says: We had many rooms and were fairly prosperous. But the accommodation does not seem excessive for eight persons. Furthermore, one knows that the father often received financial assistance from his wife's family, so that the word prosperous is doubtless a euphemistic expression. There was no bathroom, but once a fortnight a couple of strong carriers brought a large wooden tub, with several kegs of hot and cold water, into the kitchen and fetched them away the next day. When the children were old enough, however, their mother would take them to one of the many public baths. The cabinet, a long and narrow room separated from the rest of the flat, with a window looking on to the street, was allotted to Sigmund; it contained a bed, chairs, shelf, and writing-desk. There he lived and worked until he became an interne at the hospital; all through the years of his school and university life the only thing that changed in it was an increasing number of crowded bookcases. In his teens he would even eat his evening meal there so as to lose no time from his studies. He had an oil lamp to himself, while the other bedrooms had only candles. An illustration of the esteem in which he and his studies were held in the family is a sad story related by his sister. When she 1 Ibid., 589. Actually he was nearly ten. 2 This account of the accommodation comes from his sister Anna and apparently applies to the last named flat, though she does not make this quite explicit.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 19 was eight years old their mother, who was very musical, got her to practise the piano, but, though it was at a certain distance from the cabinet, the sound disturbed the young student so much

that he insisted on the piano being removed; and removed it was. So none of the family received any musical education, any more than Freud's children did later. Freud's aversion to music was one of his well-known characteristics. One well remembers the pained expression on his face on entering a restaurant or beer garden where there was a band and how quickly his hands would go over his ears to drown the sound. Yet, as we shall see, this is not the full story. After the first lessons with his mother, Freud's father took charge of his education before sending him to a private school.1 Though self-taught, he was evidently a man of parts, above the average in intelligence and outlook. If the account is true, then that the boy made such good progress would be evidence of the satisfactory relationship between him and his father. He related that from the age of twelve he used to accompany his father in walks in the neighbourhood of Vienna.2 At that time there was not the interest in sport and athletics that has since become so general in Central Europe, and doubtless the main exercise he indulged in was that of walking, especially on mountains: he remarked later that going for walks alone had been his chief pleasure in his student days.3 He was a good swimmer and never missed an opportunity of bathing in lake or sea. He mentioned that he only once sat on a horse and did not feel comfortable in the situation.4 But he was assuredly a good walker. When he was sixty-five he took part in a walking tour in the Harz Mountains with half a dozen colleagues who were a quarter of a century younger, and he excelled all of us both in speed and in endurance. The only difference between father and son seems to have been on an occasion when Freud, then seventeen years old, indulged his propensity for buying books to such an extent that he was unable to pay for them.5 His father was not at all the strict paternal type then so common, and he used to consult the children over various decisions to be made. These discussions took place in what was called the Family Council. An example 1 Anna Bernays, op. cit. 2 G.W., II/III 203. 3 M., Sept. 28, 1883. 4 G.W., II/III 236. 5 Ibid., 178.

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circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 20 was the choice of a name for the younger son. It was Sigmund's vote for the name of Alexander that was accepted, his selection being based on Alexander the Great's generosity and military prowess; to support his choice he recited the whole story of the Macedonian's triumphs.1 On the other hand, the father was after all a Jewish patriarch and so demanded corresponding respect. Moritz Rosenthal, the pianist, tells a story2 of how one day he was having an argument with his father in the street when they encountered Jakob Freud, who laughingly reproved him thus: What, are you contradicting your father? My Sigmund's little toe is cleverer than my head, but he would never dare to contradict me! Of Freud's religious background not a great deal is known. There was, of course, the Catholic Nanny,3 and perhaps her terrifying influence contributed to his later dislike of Christian beliefs and ceremonies. His father must have been brought up as an orthodox Jew, and Freud himself was certainly conversant with all Jewish customs and festivals. His children have assured me that their grandfather had become a complete free-thinker, but there is some evidence to the contrary. He was undoubtedly a liberal-minded man of progressive views, and it is not likely that he kept up orthodox customs after migrating to Vienna. On the other hand, Ernst Freud possesses a Bible which his grandfather presented to his father (Freud) on the latter's thirty-fifth birthday when Jacob was seventy-five years old. The inscription, in Hebrew, runs as follows: My dear Son It was in the seventh year of your age that the spirit of God began to move you to learning. I would say the spirit of God speaketh to you: Read in My book; there will be opened to thee sources of knowledge of the intellect. It is the Book of Books; it is the well that wise men have digged and from which lawgivers have drawn the waters of their knowledge. Thou hast seen in this Book the vision of the Almighty, thou hast heard willingly, thou hast done and hast tried to fly high upon the wings of the Holy Spirit. Since then I have preserved the same Bible. Now, on your thirty-fifth birthday I have 1 Anna Bernays, op. cit. 2 Wittels, op. cit., p. 60.

3 See chap. I, p. 6.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 21 brought it out from its retirement and I send it to you as a token of love from your old father. Freud's mother too preserved some belief in the Deity. Thus when he was about to set up in practice as a family man she earnestly called down the blessing of Almighty God on his endeavours.1 When Freud spoke of his having been greatly influenced by his early reading of the Bible he can only have meant in an ethical sense, in addition to his historical interest. He grew up devoid of any belief in a God or Immortality, and does not appear to have felt the need of it. The emotional needs that usually manifest themselves in adolescence found expression, first in rather vague philosophical cogitations, and, soon after, in an earnest adherence to the principles of science. When he was nine years old he passed an examination that enabled him to attend the High School (Sperl Gymnasium)2 a year earlier than the normal age.3 He had a brilliant career there. For the last six of the eight years he stood at the head of his class.4 He occupied a privileged position and was hardly ever questioned in class. When, at the age of seventeen, he passed out with a distinction his father rewarded him with a promise of a visit to England, which was fulfilled two years later. From a contemporary letter to a friend, Emil Fluss, we happen to know some details of the examination. In the German-Latin translation he obtained pass marks; in Latin-German, a passage from Vergil which he had read for his own pleasure; in Greek-German, a passage of thirty-three verses fromappropriately enoughSophocles' Oedipus; and in mathematics (to his great surprise), credit marks; and in the German Essay on Considerations on the Choice of a Profession, distinction marks.5 The examiner informed 1 Letter to Freud from his mother, July 5, 1886. 2 The Leopoldstdter Kommunalreal-und Obergymnasium in the Sperlgasse. It acquired the colloquial name of Sperlgymnasium after 1870 when it expanded from the Taborstrasse into the

Sperlgasse. 3 Records of Sperl Gymnasium (Bernfeld). 4 When his sister says he was head of his class for eight years, and matriculated at eighteen, she makes two slips of memory. Dr. Bernfeld has retrieved from the School records Freud's place in every semester! 5 I use the current English expressions. The German words are, respectively, befriedigend, lobenswert, and ausgezeichnet.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 22 him that he had what the poet Herder termed an idiotic style, i.e. one both correct and distinctive.1 He added half-jokingly to his friend:2 You didn't know you were exchanging letters with a German stylist. You had better keep them carefullyone never knows. Unfortunately, however, only seven of these letters survived. It should be noted that these examination results relate only to the written examination, since the letter was written before the viva voce ones. He must have done especially well in the latter, if his sister is right in saying that he passed summa cum laude. He repaid his father's instruction by in his turn helping his sisters with their studies. He even exercised some censorship over their reading, telling them what they were too young to read; when his sister Anna was fifteen, for instance, she was warned off Balzac and Dumas.3 He was altogether the big brother. In a letter of July 1876, to his sister Rosa, four years younger than himself, who was staying at Roznau with their mother, he warned her against having her head turned by a slight social success. She had given a performance on the zither, an instrument with which she was only a little familiar. The letter is full of worldly wisdom on the theme of how unscrupulous people are in over-praising young girls, to the detriment of their later character. Such experiences can end in the trinity of their becoming vain, coquettish and insufferable! The advice was illustrated, as was always so characteristic of Freud, by a legendary anecdote. An earlier opportunity for his helpfulness had occurred during the Austro-Prussian war when he was only ten years old. His father would take him to see the wounded soldiers being transferred from the train to hay-carts on their way to the hospital. The plight of the wounded impressed him deeply and he begged his mother to let him have her old linen so that he could make what was

called Charpie for them, the predecessor of medicated cotton. The girls made this in their schools, and Sigmund asked his teachers to organize Charpie groups in the boys' schools as well.4 There is no doubt that young Sigmund was engrossed in his studies and was a hard worker. Reading and studying seem to 1 Reverting to an earlier use of the word, meaning personal, separate; cf. idiomatic. 2 I.Z., 1941, XXVI, 5. 3 Anna Bernays, op. cit. 4 Ibid.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 23 have filled the greater part of his life. Even the friends who visited him, both in school years and later, were at once closeted in the cabinet for the purpose of serious discussion, much to the pique of his sisters who had to watch the youths pass them by. A notable feature was his preference for comprehensive monographs1 on each subject over the condensed accounts given in the text-books, a preference which was also prominent in later years in his archaeological reading. He read widely outside the studies proper, although he mentions that he was thirteen before he read his first novel.2 Probably this means a modern novel; he had already read the German classics. He had a very considerable gift for languages, of which his becoming later a recognized master of German prose was only one example. Besides being completely at home in Latin and Greek, he acquired a thorough knowledge of French and English; in addition he taught himself Italian and Spanish. He had of course been taught Hebrew. He was especially fond of English and he told me once that for ten years he read nothing but English books. Shakespeare, in particular, whom he started reading at the age of eight,3 he read over and over again and was always ready with an apt quotation from his plays. He admired his superb power of expression and, even more, his extensive understanding of human nature. Yet I can recall some faddist ideas he had about his personality. He insisted that his countenance could not be that of an Anglo-Saxon but must be

French, and he suggested that the name was a corruption of Jacques Pierre.4 He wanted me to make a study of the Baconian interpretations and contrast them with psycho-analytic interpretations. Not that he was an adherent of Baconianism, as was his teacher Meynert, but he thought it worth while to disprove it. At the time he had pooh-poohed Meynert's enthusiasm for the idea with the sage remark, In that event Bacon would then have been the most powerful brain the world has ever borne, and it seems to me that there is more need to share Shakespeare's achievement among several rivals than to burden another important man with it.5 But in later life he was greatly taken with the idea of the Earl of Oxford being the 1 G.W., II/III 178. 2 Ibid., 211. 3 M., Jan. 14, 1884. 4 He told me later that he had got this notion from Professor Gentilli of Nervi. 5 M., June 22, 1883.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 24 real author of the plays and was rather disappointed at my scepticism. A Gentile would have said that Freud had few overt Jewish characteristics, a fondness for relating Jewish jokes and anecdotes being perhaps the most prominent one.1 But he felt himself to be Jewish to the core, and it evidently meant a great deal to him. He had the common Jewish sensitiveness to the slightest hint of anti-semitism and he made very few friends who were not Jews. He objected strongly to the idea of their being unpopular or in any way inferior,2 and had evidently suffered much from school days onward, and especially at the University, from the anti-semitism that pervaded Vienna. It put an end for ever to the phase of German nationalistic enthusiasm through which he passed in early years.3 Submission was not in his nature, and his father never regained the place he had held in his esteem after the painful occasion when he told his twelve-year-old boy how a Gentile had knocked off his new fur cap into the mud and shouted at him: Jew, get off the pavement.4 To

the indignant boy's question: And what did you do? he calmly replied: I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap. This lack of heroism on the part of his model man shocked the youngster who at once contrasted it in his mind with the behaviour of Hamilcar when he made his son Hannibal swear on the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Freud evidently identified himself with Hannibal, for he said that ever since then Hannibal had a place in his phantasies. During his development Freud went through an unmistakable militaristic phase, which he traced ultimately to the battles with his nephew in early childhood. One of the first books that fell into his childish hands after he had learned to read was Thiers's Consulate and Empire. He tells us how he pasted on to the backs of his wooden soldiers little labels bearing the names of Napoleon's marshals.5 His favourite one was Massna, usually believed to be a Jew; he was aided in his hero-worship by the circumstance that they were both born on the same date, a 1 In 1897 he told a friend he was making a collection of wise Jewish anecdotes (Anf., 224). 2 Miss Puner's statement that he resented being a Jew is quite unfounded. 3 G.W., II/III 328. 4 Ibid., 203. 5 Loc. cit.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 25 hundred years apart.1 The Franco-Prussian war, which broke out when he was fourteen, aroused his keen interest. His sister relates how he kept a large map on his writing-desk and followed the campaign in detail by means of small flags. He would discourse to his sisters about the war in general and the importance of the various moves of the combatants. His dreams of becoming a great general himself, however, gradually faded, and any remaining military interests must have received a final quietus from the boring experience of spending a year in the Army when he was twenty-three and in the midst of absorbing scientific research. His nephew John visited the family in 1870, and the boys took part together in a duologue2

