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university research career without painful regrets. But abandon them he did.59
During his 30s—that is, roughly from the time he was married at age 30 until his 40th birthday in 1896—Freud’s intellectual life was in transition. From his training in medicine, neurology, anatomy, and related topics, he moved to an increasing involvement with what had been his earlier predilections for psychology, literature, cultural history, mythology and anthropology. It was, if you will, a midlife crisis, in which Freud was finding out that his essential and natural motivation lay with ideas quite far removed from his prior university training. During this decade, he became familiar with the technique of hypnosis; he began to appreciate the importance of sex in the etiology of neurotic problems; and he first began to understand the significance of fantasies and dreams. His “monomaniacal” study of the neuroses60 brought him some notoriety because of the unusual character of the conditions he was studying, as well as a modest reputation as an authority on certain neurotic conditions, such as hysteria.61 He was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Vienna, but it was not a time of success.62 Freud was still deeply discontented—both financially, for his practice was small and his family large, and in a deeper sense, for he was still searching for the center of his intellectual and emotional life. He was at the threshold of what is now known as psychoanalysis, and indeed of the entire psychological mentality so prevalent today. But this threshold was not crossed until Freud went through his own personal psychoanalysis. Before we come to this systematic “self-analysis,” a few more words are in order about the shift from the university world to private practice. Freud’s career as a young scientist at the University of Vienna was dominated by non-Jewish figures. The major model for Freud was Professor Ernst Brücke, head of the research institute in which Freud was studying. Freud expressed this directly and at length: [I]n Ernst Brücke’s physiological laboratory, I found rest and satisfaction—and men, too, whom I could respect and take as my models: the great Brücke himself, and his assistants Sigmund Exner and Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow. With the last of these, a brilliant man, I was privileged to be upon terms of friendship.63 The other men, Exner and Fleischl (the “von” and “Marxow” are usually omitted from Fleischl’s name) were the assistants in Brücke’s lab and directly superior to Freud in rank. Exner was in the process of becoming a world-famous physiologist. He, like Fleischl, was from a wealthy and socially prominent Viennese family.64 Thus, in this university-based, scientific period of Freud’s life, his most influential models were, first, Brentano; then Charcot (for whom he named his eldest son, as noted above); also, in limited respects, Meynert65 ; and finally Brücke (for whom he named his son Ernst),66 Exner, |