Freud's Personality at 40*

Sigmund Freud, in 1896, was a 40-year old Jewish physician, married ten years and the father of six young children. He supported his family by practicing medicine as a specialist in nervous disorders, was primarily interested in philosophical (metapsychological) problems such as—“how did human beings come to be what they are; and what in effect are they.” The main satisfactions from his clinical work lay in the opportunities they provided for making observations relevant to such questions. He had achieved some scientific prestige through his original contributions to the theory of the psychopathological etiology of the neuroses (formulating them as defense reactions against anxieties stemming from repressed memories of passive experiences of actual sexual seduction in childhood). His views had received cautious rather than enthusiastic acceptance from his colleagues and his professional status was still only precariously established.

Freud had been troubled at times for some years by symptoms of fatigue, anxiety and depression, although not to a seriously incapacitating extent. These symptoms had now become more prominent, since the recent death of his 81-year old father (Oct. 1896). Feelings toward members of his own family, apparently latent prior to his father's death, had become deeply stirred at this time and compelled his attention. He was about to enter a period of “self-analysis” which he continued actively for the next several years. During these years, he arrived at a formulation about his personal relationships with his own parents, succeeded in freeing himself permanently from his nervous symptoms, and worked out his scientific conceptions of psychopathology in the form which was to evoke wide and serious interest and make his reputation.

A characterization of Freud's personality as it functioned at this time throws light on the meaning of the nervous tension which he experienced, and on the problem which his personal