before an audience of children, Sigmund's role being that of Brutus.3 In 1873 there was an International Exhibition in Vienna, and Mrs. Bernays has a story about her brother being much taken by the specimens of Lincoln's letters and by the copy of the Gettysburg address, which he committed to memory and declaimed before his sisters. In the catalogue of the American pavilion, however, which is still extant, there is no mention of any documents, so possibly the story has got touched up in the course of years. In any event her date of 1879 is incorrect.4 Freud was nineteen before he first visited the land of his dreams, England. He had never ceased to envy his half-brother for being able to live in England and bring up his children far from the daily persecutions Jews were subject to in Austria.5 All we know about the visit was his story of his embarrassment at introducing genders where they did not belong in English,6 his sister's account of an extremely enthusiastic letter Emanuel 1 This is by no means exact. It is a date that has been disputed, but Princess Joachim Murat was good enough to examine the birth certificate in the possession of her brother, the Duc de Rivoli, Massna's great-grandson, and that gives Sept. 6, 1759. 2 This was taken from a duet in an early version of Schiller's Die Ruber (Act IV, Sc. 5), the pronouncedly parricidal content of which Freud did not mention in the allusion he makes to the incident. 3 G.W., II/III 427. 4 My suspicions were confirmed by finding a remark in a letter to Martha Bernays (July 1, 1882). His future brother-in-law, Eli Bernays, had just made him a present of a copy of the Declaration of Independence (see illustration, p. 74), but there is no mention of the story related by his sister Anna. 5 G.W., II/III 447. 6 Ibid., 523.

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- 26 wrote to his father lauding his young brother's development and character, that the visit had heightened his long-standing admiration for Oliver Cromwell1 (after whom he named his second son), and that a talk with his half-brother had the effect of softening the criticism of his father over the cap-in-the-gutter episode. He confessed later that he used to indulge in the phantasy of having been born Emanuel's son, when his path in life would have been much easier.2 His sister adds that it was on that visit that he decided to adopt a medical career, but she puts the decision two years late. His father thought he was too soft-hearted for such workhe also had a considerable horror of bloodbut he persisted, saying, according to his sister, I want to help people who suffer. Whether this be true or notit almost certainly is notthe motive adduced was assuredly not the only one, or the main one. The reasons Freud himself gave for the choice were, as we shall see, very different. Of his sexual development during these years we know of only one incident. From what we know of his balanced maturity and from the evidently successful sublimations of his adolescence, one would suppose that he went through a calmer development than the majority of youths. The incident in question, however, is of considerable interest. It is the one Bernfeld unravelled from the anonymous description Freud published under the disguise of a supposed patient whom Bernfeld labels Mr. Y.3 In 1899, when it was written (it was sent to the publishers in the middle of May4), nothing was known of Freud's early personal life, but he did not reprint the essay where it would naturally belong, in either the Sammlung kleiner Schriften or the Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. Ten years later he inserted into the second edition of the Traumdeutung, which contains so many personal allusions, a remark (concerning his facial scar) which would reveal the personality of the so-called patient. When the Gesammelte Schriften were being arranged, in 1925, Freud could not refuse the editors permission to include the beautiful little essay in question, Ueber Deckerinneringen (On Screen Memories).5 It would have been too pointed and would certainly have aroused their 1 Ibid., 450. Cromwell's re-introduction of the Jews into England must have been a considerable factor in this. 2 G.W., IV 245. 3 Bf. (3).

4 Anf., 289, 299 5 G.S., I 465.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 27 suspicion of a mystery. But at the same time he took care to erase from the Traumdeutung, which was also being reprinted for the Gesammelte Schriften, the revealing passageeven at the cost of making the context there unintelligible.1 It is therefore plain that Freud regarded the story in the screen memory, or rather the deep personal feelings connected with it, as something specially intimate, though the grounds for this are far from evident to anyone else. Nor could all the precautions he took prevent its being pretty clear to several of us that the patient must have been himself. The story relates his first love experience at the age of sixteen whenfor the only time in his life he revisited his birthplace. He stayed there with the Fluss family who were friends of his parents and who were in the same textile business as his father. With their daughter Gisela, three years younger than himself, he fell in love on the spot. He was too shy to communicate his feelings, or even to address a single word to her, and she went away to her school after a few days. The disconsolate youth had to content himself with wandering in the woods with the phantasy of how pleasant his life would have been had his parents not left that happy spot where he could have grown up a stout country lad, like the girl's brothers, and married the maiden. So it was all his father's fault. As might be expected, the phantasy was accompanied, though quite unconsciously, by a deeper, plainly erotic one. The whole episode got associated later in his mind with the discovery that his father and his half-brother Emanuel had the plan of weaning him from his intellectual pursuits and replacing them by more practical ones, after which he would settle in Manchester and marry his half-brother's daughter, Pauline, a playmate of early childhood. Gisela Fluss and Pauline were thus identified with each other. The love episode with the former, and the unconscious erotic phantasy that accompanied it, must have re-animated the infantile rape phantasy concerning Pauline (and, doubtless, ultimately his mother also). We have here the reason why Freud was so secretive about it; it contained both halves of the Oedipus complex. When faced with the difficulty of finding a livelihood in Vienna he often reflected on this

second, lost opportunity of an easier life and thought that there had been much to be said for 1 G.S., III 164. Cp. G.W., XIII 166.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 28 his father's plan. But it was not to be. That the young lady left him cold1 when he saw her on his visit to Manchester2 at the age of nineteen may well be one of the factors in his decision to persist in a scientific career. Had her charms equalled those of the country lass much might have been different in our world. 1 On the other hand he found her sister Bertha, who was two years younger, very attractive and several times mentions her in his letters to Martha Bernays. 2 A cynic must not say it was the glimpse of Manchester, for even that did not weaken his Anglophilism.

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Chapter III The Choice of Profession (1873)

On leaving school Freud had to face the anxious problem of choosing a career. He had not yet come to any decision, and his father had left him entirely free in the matter. The boyhood dreams of becoming a great general or a Minister of State had long vanished in the face of reality. For a Viennese Jew the choice lay between industry or business, law, and medicine. The first of these was quickly discarded by someone of Freud's intellectual type of mind, in spite of his occasional regrets for a more assured existence. There seems to have been a temporary hesitation over the study of jurisprudence with the idea of taking up some social workan echo of the early

political ambitionsbut deep impulses were driving him in another direction; incidentally, it is a curious fact that the only examination in his life at which he failed was in medical jurisprudence.1 To medicine itself he felt no direct attraction. He did not conceal in later years that he never felt at home in the medical profession, and that he did not seem to himself to be a regular member of it. I can recall as far back as in 1910 his expressing the wish with a sigh that he could retire from medical practice and devote himself to the unravelling of cultural and historical problems ultimately the great problem of how man came to be what he is. And yet the world has rightly greeted him as, among other things, a great physician! Here is his own account: Although we lived in very limited circumstances, my father insisted that in my choice of a profession I should follow my own inclinations.2 Neither at that time, nor indeed in my later life, did I feel any particular predilection for the career of a physician. I was moved, rather, by a sort of curiosity, which was, however, directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects; nor had I 1 G.W., II/III 281. 2 Miss Puner states that Freud was convinced of his father's coercion in the choice, but I am aware of no evidence which supports this.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 30 grasped the importance of observation as one of the best means of gratifying it. My early familiarity with the Bible story (at a time almost before I had learnt the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest. Under the powerful influence of a school friendship with a boy rather my senior who grew up to be a well-known politician I developed a wish to study law like him and to engage in social activities. At the same time, the theories of Darwin, which were then of topical interest, strongly attracted me, for they held out hopes of an extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world, and it was hearing Goethe's beautiful essay on Nature read aloud at a popular lecture by Professor Carl Brhl1 just before2 I left school that decided me to become a medical student.3

Here is another version: After forty-one years of medical activity, my self-knowledge tells me that I have never really been a doctor in the proper sense. I became a doctor through being compelled to deviate from my original purpose; and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path. I have no knowledge of having had in my early years any craving to help suffering humanity. My innate sadistic disposition was not a very strong one, so that I had no need to develop this one of its derivatives. Nor did I ever play the doctor game; my infantile curiosity evidently chose other paths. In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution. The most hopeful means of achieving this end seemed to be to enrol myself in the medical faculty; but even then I experimented unsuccessfullywith zoology and chemistry, till at last, under the influence of Brcke, the greatest authority who affected me more than any other in my whole life, I settled down to physiology, though in those days it was too narrowly restricted to histology. By that time I had already passed all my medical 1 Dr. Bernfeld tells me that, according to Fritz Eckstein, an old friend of Freud's, Freud wrote a review of this lecture for a daily newspaper, which, however, has not yet been traced. The lecture itself was on Comparative Anatomy! 2 Elsewhere he says that he listened to this critical lecture after leaving school and while he was still undecided about his future profession. 3 Selbstdarstellung. 1925. 7.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 31 examinations; but I took no interest in anything to do with medicine till the teacher whom I so deeply respected warned me that in view of my restricted material circumstances I could not possibly take up a theoretical career. Thus I passed from the histology of the nervous system to neuropathology and then, prompted by fresh influences, I began to be concerned with the neuroses. I scarcely think, however, that my lack of genuine medical temperament has done much damage to my patients. For it is not greatly to the advantage of patients if their physician's

therapeutic interest has too marked an emotional emphasis. They are best helped if he carries out his task coolly and, so far as possible, with precision.1 Divine curiosity of this order may focus on the riddles of human existence and origin or extend to the nature of the whole universe; with Freud the former was evidently true. Again, such curiosity may seek satisfaction in one of two ways, through philosophical speculation or through scientific investigation. We know which path Freud in fact followed but Wittels2 has made the shrewd suggestion that Freud was perhaps one of those whose bent towards speculative abstractions is so powerful that he is afraid of being mastered by it and feels it necessary to counter it by studying concrete scientific data. This is confirmed by a reply Freud once made to my question of how much philosophy he had read. The answer was: Very little. As a young man I felt a strong attraction towards speculation and ruthlessly checked it. We know from the last chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams and other of his writings that he possessed a remarkable capacity for abstract thought, but he used it in the interests of reality. Goethe's dithyrambic essay is a romantic picture of Nature as a bountiful mother who allows her favourite children the privilege of exploring her secrets. This imagery attracted the youthful Freud more than the prosaic prospect of marrying a relative in Manchester. His outlook was the reverse of materialistic. He chose an ideal career, irrespective of poverty or wealth, rather than worldly comfort. Wittels3 thinks that what attracted Freud in the Goethe essay was not only the sense of beauty in Nature but that of 1 G.W., XIV 290. 2 F. Wittels, Sigmund Freud, 1924, 20. 3 Idem., Freud and his Time, 1931, 34.

