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Copyright 1949 by Siegfried Bernfeld Ph. D.
The childhood phantasies and the adolescent day dreams of Freud, as far as we know them, do not foretell the future originator of psychoanalysis. They fit a general, a reformer or a business executive rather than the patient, fulltime listener to petty complaints, humdrum stories and the recounting of irrational sufferings. It was a long way from the child who devoured Thier's story of Napoleon's power; who identified himself with the Marshall Massena, Duke of Tivoli and Prince of Essling, to the psychoanalyst 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. “The urge to understand something about the mysteries of the world and maybe contribute somewhat to their solution became overwhelming”. (1) He turns to the more sublime power over nature, through science, and he decides to study “natural history”—biology to us today. Power, prestige and wealth should come to him only contingent to his being a great scientist.
Great he had to be. “I fear mediocrity,” he says in a remarkable letter to a friend, in the days of the final examination. (2)) This friend had recently tried to console him: “He who only fears mediocrity is quite secure”. “But,” answers Freud, “at night—June 16, 1873 … with a somewhat somnolent philosophy… Secure from what, I