Freud's Cultural Background

In order to do full justice to the scientific and cultural tradition to which Freud's thought is related, it would be necessary to cover a wide variety of topics. In this essay, however, I confine myself to those sources which are usually regarded as literary, political, or broadly cultural rather than scientific; thus I do not aim at comprehensiveness. In addition, the influences discussed in this investigation are presumed to have affected Freud at a young age, before he immersed himself during his early twenties in the scientific work of von Brücke's physiological laboratory. In the following sections I shall deal with Freud's link with romanticism, particularly as reflected in his view of nature, the political and cultural milieu of Vienna in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the influence on Freud of the Jewish tradition, and Freud's secondary school education, with its classical emphasis on Greek and Latin texts.

Men of thought who find a universe emptied of God fill the conceptual void. The mind requires a manner of accounting for order and energy, a regulatory agency, preferably impersonalized and inoffensive to empiricism. With the decline of the theological point of view and the coming of romanticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nature was credited with the power previously attributed to a deity.

Although the adolescent Freud showed an early interest in the study of nature, this interest vied with involvement in another derivative of the romantic movement—the arena of revolutionary politics. The revolutions of 1848, the subsequent concessions to bourgeois demands, the tottering monarchies, and stirring nationalist movements made a political career a promising choice for able young men in the early 1870s. Thus nature and politics—the first a field for learning something of the world, the second the means for changing it—were twin enthusiasms of the young Freud.

Before discussing the view of nature in Freud's thought,