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WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 32a meaning and purpose. There is no reason to think that Freud ever cudgelled his brains about the purpose of the Universehe was always an unrepentant atheistbut that mankind was moved by various purposes, motives, aims, many of which need not be evident ones, was a conception he must always have had in his mind, long before he developed it so brilliantly by solving the

riddle of the Sphinx. It is reasonable to suppose that this restless search into the meaning of humanity and human relations was first generated in connection with the puzzling problems of his early family life; there again his dictum that the first two or three years of life are decisive for the formation of character and personality would seem to be well illustrated. An interesting passage from Bernfeld1 may well be quoted at this point: The childhood phantasies and the adolescent day dreams of Freud, as far as we know them, do not foretell the future originator of psycho-analysis. They fit a general, a reformer, or a business executive rather than the patient, full-time listener to petty complaints, humdrum stories and the recounting of irrational sufferings. It was a long way from the child who devoured Thiers's story of Napoleon's power, who identified himself with the Marshal Massna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling, to the psycho-analyst who cheerfully admits that he has, in fact, very little control even over those symptoms and disturbances which he has learned to understand so well. Twelve years old, he still thinks of himself as a candidate for cabinet rank and, as an adolescent, he plans to become a lawyer, and to go into politics. Then, at seventeen, shortly after his graduation from High School, Freud suddenly retreats from his search for power over men. He turns to the more sublime power over nature, through science, and he decides to study natural historybiology to us to-day. Power, prestige, and wealth should come to him only contingent to his being a great scientist. Bernfeld here adumbrates the important topic of the search for power over man. It is commonly supposed that this attitude is characteristic only of men of an aggressively domineering type, of which unfortunately we have of late witnessed many notorious examples. Psycho-analysis has, on the contrary, revealed that it is a universal human characteristic, one, however, which may assume many diverse formssome evident 1 Bf. (4), 163.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 33 and some non-recognizable. Furthermore, it is incorrect to regard it as a purely aggressive tendency. A great part of its motivation is more truly an expression of deep fears in infancy. The sense of badness withinwhether primordial or the result of introjectionsis commonly projected outwards on to other human beings in the endeavour to get rid of it. The advantage of

this expulsion, however, is counter-balanced by the fear that, now the badness is outside one, it is no longer under one's control. Hence the need to make efforts to influence, to control, or in extreme cases to dominate, one's fellow beings. This apparently irrelevant disquisition on psycho-analytical theory is interpolated here so as to avoid creating a false impression when one speaks of Freud's search for power over men. The most obvious form of such a desire is the military oneforce and conquest being apparently so decisivefrequent enough among boys before they discover that the civil (political) arm is more potent than the military arm, and this was the early development we observe with Freud. But at the critical period of his life we are now considering the great change was beginning in which the primacy of the intellect was recognized. He perceived that the ultimate secret of power was not force, but understanding, a fact to which the great achievements of science in the past three centuries bear ample witness. Before this truth could be applied to man's behaviour it was necessary, so he thought, to learn something about nature, man's place in nature, and man's physical constitution. Here it was Darwin who pointed the way, and the excitement caused by Darwin's work was at its height in the seventies in every country in Europe. In a conversation I once had with him on the balanced nature of the Greek ideal, supremacy in both intellectual and physical achievementsthe word aesthetic perhaps forming a link between the twoFreud remarked: Yes, that combination is certainly preferable. For various reasons the Jews have undergone a one-sided development and admire brains more than bodies, but if I had to choose between the two I should also put the intellect first. This transformation from force to understanding, ultimately from the body to the intellect, was extremely thorough and far-reaching. In spite of extensive provocation Freud hardly ever indulged in controversy; it was distasteful to his nature. Like

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 34 Darwin, and unlike most men of science, he responded to criticism, sensitive as he was to it, simply by continuing his researches and producing more and more evidence. He had little desire to influence his fellow men. He offered them something of value, but without any wish to force it on them. He disliked debates or even public scientific discussions, the object of which he knew was mainly controversial, and it was in deference to this attitude that papers read at psychoanalytical congresses have never been followed by discussion of them. And, although wildly untrue statements have been made to the contrary, I can firmly assertand no one could be in a

better position to judge it at first-handthat his attitude towards his colleagues and pupils was never domineering. Any dominating position he achieved was solely the indirect result of the respect which is the meet due of any great man. One may legitimately wonder whether this revolutionary change was furthered by the intense love experience described in the anonymous autobiographical fragment to which reference has already been made. Since the episode was a significant one in Freud's life, and indeed may have had a bearing on the choice of career, it is a matter of interest whether it took place at the moment of that choice or a year earlier, and the arguments in favour of each date may be mentioned. The subject of the story, Mr. Y., is said to have visited his old home, where the episode occurred, at the age of seventeen, i.e. in the vacation following the final school examination when Freud was debating the choice of a career and when a special holiday was very much in place. According to his sister, their father was so pleased with the result of the Matura (University entrance) examination that he rewarded his son with the promise of a trip to England. She says further that this took place soon after, but it is possible that she here confounds it with the Freiberg holiday, since Freud himself gives nineteen, not seventeen, as his age on the English visit and there seems no reason to doubt this.1 The summer of 1873 was when the Stock Exchange in Vienna crashed, not a very propitious moment for embarking on an expensive holiday, which apparently had to be postponed for two years. It seems plausible that, to console the youth for his disappointment in not visiting his English 1 He gave seventeen as his age in the first edition of the Traumdeutung (S. 304), but nineteen in all the subsequent ones.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 35 brothers, the father arranged the minor trip to Freiberg in the meantime. On the other hand, in his letter to the Mayor of Freiberg,1 on the occasion of the tablet (1931), Freud says he last visited his birthplace at the age of sixteen when still a schoolboy (which he would no longer be in the vacation at the age of seventeen), and it would require evidence, not speculation, to rebut such a definite statement. The accuracy of his memory is supported by two other data: (1) In The Interpretation of Dreams he remarks that he committed a Czech nursery rhyme to memorywhich would almost certainly have been at Freibergin his seventeenth

year;2 (2) Mr Y., in the story of the screen memory, mentions that he went to visit his relations abroad three years later than the episode related. Freud was nineteen when he travelled to England. So we may take it that when Freud gives Mr. Y.s age as thirty-eight (in the screen memory story), when his actual age was forty-three, he also changed the age at the love episode from sixteen to seventeen.3 It is known that Freud took very complicated measures in later years, when his own self-disclosures had greatly heightened the risk of discovery, to conceal the identity of the supposed patient, so that it was vastly important to him to preserve the secrecy. One must ascribe that to the links between the experience itself and the deeply repressed forbidden impulses of infancy, a link he himself mentions. It would seem reasonable to suppose that there was a painful reaction to the discovery that he could be carried away by a surge from the depth and, further, to the pain of finding that the experience itself had been so fruitless. Was this 1 G.W., XIV 561. 2 G.W., II/III 201. 3 This conclusion was subsequently confirmed by finding a letter (Oct. 28, 1883) to Martha Bernays describing the incident in full and mentioning that he was then sixteen years old. On looking back he attributed his infatuation to Gisela's black hair and eyes and to the deeply moved state of mind that this visit to his birthplace had induced. It was evidently not the girl's charms themselves, since he commented on his lack of taste; he also said that he never exchanged a single word with her. So it was love of some internal image of his own plainly derived from far deeper sources but associated with his early home. The girl herself married a Herr Popper, an acquaintance of Freud's. It was not the famous Popper(-Lynkeus) on whom Freud was too reluctant to call in later years (see chap. XVI, p. 394); this Popper married only on his death-bed.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 36 increased wave of sexual repression a contributory factor in his turning so sharply from the chances of worldly ambition and ease towards the cold flame of idealism that the intellect

promised? It was ten years before he ventured to fall in love again, but that time it was more successful. To return to the choice itself, Freud had a very orderly mind (and also orderly habits), and his power of organizing a mass of facts into a systematic grouping was truly remarkable; his command of the literature on the subject of childhood paralyses, or on that of dreams, is one example alone of this. But on the other hand he rather spurned exactitude and precise definition as being either wearisome or pedantic; he could never have been a mathematician or physicist or even an expert solver of chess problems. He wrote easily, fluently, and spontaneously, and would have found much re-writing irksome. His translators will bear me out when I remark that minor obscurities and ambiguities, of a kind that more scrupulous circumspection could have readily avoided, are not the least of their trials. He was of course aware of this. I remember once asking him why he used a certain phrase the meaning of which was not clear, and with a grimace he answered: Pure Schlamperei.1 We touch here on one of his main characteristicshis dislike of being hampered or fettered. He loved to give himself up to his thoughts freely, to see where they would take him to, leaving aside for the moment any question of precise delineation; that could be left for further consideration. We have already noted his early tendency to speculative rumination, one which he sternly checked. The motive for this checking was perhaps only in part the intellectual perception of its dangers in leading him astray from objectivity; had it not taken place there was also the danger of releasing unconscious thoughts for which the time was as yet far from ripe. It needed the courage and motives of a man of forty to pursue his self-examination to its last conclusion. Such considerations made him feel the need of intellectual discipline, and everything pointed to science as the supreme opportunity. Science then meant, as it still does to many people, not only objectivity, but above all exactitude, measurement, precision, all the qualities in which Freud knew he was lacking. Moreover, in the nineteenth century the belief in scientific 1 Pure sloppiness.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 37 knowledge as the prime solvent of the world's illsa belief that Freud retained to the endwas

beginning to displace the hopes that had previously been built on religion, political action, and philosophy in turn. This high esteem for science reached Vienna late from the West, particularly from Germany, and was at its height in the seventies, the time in question. Freud was certainly imbued with it, and so, despite his native talent for exploring the unknown and introducing some sort of order into chaos, he must have felt that strictness and accuracy had an important place visibly so in the exact sciences. The conflict between giving himself up unrestrainedly to thinkingand doubtless also to the play of phantasyand the need for the curb of a scientific discipline ended in a decided victory for the latter. The contrast might be expressed in his later terminology of pleasure-principle versus reality-principle, although the latter soon became also invested with great pleasure. Perhaps it corresponds also with the contrast between the belief in free will and that in determinism, an ancient antinomy he was so brilliantly to resolve a quarter of a century later. As often occurs in such situations, the restraining power seems to have been not only thorough, but perhaps excessive. For, as we shall see later, a freer and bolder use of his imagination would have brought him world fame more than once in the course of his laboratory researches had he not cautiously refrained from pursuing the inferences of his work to their logical conclusion. That Freud was ambitious in his pursuit of knowledge as the secret of achievement, success and power is shown by a passage in the letter to Emil Fluss cited earlier, where he bemoans his dread of mediocrity and refuses to be reassured by his friend. Throughout his life he was modest concerning his achievements and he displayed the stern self-criticism that one finds with those who have set themselves lofty goals and had great expectations. I told him once the story of a surgeon who said that if he ever reached the Eternal Throne he would come armed with a cancerous bone and ask the Almighty what he had to say about it. Freud's reply was: If I were to find myself in a similar situation, my chief reproach to the Almighty would be that he had not given me a better brain. It was the remark of a man not easily satisfied. Freud's development during the next few years can well be

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 38 understood when one considers the state of mind we have endeavoured to depict. He would be a laborious and painstaking student, but one not likely to excel in the exact sciences. Biology offered him some understanding of the evolution of life and man's relationship to nature. Later on physiology and anatomy would teach him something of man's physical constitution. But

would this arid path ever bring him nearer to his ultimate goal, the secrets of man's inner nature, towards which the deepest urges impelled him? We know that the medical study of man's physical afflictions brought him no nearer, and perhaps even impeded his progress. That, however, he finally attained his goal, though by an extraordinarily circuitous route, he rightly came to regard as the triumph of his life.1 1 G. W., XIV 290.

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Chapter IV The Medical Student (1873-1881)

It is not surprising that medical studies entered upon in such an unorthodox fashion should pursue an irregular and protracted course. Freud did in fact spend over them three years longer than necessary. In later years he talked of his colleagues having twitted him over his dilatoriness, as if he were a backward student, but there were very good reasons for the delay. It was just in the fields he was supposed to traverse rapidly that he would have liked to spend his life. Freud entered the University of Vienna in the autumn of 1873, at the early age of seventeen. Professor Viktor Kraft's researches in the Archives of the University, undertaken at Dr. Bernfeld's instigation,1 have resuscitated a complete list of the lectures he attended throughout the course of his studies, so that we can now follow them closely step by step. He admitted himself that he pursued in only a negligent fashion the studies proper to the medical career itself and seized every opportunity to dally in those that interested him as well as to forage in neighbouring fields. In his first semester, October, 1873, to March, 1874, Freud signed up for twenty-three hours a week; twelve lectures in anatomy and six in chemistry, together with practical work in both. During his first summer semester, which ran from the end of April till late July, he spent twentyeight hours weekly in anatomy, botany, chemistry, microscopy, and mineralogy. With a characteristic overflow of interest he also followed a course on Biology and Darwinism given by the zoologist Claus, and one by Brcke on The Physiology of Voice and Speech. It was his first sight of the famous Brcke, who became so important to him later. So passed the first year.

