1A letter from Freud to Arthur Schnitzler in 1922 revealed a curious confession that he regarded the playwright as his Doppelgänger. This was so because Freud had encountered in Schnitzler's poetic fiction the same presumptions, interest, and conclusions. "Your skepticism, your ability to be moved by the truth of the unconscious, by the instinctual nature of man, to analyze the accepted cultural-conventional 'verities, ' the recurrence of your thoughts to the polarity of love and death … had for me an uncanny familiarity."

2The autobiography and diaries of Schnitzler up to 1903 reveal fascinating similarities to Freud's background and partially account for their smiliar interests and their final divergence from medicine to interests in literature and the discovery of a new science.