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honor and professional stature. Moreover (if the present thesis is correct), the fact that
this defeated outsider still kept much of his faith would have attracted Freud as well. A
still further positive ingredient was the illustrious literary family from which Brentano
came—a family with many close personal connections with Freud’s favorite author, Goethe.121
We do know that Freud, during his university days, was quite capable of being influenced in ways that would not show up until he left medical science and developed his own system of ideas. Freud described one of these very early intellectual influences much later, in a letter written in 1913 to Elise Gomperz, the recent widow of Theodor Gomperz. Gomperz was an important figure in Freud’s life from 1879 until about 1900.122 He was an assimilated Jew, part of the wealthy Jewish establishment, who had been a professor of classical philology at the University of Vienna and a widely acknowledged great scholar.123 This letter to Elise Gomperz included the following: The little notebook containing the handwriting of your unforgotten husband reminded me of that time lying so far behind us, when I, young and timid, was allowed for the first time to exchange a few words with one of the great men in the realm of thought. It was soon after this that I heard from him the remarks about the role played by dreams in the psychic life of primitive men—something that has preoccupied me so extensively ever since.124 Merlan reports that Freud translated a volume of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy for Gomperz.125 (Gomperz was the editor of the complete works of John Stuart Mill, which were being translated into German under his direction.126) A natural question is this: How did Gomperz hear about the young Freud and know that he was capable of such a translation task? The son of Gomperz wrote Freud in 1932 and inquired about this. Freud wrote back: I know I was recommended to your father by Franz Brentano. Your father, at a party… mentioned that he was looking for a translator, and Brentano, whose student I then was or had been at a still earlier time, named my name [emphasis in the original quote from Merlan].121 It is not surprising that Gomperz’s son, after noting the two theorists’ mutual emphasis on the psychic apparatus operating in a way more or less independent of the physical apparatus, goes on to suggest an influence of Brentano on Freud.128 There are other little-recognized associations between Brentano and Freud, which derive from the fact that both men were part of the same group or network of people in Vienna. This network had much to do with social connections and with political views. Both Freud and Brentano were part of a group that was politically liberal in outlook, usually quite educated, interested in ideas and the arts, and generally very well off |