In the following winter semester (1874-5) he continued as a regular medical student with twentyeight hours weekly spent 1 Bf. (5).

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 40 on anatomical dissection, physics, physiology (by Brcke), and zoology for medical students (by Claus). Once a week, however, he took a glance at philosophy in Brentano's reading seminar. Attendance at a three years' course in philosophy had been obligatory for medical students in Vienna since 1804, but was no longer after 1872. In his fourth semester, in the summer of 1875, we find Freud striking out on a more independent line. He attended the lectures, not on zoology for medical students, but those on zoology proper (fifteen hours a week). He took two physics classes, one more than was required in the medical curriculum. He continued with the seminars on philosophy and added another course of Brentano's, on Aristotle's logic. Eleven hours a week were given to Brcke's physiology lectures. This leaning to biology became more pronounced in the following summer semester, when he spent ten hours a week on practical zoology in Claus's laboratory. Anatomy and physiology took up the rest of his time, but he still attended Brentano's readings once a week. At the end of the semester in March, 1876, after having been a University student for two and a half years, he began the first of his numerous original researches. It was suggested to him by Professor Claus. Carl Claus, the head of the Institute of Comparative Anatomy, had come from Gttingen to Vienna two years before, with the task of bringing the zoology department to a more modern level. He was specially interested in marine zoology, and in 1875 he was allowed to found the Zoological Experimental Station at Trieste, one of the first of its kind in the world. Funds were placed at his disposal to send a few students to Trieste for several weeks of study and research twice a year. One of the first to be given this grant, in March, 1876, was the young Freud, so evidently his teacher thought well of him.1 A scientific excursion to the shores of the Adriatic must have been sought after, so the grant was valued as a distinction. It was Freud's first sight of a southern civilization, as well as his first effort in scientific research, and his sister recalls the visit as an important episode in his life.

In the summer term between the two visits to Trieste he concentrated on biology. He attended fifteen lectures a week on zoology and only eleven on other subjects; in addition, there 1 Bf. (4), 166.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 41 were three of Brentano's on Aristotle. In physiology for the first time he encountered Exner and Fleischl, important figures later, and there were a few lectures on spectrum analysis and the physiology of plants. The task assigned to him concerned what had remained a puzzling problem since the days of Aristotle. The gonadic structure of eels had never been settled. As he wrote in his paper: No one has ever found a mature male eelno one has yet seen the testes of the eel, in spite of innumerable efforts through the centuries. The difficulty was evidently bound up with their extraordinary migration before the mating period. In 1874 Syrski at Trieste had described a small lobed organ and considered that it represented the missing testes. It was a finding that obviously had to be checked, and this is what Freud set out to do. Claus was plainly satisfied with his beginning, since he renewed the grant for another visit in September of the same year. Later, between October and January, he was able to supply his student with rather more mature animals. In all, Freud dissected some four hundred eels and he found the Syrski organ in many of them. On microscopic examination he found its histological structure to be such that it might well be an immature testicular organ, though there was no definite evidence that it was so. Nevertheless his paper, which Claus presented to the Academy of Sciences (March 15, 1877, published in the April number of its Bulletin), was the first of a series that confirmed Syrski's suggestion. In the circumstances no one could well have done better, but Freud was much more dissatisfied with his inconclusive results than was his chief. An ambitious youth must have hoped for a task where some brilliant and original discovery would be made.1 In the abstract of his scientific writings which he presented to the University some twenty years later, on the occasion of his applying for the title of Professor, he gave such a disparaging version of this piece of work as almost to insinuate that it had been a futile and pointless one.2 It was the only occasion in this

list of researches that he mentioned the name of 1 One is tempted to make the perhaps irrelevant remark that the future discoverer of the castration complex was disappointed at not being able to find the testes of the eel. 2 Bibliographie und Inhaltsangaben der wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten des Privatdozenten Dr. Sigmund Freud, 1897. Reprinted in I.Z., 1940, XXV, 69.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 42 the teacher who suggested the work, and one cannot help detecting a note of resentment against him. We come here to the end of his third year, a date concerning which Freud later (1925) made the following comment: During my first three years at the University I was compelled to make the discovery that the peculiarities and limitations of my gifts denied me all success in many of the departments of science into which my youthful eagerness had plunged me. Thus is learned the truth of Mephistopheles warning: It is in vain that you range round from science to science; each man learns only what he can. At length in Ernst Brcke's Physiology Laboratory I found rest and satisfactionand men, too, whom I could respect and take as my models: the great Brcke himself and his assistants Sigmund Exner and Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow.1 There was clearly a contrast in Freud's mind between his former chief, Claus, and the later one, Brcke: dissatisfaction with the formeralthough he was a man of the highest scientific repute and admiration for the latter. Since both men were, objectively speaking, of the same type, it is likely that some personal feeling entered into the matter. Bernfeld2 has pointed out that Claus was twenty years older than Freud, while Brcke was forty years his senior. These differences in age correspond exactly with on the one hand that between Freud and his half-brother, the imagined rival with his mother in early childhood, and on the other hand that between Freud and his omniscient and beloved father. At all events the irritation and frustration of the zoological laboratory was replaced by a sense of inner peace and satisfaction in the physiological laboratory, despite the similarity of the researches he carried out in both. The young student accepted guidance and criticism from the old Brckethe greatest authority I ever met3as he had admiringly looked up to his father in early childhood. He patiently settled down to the

regular medical studies and, for the next five semesters, he attended no courses outside these, not even on philosophy, which now disappeared from his interests. His researches had to be carried out in overtime work added to this full curriculum, or, as is more probable, by cutting out some of the latter. Freud always spoke later of his respect and admiration for 1 Auto., 15. 2 Bf. (4), 169. 3 G.W., XIV 290.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 43 this unchallenged authority, sentiments which were also tinged with awe. A reprimand by Brcke for being late one day, when the student was overwhelmed by the terrible gaze of his eyes,1 was recalled years afterwards, and the image of those steel-blue eyes would throughout his life appear at any moment when he might be tempted to any remissness in duty or to any imperfection in executing it scrupulously. What manner of man was this who left such an indelible impression on the young Freud, and who, as he says, influenced him more than any other man in his life?2 When someone makes a remark about another man such as the one just cited, one may be sure that there is a significant affinity between their natures. It does not necessarily mean that their personalities closely resemble each other, but it does mean that the admired man incorporates some ideal towards which the influenced man is striving. In the present instance it is not hard to discern that ideal. It can only be that of scientific integrity combined with a whole-hearted faith in its ethical value. The word faith is used advisedly, since the analogy between this attitude and that of religious or political ideals is not altogether remote. Like most adolescents Freud had the need to believe in something and in his case the something was Science with a capital. Freud was to remain throughout his life unswervingly loyal to the aspect of science that represents the ideal of intellectual integrity, to the truth as he could best see it. But another aspect of science, tedious exactitude, did not fare so well. To be tied down to exactitude and precise

measurement was not in his nature. On the contrary, it conflicted with certain revolutionary tendencies that would burst the bonds of conventions and accepted definitions, and one day they did. For the next ten years, however, such tendencies were sternly kept in abeyance, and he made every effort to enlist scientific discipline to curb what he vaguely felt was in him. He was a good student, conducted useful researches, but the discipline was won at the expense, for some years, of his native boldness and imagination. Brcke himself was an excellent example of the disciplined scientist that Freud felt he should aim at becoming. To begin with, he was German, not Austrian, and his qualities were the very opposite to the Viennese Schlamperei, with which Freud must already have been only too familiar, and for which he felt 1 G.W., II/III 425. 2 G.W., XIV, loc. cit.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 44 a good-natured contempt perhaps mingled with a slight, sneaking sympathy. Brcke's Institute was an important part indeed of that far-reaching scientific movement best known as Helmholtz's School of Medicine. The amazing story of this scientific school started in the early forties with the friendship of Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818-96) and Ernst Brcke (1819-92), soon joined by Hermann Helmholtz (1821-94) and Carl Ludwig (1816-95). From its very beginning this group was driven forward by a veritable crusading spirit. In 1842 Du BoisReymond wrote: Brcke and I pledged a solemn oath to put into effect this truth: No other forces than the common physical and chemical ones are active within the organism. In those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces one has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical-mathematical method or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion.1 These men formed a small private club which in 1845 they enlarged to the Berliner Physikalische Gesellschaft. Most of its members were young students of Johannes Mller physicists and physiologists, banded together to destroy, once and for all, vitalism, the

fundamental belief of their admired master. Du Bois-Reymond, Brcke, Helmholtz, and Ludwig remained lifelong friends. Within twenty-five or thirty years they achieved complete domination over the thinking of the German physiologists and medical teachers, gave intensive stimulus to science everywhere, and solved some of the old problems for ever. Of this group of important men Helmholtz was certainly the pre-eminent member. Several years later he paid a short visit to Vienna, and Freud regretted not having had the chance of catching sight of him. He added, He is one of my idols.2 Brcke, whom in Berlin they jocularly called Our Ambassador in the Far East, published in 1874 his Lectures on Physiology. The following account of the physical physiology that captivated the student Freud is abstracted from the introductory pages. Physiology is the science of organisms as such. 1 This and several of the following paragraphs are, with his kind permission, paraphrased from two valuable essays of Dr. Bernfeld's (Bf. (2) and (4). The whole chapter owes a great deal to his researches. 2 M., Oct. 28, 1883.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 45 Organisms differ from dead material entities in actionmachinesin possessing the faculty of assimilation, but they are all phenomena of the physical world; systems of atoms, moved by forces, according to the principle of the conservation of energy discovered by Robert Mayer in 1842, neglected for twenty years and then popularized by Helmholtz. The sum of forces (motive forces and potential forces) remains constant in every isolated system. The real causes are symbolized in science by the word force. The less we know about them, the more kinds of forces do we have to distinguish: mechanical, electrical, magnetic forces, light, heat. Progress in knowledge reduces them to twoattraction and repulsion. All this applies as well to the organism man. Brcke then gives an elaborate presentation in his two volumes of what was at the time known about the transformation and interplay of physical forces in the living organism. The spirit and content of these lectures correspond closely with the words Freud used in 19261 to characterize

psycho-analysis in its dynamic aspect: The forces assist or inhibit one another, combine with one another, enter into compromises with one another, etc. Very closely connected with this dynamic aspect of Brcke's physiology was his evolutionary orientation. Not only is the organism a part of the physical universe but the world of organisms itself is one family. Its apparent diversity is the result of divergent developments which started with the microscopic unicellular elementary organisms. It includes plants, lower and higher animals, as well as man, from the hordes of the anthropoids to the peak of his contemporary Western civilization. In this evolution of life, no spirits, essences, or entelechies, no superior plans or ultimate purposes are at work. The physical energies alone cause effectssomehow. Darwin had shown that there was hope of achieving in a near future some concrete insight into the How of evolution. The enthusiasts were convinced that Darwin had shown more than that in fact had already told the full story. While the sceptics and the enthusiasts fought with each other, the active researchers were busy and happy putting together the family trees of the organisms, closing gaps, rearranging the taxonomic systems of plants and animals according to genetic relationships, discovering transformation 1 G.W., XIV 301.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 46 series, finding behind the manifest diversities the homologous identities. This physiology was a part of the general trend of Western civilization. Slowly, continuously, it had risen and grown everywhere through the preceding two or three hundred years, steadily gaining momentum from the end of the eighteenth century and increasing rapidly in velocity and expansion after the eighteen thirties. This trend, weaker in Germany than in England and France, was interrupted there from about 1794 to 1830 by the period Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature). Naturphilosophie is the name of the pantheistic monism, close to mysticism, which, professed by Schellingrepeated, developed, and varied by a host of writerswas eagerly accepted by the average educated man and literary lady. The Universe, Nature, is one vast organism, ultimately consisting of forces, of activities, of creations, of emergingsorganized in eternal basic

conflicts, in polarity; reason, conscious life, mind, being only the reflection, the emanation, of this unconscious turmoil. These ideas have been expressed before and since and contain the seeds of some of the scientific theories of the nineteenth century and of our time. But it is not the ideas that were characteristic of the movement nor even the romantic temper enveloping them. That was a general European trend. What characterized the German Naturphilosophie is the aspiration expressed in the name speculative physics (which Schelling himself gave to his endeavours) and the unbalanced megalomaniac emotionalism of the phantasy and style of these writers. An English philosopher puts it thus: They exhibit tendencies that seem foreign to the course of European thought; they recall the vague spaciousness of the East and its reflection in the semi-oriental Alexandria.1 Physical physiologyalthough not by itselfoverthrew this philosophy and took its place. As has happened before, the conqueror introjected the emotionalism of the victim. Unity of science, science, physical forces were not merely directing ideas or hypotheses of scientific endeavour: they became almost objects of worship. They were more than methods of research they became a Weltanschauung. The intensity of this temper varied from scientist to scientist; from place to place. In Berlin with Du Bois-Reymond it was at its maximum, strangely mixed with Prussian nationalism. In Austria, Naturphilosophie 1 G. S. Brett, A History of Psychology, vol. III, 1921, p. 129.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 47 never had much power, therefore the fanaticism in physiology was at a minimum in Vienna and with Brcke. Yet it was there. Freud himself, inspired by Goethe, who was one of the first pioneers, passed through a brief period of the pantheistic Naturphilosophie. Then, in his enthusiasm for the rival physical physiology, he swung to the opposite extreme and became for a while a radical materialist. That this was a highly emotional reversal of attitude was demonstrated in a discussion in a students' society where he behaved very rudely to his philosophical opponent1 and obstinately refused to apologize; there was even for the moment some talk of a duel.2 So much for the ideas of the Brcke Institute where Freud was stuck, as he termed it, for six

years. But they were good and fruitful years, which he later described in unrestrained superlatives as the happiest years of my youth. It was there that he developed the particular physiological framework into which he tried later to cast his discoveries in psychology. Brcke's personality was well suited to the uncompromising idealistic and almost ascetic outlook characteristic of the school of Helmholtz. He was a small man with a large and impressive head, a balanced gait, and quiet, controlled movements; small-lipped, with the famous terrifying blue eyes, rather shy, but stern and exceedingly silent. A Protestant, with his Prussian speech, he must have seemed out of place in easy-going Catholic Vienna, an emissary from another and more austere worldas indeed he was. A conscientious and indefatigable worker himself, he exacted the same standard from his assistants and students. Here is a typical anecdote. A student who in one of his papers had written: Superficial observation reveals had his paper returned with the objectionable line violently crossed out and Brcke's comment on the margin: One is not to observe superficially. He was one of the most dreaded of examiners. If the candidate muffed the answer to his first question, Brcke sat out the remaining ten or twelve minutes of the prescribed examination period, stiff and silent, deaf to the pleas of the candidate and the Dean, who had also to be present. The general opinion had him labelled as a cold, purely 1 The redoubtable Viktor Adler, the future Social Democratic leader. 2 G.W., II/III 217-18.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 48 rational man. What degree of violent force against himself and his emotions he needed to build up this front is revealed by his reaction to the death of his beloved son in 1872. He forbade his family and friends to mention his son's name, put all pictures of him out of sight, and worked even harder than before. But this man was completely free of vanity, intrigue, and lust for power. To the student who proved his ability he was a most benevolent father, extending counsel and protection far beyond scientific matters. He respected the student's own ideas, encouraged original work, and sponsored talents even if they deviated considerably from his own opinions. It is said that no pupil or friend ever became unfaithful to him. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow (1846-91), whose friendship meant much to Freud, and whose

untimely death he deeply deplored, was a physicist as well as a physiologist. In many respects he was quite the opposite of Brcke. He was young, handsome, enthusiastic, a brilliant speaker, and an attractive teacher. He had the charming and amiable manners of old Viennese society, ever ready to discuss scientific and literary problems with a flow of challenging ideas. These qualities were in strange contrast to his pathetic part as hero and martyr of physiology. At twenty-five while conducting research in pathological anatomy he contracted an infection. An amputation of the right thumb saved him from death. But continued growth of neuromas required repeated operations. His life became an unending torture of pain and of slowly approaching death. This mutilated and aching hand performed experimental work of technical perfection. His sleepless nights he used for studying physics and mathematics. When with his growing skill in the sciences this drug became ineffective he began the study of Sanscrit. Brcke's other assistant, Sigmund Exner (1846-1926), who later succeeded him in the Chair of Physiology, made up the trio: professor and assistant professors. It was they whom Freud recalled as men whom I could respect and take as my models. His life's endeavour was to apply their principles to the study, first of the nervous system, and then of the mind. When he was nearly seventy he said on a solemn occasion: My life has been aimed at one goal only: to infer or to guess how the mental apparatus is constructed and what forces interplay and counteract in it.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 49 Exner was the one of the three who least appealed to Freud. He was an excellent scientist, but a very ambitious man; vain and dictatorial, although he had a jovial manner. We have dwelt on the background of the Brcke Institute at some length for the following reason. It has often been assumed that Freud's psychological theories date from his contact with Charcot or Breuer or even later. On the contrary, it can be shown that the principles on which he constructed his theories were those he had acquired as a medical student under Brcke's influence. The emancipation from this influence consisted not in renouncing the principles, but in becoming able to apply them empirically to mental phenomena while dispensing with any anatomical basis. This cost him a severe struggle, but then his true genius consisted throughout in emerging successfully from severe struggles. Yet Brcke would have been astonished, to put it mildly, had he known that one of his favourite pupils, one apparently a convert to the strict faith, was later, in his famous wish theory of the

mind, to bring back into science the ideas of purpose, intention, and aim which had just been abolished from the universe. We know, however, that when Freud did bring them back he was able to reconcile them with the principles in which he had been brought up; he never abandoned determinism for teleology. In the autumn of 1876, after his second return from Trieste and while still occupied with his zoological research, he was accepted in the Institute of Physiology at the age of twenty as what was called a famulus, a sort of research scholar. The abode itself of the famous Institute was far from being commensurate with its high aspirations and admirable scientific achievements. The Institute was miserably housed in the ground floor and basement of a dark and smelly old gun factory. It consisted of a large room where the students kept their microscopes and listened to lectures, and two smaller ones, one of which was Brcke's sanctum. There were also on both floors a few small cubicles, some without windows, that served as chemical, electrophysiological and optical laboratories. There was no water supply, no gas, and of course no electricity. All heating had to be done over a spirit lamp, and the water was brought up from a well in the yard where also a shed housed the animals experimented on. Nevertheless this Institute was

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 50 the pride of the medical school on account of the number and distinction of its foreign visitors and students. Although Brcke preferred students to present their own project for research, he was quite ready to formulate a problem for those beginners who were too timid or too vague to do so themselves. He set Freud behind the microscope on work connected with the histology of the nerve cells. In a paper read some six years later Freud described in the following words the general situation as he found it: Very soon after the recognition of the nerve cells and of the nerve fibres as the fundamental parts of the nervous system there began the efforts to clarify the finer structure of these two elements, motivated by the hope of using the knowledge of their structure for the understanding of their function. As is well known, up to now neither sufficient insight nor agreement has been reached in either of these two directions. One author thinks of the nerve cell as granulated, the other as fibrillose; one thinks of the nerve fibre as a bunch of fibrils but another as a liquid column. Consequently, while one elevates the nerve cell to the basic source of nervous activity another degrades it to a mere nucleus of the Schwann sheaths.

Together with this problem of the intimate structure of the nervous elements goes the interesting question of whether the nervous system of the higher animals is composed of elements different from those of the lower animals, or whether both are built of the same units. This topic was highly controversial at that time. The philosophical and religious implications seemed to be very disturbing. Are the differences in the mind of lower and higher animals only a matter of degree in complication? Does the human mind differ from that of some molluscnot basically, but correlative to the number of nerve cells in both and the complication of their respective fibres? Scientists were searching for the answers to such questions in the hope of gaining definite decisionsin one way or anotheron the nature of man, the existence of God, and the aim of life. To this vast and exciting field of research belonged the very modest problem which Brcke put before Freud. In the spinal cord of the Amoecetes (Petromyzon), a genus of fish belonging to the primitive Cyclostomata, Reissner had discovered a peculiar kind of large cell. The nature of these cells and their connection with the spinal system elicited a number of unsuccessful investigations. Brcke wished to see the histology of

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 51 these cells clarified. After a few weeks Freud came to him with the quite unexpected discovery that non-myelinated fibres of the posterior (sensory) nerves originated in some of the Reissner cells. Other fibres, probably also sensory, coming from these cells pass behind the central canal to the opposite side of the spinal cord. Although this finding did not explain the nature of the cells, it did promise a simple solution and eliminated various hypotheses current in the literature. Brcke, it seems, thought this was good enough for a beginner, and pressed for publication. Freud obliged by hurriedly putting together a report. His dissatisfaction with the unfinished work, however, is noticeable in many places in the paper. In style and organization it was far below the paper on the eels and the succeeding publications of his student years. Brcke presented the study at the Academy of Sciences at its meeting of January 4, 1877. It appeared in the January Bulletin of the Academy. It was the first paper of Freud's to be actually published, since the one on his first piece of research, on the eel, did not appear until three months later. Freud continued in his thorough investigation of the Reissner cells, and published a second report on Petromyzon in July of the following year (1878). Here he assembled an amazingly complete bibliographyeighteen pages of his report deal with the literature. This historical conscientiousness was not quite favourable to the young scientist's ambitions: I must accuse

myself of having falsely thought that I was the first one to describebased on direct and certain observationsthe origin of the posterior nerve roots in certain cells of the petromyzon. Only shortly after the publication of my paper did I find in Stieda's abstracts of the Russian literature an abstract of a paper by Kutschin which contains important information on the origin of the posterior root. Due to the friendliness of Professor Stieda in Dorpat, who had sent me the Russian paper, I could examine the pictures by Kutschin and satisfy myself that Kutschin had seen in his preparations, as long ago as 1863, convincing proof of the origin of the posterior roots in the posterior cells. By way of apology I can only say that Kutschin's statementsperhaps because his pictures were not available to the German histologistswere quite generally overlooked. Aided by an improvement in the technique of the preparation, Freud established definitely that the Reissner cells are

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 52 nothing else than spinal ganglion cells which, in those low vertebrates, where the migration of the embryonic neural tube to the periphery is not yet completed, remain within the spinal cord. These scattered cells mark the way which the spinal ganglion cells have made throughout their evolution. This solution of the problem of the Reissner cells was a triumph of precise observation and genetic interpretationone of the thousands of such small achievements which have finally established among scientists the conviction of the evolutionary unity of all organisms. But what was really new was the genetic tracing of the unipolar cells from the bipolar ones. This meant that the cells of the nervous system of lower animals showed a continuity with those of higher animals, and that the sharp distinction previously accepted no longer existed. Freud had made a major discovery with Petromyzon: The spinal ganglion cells of the fish have long been known to be bipolar (possessing two processes), while those of the higher vertebrata are unipolar. This gap between lower and higher animals Freud closed. The nerve cells of the Petromyzon show all transitions from uni- to bi-polarity including bipolars with T-branching. This paper, in content, presentation, and implication, was without any doubt well above the beginner's level; any zoologist could have been proud to have made these discoveries. Brcke presented it at the Academy on July 18, 1878, and it appeared in its Bulletin, eighty-six pages

long, the next month. The same general problem was the aim of Freud's next investigation which he conducted by his own choice in the summer months of 1879 and 1881. This time the objects were the nerve cells of the crayfish. Here he examined the live tissues microscopically, using a Harnack No. 8 lens a technique which, at that time, was very little known, undeveloped, and difficultand he reached the definite conclusion that the axis cylinders of nerve fibres are without exception fibrillary in structure. He was the first to demonstrate this fundamental feature. He recognized that the ganglion consists of two substances, of which one is net-like and the origin of the nerve process. This study, which Freud got presented at the Academy of Sciences at the meeting of December 15, 1881, and which appeared in the Bulletin of the Academy in January, 1882,

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 53 excels in the choice of its method, the exacting care given to its development, the caution shown in the argumentation, the direct approach to the key problem as well as its precise, definite and significant results. With this paper and the two preceding ones Freud had done his share to pave the way for the neurone theory. One might safely go even a little further and claim, as have Brun1 and Jelliffe,2 that Freud had early and clearly conceived the nerve cells and the fibrils to be one morphological and physiological unitthe later neurone. In his research papers he confined himself strictly to the anatomical point of view, although he made it clear that his investigations were conducted with the hope of gaining insight into the mystery of nerve action. Only once, in a lecture on The structure of the elements of the nervous system which summarizes his work, did he venture into this land beyond histology with the one paragraph: If we assume that the fibrils of the nerve have the significance of isolated paths of conduction, then we should have to say that the pathways which in the nerve are separate are confluent in the nerve cell: then the nerve cell becomes the beginning of all those nerve fibres anatomically connected with it. I should transgress the limitations I have imposed on this paper were I to assemble the facts supporting the validity of that assumption: I do not know if the existing material suffices to decide the problem, so important for physiology. If this assumption could be established it would take us a good step further in the physiology of the nerve elements: we could imagine that a stimulus of a certain strength might break down the isolation of the fibrils so that the nerve as a unit conducts the excitation, and so on.

This lecture Freud delivered at the Psychiatric Society3 1 Sigmund Freud's Leistungen auf dem Gebiete der organischen Neurologie, Schweizerisches Archiv fr Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 1936, XXXVI, 200. 2 Sigmund Freud as Neurologist, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1937, LXXXV, 696. 3 In various bibliographies of Freud's writings this society is listed under several different titles, creating confusion and suggesting there were different societies. Dr. Solms, the present Secretary, has kindly sent me an authentic account of it. In 1868 the Verein fr Psychiatrie und forensische Psychologie was founded, and on May 9, 1895, changed its name to the Verein fr Psychiatrie und Neurologie; in references this is often abbreviated to Psychiatrischer Verein. Its official organ was called, from 1868-9, the Vierteljahrschrift fr Psychiatrie; from 1871-8, the Psychiatrische Centralblatt; from 1879-91, the Jahrbcher fr Psychiatrie, and since then the Jahrbcher fr Psychiatrie und Neurologie.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 54 within a year after he left the Brcke Institutein 1882 or 1883.1 It was published in the Jahrbcher fr Psychiatrie early in 1884. There he gave an account of the whole situation in which his highly specialized investigation originated. He detailed his methods and findings and in a few sentences intimated the far-reaching vistas opened by his results. We find here the same caution and boldness, the same style of argumentation which characterizes the many accounts of his findings in psychoanalysis which Freud later gave to audiences unfamiliar with the aims, methods, and experiences of the specialist. The first lecture of this kind shares with its successors the condensation of complex networks of facts and of complicated chains of thought in a few simple and lucid sentences. This unitary conception of the nerve cell and processesthe essence of the future neurone theory seems to have been Freud's own and quite independent of his teachers at the Institute. There is certainly in his few sentences both a boldness of thought and a cautiousness in presentation; he makes no real claim. But two comments seem in place. The lecture containing those remarks was delivered four or five years after he had conducted the researches on which they were based, so that the period of rumination was a long one. Then, after so much time for reflection, one would

have thought that a little of the free and bold imagination he was so often to display in later years would have carried him the small step further, for he was trembling on the very brink of the important neurone theory, the basis of modern neurology. In the endeavour to acquire discipline he had not yet perceived that in original scientific work there is an equally important place for imagination. Actually no notice was taken of these precious sentences, so that Freud's name is not mentioned among the pioneers of the neurone theory. There were many such pioneers, the chief being Wilhelm His with his embryological studies on the genesis of nerve cells, August Forel with his observations on the Wallerian 1 In his bibliography (1897) Freud gives 1882 as the date, but he was by no means infallible in such matters. The reports of the Society in the medical periodicals for 1882 are complete and do not mention his lecture. Those for 1883 do not either, but they are incomplete, so the point must be left open.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 55 degeneration following injury or section of nerve fibres, and Ramon y Cajal with his beautiful preparations made by the use of Golgi's silver impregnation. The final establishment of the neurone theory is usually dated from Waldeyer's comprehensive monograph in 1891, in which the word neurone was first employed. It was not the only time that Freud narrowly missed world fame in early life through not daring to pursue his thoughts to their logicaland not far offconclusion. Another characteristic of the original scientist, however, he did display. Scientific progress typically proceeds from the invention of some new method or instrument which reveals a new body of fact. Astronomy, for instance, had come to a dead end before the invention of the telescope, and then bounded forward once more. Now, the histological researches just recorded were made possible, or at all events greatly facilitated, by an improvement in technique which Freud devised early on, in 1877, soon after entering the Institute. It was a modification of the Reichert formula, a mixture of nitric acid and glycerine, for preparing nervous tissue for microscopical examination. Freud used it first when studying the spinal cells of the Petromyzon, but the following quotation from his published account of the method in 18791 illustrates the

wide range of his investigations: I use Reichert's mixture as I have modified it for the purpose of preparing in a guaranteed and easy way the central and peripheral nervous system of the higher vertebrata (mice, rabbits, cattle) I have tried the method with the cerebral nerves of infants Professor Dr. E. Zukerkandl kindly participating. We have found that it considerably facilitates the preparation of nerves situated in the bone channels and in the preparation and disentanglement of anastomoses and nerve networks Furthermore, I have used it successfully for the preparation of mucous and sweat glands, Pacini bodies, hair roots, etc. This mixture destroys the connective tissues and makes it easier to remove the muscles and bones, so that both the central nervous system and its peripheral branches are laid bare for separate examination. A few years later he made a more important technical inventionthe gold chloride method of staining nervous tissuebut neither method was much used outside the Vienna Institute. He must have been an expert technician, for in his researches 1 Centralblatt f.d. mediz.-Wissenschaften, 1879, XVII, 468.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 56 on the nervous tissue of crayfish he speaks of special studies of his material in vivo, a delicate enough operation; it was a method he had learned from Stricker. Incidentally one may mention that he drew himself the illustrations for his publications on the Petromyzon, one in the first and four in the second. Evidently, therefore, Freud had early on grasped the fact that further progress in knowledge requires new or improved methods. Then come the new facts thus discovered, followed by the organization of the new and old knowledge in a theory of them. The theory may then lead to speculation, a glancing and guessing at questions and answers beyond existing means of observation. It is extremely rare for one and the same man to be equally successful in all these phases of development. Freud's work in psycho-analysis was to prove an example of this rarest case. He devised the instrument, used it to discover a great number of new facts, provided the organizing theory, and ventured on stimulating speculations beyond the actually known. In the lecture previously alluded to (1882) he described a new technique, the new findings, the theory adequate to them, with some glances beyond. It was on a small scale, it was hampered by

an over-curbing of the imagination, but it was the future Freud in embryo. One notable feature in Freud's neurological researches was his adhesion to anatomy. The microscope was his one and only tool. Physiology seemed to mean histology to him, and not experimentation: statics, not dynamics. This might at first sight seem strange in a man of Freud's active mind, but reflection shows that it corresponded to something highly significant in his nature. In later years he was to complainnot quite fairlythat there had been too much histology in Brcke's Institute and that he had been condemned to a subordinate part of physiology, but it was certainly something in himself that attached him to it or else kept him away from experimentation. It is true that Brcke did not share the contempt some of his fellow physiologists felt for the mere microscopist. In his mind there was no opposition between anatomy and physiology, between the microscope and experimentation; his first work on the structure of cells (1847), which made him famous, had combined both approaches. Nevertheless in Freud's time Brcke and his

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 57 two assistants, Exner and Fleischl, used animal experimentation extensively. It is also true that to understand the active forces of the organism one has to have a good knowledge of its structure, the material on which those forces work. Still that is no reason why someone whose deepest urge was to understand those forces should for so long confine himself to the problems of structure alone. There was certainly no lack of opportunity. He was free to choose whatever problem or method interested him. Moreover, in 1882, when he exchanged Brcke's laboratories for Meynert's and was again free to choose, it was once more the microscope to which he turned. When he first, as an eager beginner, asked Brcke for a problem to work on he was given a histological one. Did some docility or feeling of inferiority interpret this, as Dr. Bernfeld suggests,1 as being relegated to an inferior sphere, where it was his duty to remain evermore, leaving the higher experimental activities to the three professors, to grown-ups? Possibly so, but in his attitude one senses something deeper and highly characteristic of his personality. There are two sides to this preference of the eye over the hand, of passively seeing over actively

doing; an attraction to the one, an aversion to the other. Both were present. Of the former something will be said presently. The latter is plainly indicated in a letter he wrote in 1878, the year we have reached, to a friend, Wilhelm Knpfmacher,2 in which he wrote: I have moved to another laboratory3 and am preparing myself for my proper professionmutilating animals or tormenting human beingsand I decide more and more in favour of the former alternative. He was the last man who could ever permit himself to be brutal or cruel, and he was even extremely averse to interfering with other people or striving to influence them. When later on it fell to his lot to treat neurotic patients he soon abandoned the methodcustomary then and recently revived in another formof stimulating them by means of electricity. And it was not long before he gave up the use of hypnosis, which he found a coarsely interfering method. He chose instead to look and listen, confident that if he could perceive the structure of a neurosis he would truly understand and have power over the forces that had brought it about. Pierre Janet, 1 Bf. (4), 187. 2 Anf., 21n.1. 3 i.e. Stricker's.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 58 who has erroneously been regarded as a predecessor of Freud's, adopted in the eighties the alternative method of approach. He devised some beautiful and very ingenious experiments which led to some vivid descriptive conclusions, but they brought him not one step nearer to the forces at work. It was the passive method that succeeded, not the active one. That there was a pronounced passive side to Freud's nature is a conclusion for which there is ample evidence. He showed little aggressiveness in his life and only on two exceptional occasions did he deign to reply to his opponents. An active role in life would not have suited him. He once remarked that there were three things to which he felt unequal: governing, curing,1 and educating. But what is significant is the extraordinary change that must have set in at about the age of sixteen or seventeen. Gone is the pugnacious child who fought vigorously with his playfellow, the boy full of military ardour, the youth who dreamed of becoming a Cabinet Minister and ruling the nation. Was, after all, the two-day encounter with a country girl so very

fateful? Whatever the reason, we observe the profundity of the change in the direction of power. Dominating fellow-beings is entirely replaced by understanding them. Only knowledge will give power. And that in the long runhow long!this proved true, that Freud can be said to be the first ever to effect radical changes in human personality, was surely the greatest triumph for the method he was unconsciously moved to select: statics had led to dynamics. What a daemonic intuition must have been at work! Perhaps we are nearing a clue to the mysterious problem of how it was that just this man was destined to discover psycho-analysis and reveal the unconscious mind of man. Three times he essayed the experimental method, and each time unsuccessfully. When this happens to someone with at least average intelligence there must be some inner resistance at work; his heart cannot be in it. The first attempt was in 1878 when he worked in the summer term and a portion of the summer vacation in Stricker's laboratory. Solomon Stricker, a vain man of uncertain temper, who was a contemporary of Claus, was a full Professor and had been the head of the Pathological Institute for five years. He is credited with transforming pathology from an anatomical into an experimental 1 Evidently in the sense of active intervention.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 59 physiological discipline. This was presumably what impelled Freud to work under him. All we know about the result is that at a meeting of the Gesellschaft der Arzte on October 17, 1879, Stricker introduced a paper on Acinous Glands with the statement that his student Freud had, at his suggestion, conducted experiments on this topic for six months, but had accomplished nothing.1 That was the end of this first attempt. After Freud's failure Stricker tackled the problem himself, on the basis of some new ideas supplied by Spina, and obtained with him some interesting results. Freud himself returned to the Brcke Institute and to the microscope, beginning his research on the nerve cells of the crayfish, where, incidentally, he paid high tribute to T. H. Huxley's book on that animal. Six years later, in 1884, after he had left Brcke, he made another attempt. He returned to

Stricker's laboratory and participated, together with Wagner-Jauregg, Gaertner, Spina, and Koller, in some animal experiments as part of an investigation into the function of glands in relation to the circulatory system.2 Again he accomplished nothing, and he confined himself from then on to brain anatomy. The third short attempt, in 1885, was a small part of his examination of the coca plant. In studying its effect on the body he had the idea, so as to find out whether the characteristic euphoria was justified or illusory, of testing the effect of the drug on muscular strength as measured by the dynamometer, a rather crude instrument. He ascertained, working together with Koller, that the strength was actually increased, but the study was a poor effort. The technique was over-simplified and the exposition uncertain and uncritical, the work of an ordinary beginner, on quite another plane from his valuable histological researches of years before. When in later years Freud bemoaned the lack of success in his first three years as a medical student, meaning in zoology, where he was unduly hard on himself, it would have been more to the point if he had said (experimental) physiology rather than zoology. 1 Wiener medizinische Presse, Nov. 2, 1879, S. 1403. The report in the Wiener medizinische Wochenscrift, 1879, S. 1133, does not mention Freud but has an allusion in another connection to a certain M. Freund which has misled some research students. 2 Carl Koller, Wien. Mediz. Woch., 1935, S. 7.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 60 In the summer or autumn of 1879 Freud was called up for his year's military service. That was far less strenuous in those days than now. Medical students continued to live at home and had no duties except to stand about in the hospitals. The hardship was the terrible boredom, which was perhaps the reason why a few years later it was decreed that they had to spend half their time undergoing military training proper. Freud spent his twenty-fourth birthday under arrest (May 6, 1880) for being absent without leave.1 He was interested to meet at dinner five years later the General Podratzsky who had sentenced him, but he bore him no grudge since he admitted that he had failed to attend eight visits in succession.2 In the first part of the year Freud was able to cope with the boredom by devoting himself to

translating a book by John Stuart Mill, the first of five large books he translated. It was congenial work, since he was specially gifted as a translator. Instead of laboriously transcribing from the foreign language, idioms and all, he would read a passage, close the book and consider how a German writer would have clothed the same thoughtsa method not very common among translators. His translating work was both brilliant and rapid. This was the only work, original or translation, he ever published that had no connection with his scientific interests,3 and, although the contents of the book probably appealed to him, his main motive was probably to kill time and, incidentally, earn a little money. The editor of Mill's collected writings in German was Theodor Gomperz, a philosopher and historian of high standing in Vienna. When fifty years later his son Heinrich was preparing a biography of his father he asked Freud how he came to be the translator of the twelfth volume. Freud replied, in a letter dated June 9, 1932, that Gomperz had inquired at a party for someone to replace Eduard Wessel, the young translator of the twelfth volume who had died suddenly, and that Brentano had given him Freud's name. Freud had for a couple of years attended Brentano's lectures, as indeed had half Vienna since 1 G.W., IV 271. 2 M., June 15, 1885. 3 Exceptions to this statement are: (1) the section on Samuel Butler in Israel Levine's Das Unbewusste (Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek, 1926, Bd. XX) and (2) Marie Bonaparte's book Topsy, on which he and Anna Freud spent their time while waiting for the Nazi permission to leave Austria in 1938.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 61 he was a very gifted lecturer, but whether Brentano remembered him from his seminars or whether Freud's name was passed on to him by one of their mutual friendsBreuer, for instance, was Brentano's family physicianis not known, nor does it seem of any importance. Three of Mill's essays were concerned with social problems: the labour question, the enfranchisement of women, and socialism. In the preface Mill said that the greatest part of these was the work of his wife. The fourth, by Mill himself, was on Grote's Plato. Freud remarked

many years later (in 1933) that his knowledge of Plato's philosophy was very fragmentary, so perhaps what there was of it had been derived from this essay of Mill's. He added, however, that he had been greatly impressed by Plato's theory of reminiscence, one which Mill treats sympathetically, and had at one time given it a great deal of thought. Many years later he wove some suggestions of Plato's into his book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The researches we have described took up, after all, only the smaller part of his time, which was mostly devoted to medical studies, pathology, surgery, and so on. Here he had many distinguished and inspiring teachers. Somesuch as Billroth, the surgeon, Hebra, the dermatologist, and Arlt, the ophthalmologistwere world-famous men and attracted crowds of enthusiastic students. They gave more than the routine knowledge of contemporary medicine; they were brilliant innovators in their several fields and instilled in their students the spirit of scientific medicine. Yet Freud remained cool towards their work. For Billroth, it is true, he retained a great admiration. The only lectures he found at all interesting were Meynert's on psychiatry, a field that must have seemed very novel to him, the devotee of laboratories. As his letter to Knpfmacher shows, he doubted seriously whether he would ever want to become a physician. He knew, however, that all the leading physiologists, such as Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond, and Brcke himself, had qualified for the degree of M.D. and some had even practised medicine. So at long last he suddenly decided to follow in their footsteps and take the necessary examinations, called in Vienna rigorosa. What we term the preliminary scientific examination is nowadays (also in Vienna) taken at the end of the first year of study, or even in school before entering any medical institution.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 62 In those days, however, it could be postponed until all the studies were completed, and Freud did not miss availing himself of the opportunity for delay. So he had hurriedly to furbish up what he had learned years ago. With what he called a well-justified fear he faced his friend, Professor Fleischl, on June 9, 1880, for his first rigorosum in chemistry, botany, and zoology. He said: I escaped disaster only through the clemency of fate or of that of the examiners.1 He was interested in chemistry, or admired its exactitude, but he had no aptitude for it. He remarked that his interest in botany was never very great; at the examination he failed to identify a crucifer and was saved only by his theoretical knowledge. This is rather surprising when one thinks of his fondness for the country and his unusual familiarity with flowers. Nevertheless, his grading in

the examination, conducted by Fleischl, was excellent. On the same day, in the second rigorosum, on general medicine, Hoffman passed him as satisfactory only, because Freud had failed in forensic medicine. Freud worked in Brcke's laboratory for another ten months before he went up for the third rigorosum on the several medical specialities. Hoffman was again the examiner and passed him, on March 30, 1881, with the grading excellent. This result, according to Freud, was due only to the photographic memory that he had enjoyed all through his childhood and adolescence, although it was gradually becoming unreliable. He had not used the long interval for preparation for the examination, but In the tension before the final examination I must have made use of the remnant of this ability, for in certain subjects I gave the examiners apparently automatic answers which proved to be exact reproductions of the text-book which I had skimmed through but once, and then in greatest haste.2 Thus his M.D. degree is dated March 31, 1881. The graduation ceremonies took place in the beautiful Aula of the baroque building of the old University. Freud's family were present, and Richard Fluss with his parents, old friends of his early childhood years in Freiberg, Moravia. The obtaining of this medical qualification was in no sense a turning point in Freud's life, and not even in itself an event of much importance. It was a thing that had to be done in the course of events, and he could no longer be teased as a loafer.3 1 G.W., II/III 282. 2 G.W. IV, 149. 3 G.W., II/III 453.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 63 But he went straight on working in the Brcke Institute following the course that would perhaps in due time lead to a Chair in Physiology. Any fond dream of that sort was, however, to be shattered in hardly more than a year's time.

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copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 64 -

Chapter V Medical Career (1881-1885)

One may wonder about Freud's state of mind during the years he spent in Brcke's laboratory. They were incompatible with any plans for a future livelihood, which his poor economic situation would obviously make necessary. He could not have been oblivious of such a staring fact, and even of the high probability that it would mean some form of medical practice. But he pushed it aside as long as he could and must have had strong reasons for doing so. Two such reasons are readily to be discerned. One was his aversion to the practice of medicine, a matter that is a problem in itself. The other was his great liking for his laboratory work. This itself had more than one source. He presumably found the work itself interesting, but more important was his consistent preference for research over mere practice. To discover something new and thus add to our stock of knowledge was perhaps the strongest motive in his nature. Furthermore, there was the need to discipline himself in scientific method and thus counteract his wilder and more speculative propensities, which dear as they might be could lead him far astray if not controlled. So he determined to continue with the congenial and disciplinary research work as long as he decently could, depending first on his father's willing support and, when this began to fail, on being helped by friends. At the same time, however, he also continued his regular medical studies and finally decided, in March, 1881, to pass the qualifying examinations. This no doubt alleviated the self-reproaches his three years' delay had been causing him, but, as we shall presently see, it brought him face to face with graver problems. The medical qualification appeared outwardly to make no difference. Freud continued for another fifteen months to work as before in the Physiological Institute, now devoting his whole time to it. After two months he was promoted to the position of Demonstrator, one with some teaching responsibility; he held

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 65 this position from May, 1881, to July, 1882. We have no record of any further researches in the Institute during the latter part of his period as Demonstrator, the duties of which were probably

engrossing. He finished those on the crayfish in the autumn of 1881, and his paper on it was presented at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in that December. Simultaneously with this activity he worked for a year on advanced investigations in the analysis of gases in Ludwig's Chemical Institute, where his friend Lustgarten was an Assistant. Although he rather liked chemistry he had no success in it, and he later spoke of this wasted year as an unfruitful one, the recollection of which was humiliating.1 Indeed, he afterwards termed 1882 the gloomiest and least successful year of my professional life.2 Freud held the position of Demonstrator for three semesters. In the natural course of events, however prolonged, it would lead on3 to that of Assistant, then Assistant Professor and finally Professor of Physiology in the beloved Institute, this being the logical goal. At the end of the third semester, however, in June, 1882, an event took place which may truly be called one of the great turning points in his life, one that before many years had passed resulted in his finding himself, unwittingly at first, in his permanent career. This event was the decision to earn his livelihood as a physician and resign his position in Brcke's Institute. His own account of it, in his Autobiography, 1923, runs as follows: The turning point came in 1882 when my teacher, for whom I had the highest possible esteem, corrected my father's generous improvidence by strongly advising me, in view of my bad financial position, to abandon my theoretical career. I followed his advice, left the physiology laboratory and entered the General Hospital.4 One year later, he gave substantially the same presentation in another place till the teacher, whom I so deeply respected, warned me that in view of my restricted material circumstances I could not possibly take up a theoretical career.5 When some people, e.g. Wittels, assumed that there had been a break between him and Brcke, Freud definitely contradicted 1 G.W., II/III 479. 2 Ibid., 480. 3 Provided one was a Gentile! 4 Auto., 16. 5 G.W., XIV 290.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 66 this and repeated that he had left on Brcke's advice.1 Brcke certainly retained a warm interest in Freud's career. He was his chief sponsor in his application for the rank of Privat-Dozent, being merely seconded by Meynert and Nothnagel, and it was his influence that procured for Freud against strong opposition the invaluable travelling grant for the study in Paris. They remained on entirely friendly terms; Brcke was one of the first people he visited on his return from Paris four years later.2 The economic prospects were certainly dark enough. Both the Assistants were only ten years older than Freud himself and so would not be likely to vacate such a position for him for years to come. As for the distant Chair, Freud was sixty-nine when Exner, Brcke's successor, died, so in the most favourable circumstances it would have been a very long wait. Furthermore, the salary paid to an Assistant was so exiguous that he could hardly support himself without private means, and certainly could not found a family. With those prospects, and with Freud's own poor financial background, how long could he expect to continue in his present course? He had at first been almost dependent on his father's support; a few small honorariums for his publications, and in 1879 a University grant of a hundred gulden (8),3 were the only contributions of his own. The father, then aged sixty-seven and burdened with a family of seven children, was in poor and very uncertain financial circumstances, and at times had to be helped out by loans and gifts from his wife's family. His small capital had been lost in the financial crash of 1873. The time had already come, moreover, when he had ceased to earn, and he and his family were for years in very sore straits. It is true that he had supported his young doctor son generously and willingly with the improvidence that characterized him. Earlier he had hoped his son would enter business, but with perhaps a sigh he resigned himself to the intellectual career and without doubt he was proud of his son's successes and achievements. He was content that he should continue on the path he had chosen and glad to be able to make it possible as long as he could. It is also true that Sigmund's needs were very modest. Apart from peace and quiet for reading, and the company of like-minded friends, he wanted little else than books. These certainly made some 1 Letter from Freud to Wittels, 1923.

2 M., Apr. 6, 1886. 3 Bf. (6), 208.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 67 demands on his pocket money. There were times when he had to borrow money from friends, but he repaid it conscientiously, even sooner than had been expected; one such episode is mentioned in a letter that has survived from the correspondence with his friend Knpfmacher. About this time, however, he found a philanthropic patron in the person of Breuer, who made him almost regularly a loan. By 1884 this debt reached the considerable sum of 1,500 gulden (about 125).1 All in all, the picture was not a bright one. One can only wonder what Freud's state of mind was on the subject. He was twenty-six. He did not want to be a physician. Yet he was in a blind alley, with practically no future prospects of ever earning a livelihood. The lack of foresight, and indeed of a sense of reality, seems so foreign to the Freud we knew later, who was always alive to the practical issues of life. From his subsequent accounts of the happenings one could even get the impression that it was only Brcke's homiletic intervention that suddenly woke him out of a dream, the dream of idealistically serving the cause of science irrespective of mundane considerations. Not at all the independent Freud we knew. It is not the only time that Freud preferred to give an unfavourable impression of himself rather than disclose something of his private life. What he revealed of his life was far more carefully selected and censored than is generally supposed. The contemporary evidence gives, as it often does, a very different picture. One would not know from the Autobiography whether Brcke went out of his way to offer his weighty advice or whether Freud had approached him for his opinion: further, why that important talk took place just when it did. Nor does one see what Brcke had to contribute to what Freud must already have known. That his future was most uncertain and that his financial basis was precarious were evident enough facts. In truth Freud had not at all been blind to the realities of his situation, nor was the decision an unexpected one. From the moment of acquiring the degree of M.D. he had contemplated with an increasingly heavy heart the inescapable decision facing him of leaving his laboratory work for

the practice of medicine.2 But what brought the matter to a head at a particular 1 M., Sept. 9, 1884. 2 M., Aug. 5, 1882.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 68 moment was something new in his life. He had fallen head over ears in love! More than that: in a garden in Mdling, on the fateful day of Saturday, June 10, he had received intimations from the lady, Martha Bernays, that made him dare to hope in his suit. On the next day he thought matters over, came to a definite decision, and on the following morning he informed Brcke of it. It was no news to him to hear that Brcke had no intention of parting with either of his two valuable Assistants, Fleischl and Exner, so that the Institute offered no prospects whatsoever. The die was cast. Now, although Freud never mentioned this motive in forming his resolution it was evidently the decisive one. It was like him to suppress it. Bernfeld remarks,1 in calling attention to it, that in the self-confessions scattered throughout his writings Freud figures at times as a villain, a parricide, ambitious, petty, revengeful, but never as a lover (save for a few very superficial allusions to his wife). It would be natural if he felt some resentment against fate at this break in his chosen career. If he felt any against Brcke, which would have been quite unreasonable, he never displayed it. But later in the year there was a curious outburst that perhaps makes the topic not altogether impertinent. In the Address to the Psychiatric Society, to which allusion has already been made, there was the usual criticism of those who were opposed to the conclusions he was expounding. A particularly sharp one, however, was directed against Fleischl, who was his friend, but who was also his immediate superior in the Institute, to whose position he might have hoped to succeed. He took to pieces very thoroughly a study of his on the structure of nerve fibres, rejecting the conclusions unreservedly. More than this, he resorted even to the method of personal psychological interpretation, one he firmly deprecated in later years, and pointed out what the motives of the observer might be. Since this was so alien to his usual contained attitude, it is hard not to associate it, as Bernfeld does,2 with the dissatisfaction and frustration at having

to leave the Institute. It is an example of the ambivalent changes between friendliness and hostility on which he had himself commented in connection with the lasting influence of his childhood experience with his nephew John. Freud confessed in later years how he had secretly cherished 1 Bernfeld, loc. cit. 2 Bf. (4), 180.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 69 the thought that his advancement would be favoured by Fleischl's death, but afterwards he was shocked at hearing his successor in the Institute, Paneth, openly voicing the same wish.1 As it turned out, Fleischl and Paneth died within a year of each other. The decision had undoubtedly been a very painful one, but Freud accepted it resolutely. In admitting to Martha what a wrench the separation from science had been, he cheerfully added but perhaps it is not a final one.2 The first step he took was an unavoidable one. There was evidently no alternative to earning a living by private practice, and to do sounless one would remain in the lowest ranks of the professionmeant acquiring some clinical experience in hospital, something in which he was as yet quite deficient: medical students in those days, at least on the Continent, learned through lectures and demonstrations only, and had no experience in personal care of patients. So Freud planned to spend two years living and studying in the hospital and thus acquire a more thorough and firsthand knowledge of all branches. As things turned out he stayed there fully three years. If he could attain the position there as Sekundararzt, a combination of our (resident) House Physician and Registrar, he would be at least in the middle class of the profession, and with luck might rise still higher. So this step he took without delay, and on the thirty-first day of July he inscribed himself in the General Hospital of Vienna. He chose to begin with surgery, giving as his reasons that the work was so responsible that it would compel his serious attention and further that he was already accustomed to using his hands. He found the work physically tiring and only remained a little over two months in the surgical wards. The visits lasted from 8 to 10 and again from 4 to 6; from 10 to 12 he had to spend reading the literature on the cases just examined. Presumably the chief, Professor Billroth,

was on holiday, since some time later Freud mentioned that they had not met. On October 4 he called on the great Nothnagel, bearing an introductory letter from Meynert. Nothnagel had just arrived in Vienna from Germany to occupy the Chair of Medicine, which he retained until his death twenty-three years later. The influence of a man in that position was very great, and Freud rightly surmised that his future career, especially in his future 1 G.W., II/III 488. 2 M., Aug. 15, 1882.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 70 practice, would depend very much on Nothnagel's grace. In a long letter he gave a full description of the house, of Nothnagel's personal appearance and manner, together with a verbatim account of the interview. Nothnagel had two Assistants. There was a vacancy, but it was already promised. So Freud asked him if he might function in his department as an Aspirant, roughly the position of our Clinical Assistant, until he could be appointed a Sekundararzt. Meynert spoke again to Nothnagel in his favour, and Freud thus entered his Clinic as Aspirant on October 12, 1882.1 He was then given a nominal salary. The branch of the hospital where Freud was now working was Nothnagel's Division of Internal Medicine. Nothnagel was a great physician, if not so original as his predecessor Rokitansky. He came to Vienna from Germany in 1882, and died in 1905. His conception of medical duties was extremely strict. He said to his students: Whoever needs more than five hours of sleep should not study medicine. The medical student must attend lectures from eight in the morning until six in the evening. Then he must go home and read until late at night. He had, moreover, a generous and noble character and was idolized by his students and patients alike. Freud admired and respected him, but he could not emulate his enthusiasm for medicine. He found no more interest in treating the sick patients in the wards than in studying their diseases. By now he must have been more convinced than ever that he was not born to be a doctor. What this aversion really signified is hard to determine. It was assuredly no lack of respect for the profession of medicine, as might perhaps be thought. On the contrary, there are signs that he regarded it as a Promised Landor, to be more accurate, a Forbidden Landinto which for

some reason he was not destined to enter. Only a few years later, in August, 1888, in reply to a friend's advice to become a regular physician, he wrote:2 I entirely agree with you, but nevertheless I cannot do what you recommend I have not learnt enough to be a physician. In my medical development there is a rift which was later painstakingly bridged. I could only learn enough to become a neuropathologist. And now I lack, not youth, but time and independence to make up for what I missed. Last winter I was pretty busy; so I could just make ends meet with 1 M., Oct. 13, 1882. 2 Anf., 66

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 71 my big family and had no time left for study.1 In other words, there was some sense of inferiority in the matter, which he ascribesnot at all plausiblyto insufficient knowledge or even an incapacity to learn: he who could acquire knowledge so swiftly and easily. Plainly it was a matter of inhibition rather than incapacity. Perhaps from his remark, quoted earlier, about tormenting human beings, one should infer some inhibition in dealing with physical suffering and, as a doctor, sometimes even having to add to it. Freud served under Nothnagel for six and a half months, till the end of April,2 and on May 1, 1883, transferred to Meynert's Psychiatric Clinic, where he was at once appointed Sekundararzt.3 He now moved into the Hospital, the first time he had left home save for short holidays. He was then twenty-seven years old. He never again slept at home. His new chief Mcynert (1833-92) was at least as distinguished in his sphere as Brcke was in his, so Freud could look up to him with the same respect, if not quite the same awe. Meynert's lectures had been the only medical ones that had aroused his interest as a student. In his writings we hear of the great Meynert in whose footsteps I followed with such veneration,4 and in spite of bitter personal disappointments in later years he always recalled him as the most brilliant genius he had ever encountered. Freud agreed with the general opinion that Meynert was the greatest brain anatomist of his time, but he had only a moderate opinion of him as a psychiatrist.5 Nevertheless it was from the study of the disorder called Meynert's Amentia (acute hallucinatory psychosis) that he obtained the

vivid impression of the wish-fulfilment mechanism he was to apply so extensively in his later investigations of the unconscious. Meynert's only possible rival of that period was Flechsig of Leipsic, a matter that, as Bernfeld suggests,6 probably had a fateful effect on his later relationship with Freud. Freud served in Meynert's Clinic for five months, two months in the male wards and then three in the female. This constituted 1 One senses a slightly bitter note here. 2 Dr. Bernfeld was misinformed when he wrote that Freud was not in the hospital in the first four months of 1883 (Bf. (6), 210). 3 M., Apr. 17, 1883. 4 G.W., II/III 439. 5 M., July 3 and 6, 1883. 6 Bf. (6), 213.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 72 his main purely psychiatric experience. In his letters of the time he was enthusiastic about what a stimulating teacher Meynert wasa more stimulating person than a host of friends. It was hard work, and the seven hours daily in the wards were barely sufficient to cover the ground. He was determined to master the subject and read assiduously in itEsquirol, Morel, etc.; he remarked how little psychiatrists seemed to understand of it. The month's holiday due to him in August he spent also at work in the hospital, acting then as senior Sekundararzt in place of his friend Hollnder who was on leave. He obtained, however, two weeks' leave from work in September, but only went away for a couple of days to Baden, just outside Vienna. These months in the Psychiatric Clinic were satisfactory in more than one respect. Freud mentioned that he had made many good friends among the resident physicians, and added, So I

can't be a quite unbearable person. When the united Sekundarrzte made a protest to the authorities about the accommodation in the Pathological Institute it was Freud they chose to be their spokesman, so he was evidently already beginning to stand out among the rest. On October 1, 1883, Freud moved to von Zeissl's Department of Dermatology.1 Von Zeissl had retired the year before, and his place had not yet been filled. In Freud's time Dr. Anscherlik functioned temporarily as Superintendent.2 Freud's junior colleague was Maximilian Zeissl, son of the late Superintendent, and Freud learned a good deal from him. There were two such departments in the hospital: one for ordinary skin diseases, the other for syphilitic and other infectious ones. It was the latter Freud wanted experience in, because of the important connection between syphilis and various diseases of the nervous system. He regretted, however, that he worked only in the male ward, and so did not see the same disorders in women. It was very light work, the ward visits finishing at 10 in the morning and taking place only twice a week. He thus had plenty of time for the laboratory. During the three months in which Freud was thus engaged he also attended special courses in naso-laryngology, where he found himself clumsy in the use of the instruments when doing the practical work in the Policlinic. He applied to work 1 M., Sept. 29, 1883. 2 Personal communication from Dr. Alfred Winterstein.

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 73 under Urbantschitsch, but that course was full, so he joined Ultzmann's. Before she left for Wandsbek Martha used to visit Freud in his hospital lodging. In the October after leaving Meynert's service he had to move to a different room, and in order to keep Martha in touch with the details of his daily life he described the new room and drew a diagram of it which is reproduced here.

To brighten the room that had never been graced by Martha's presence he asked her to embroider two Votive panels he

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 74 could hang over his desk. He chose two inscriptions for the purpose: one, adapted from

Candide, was Travailler sans raisonner: the