Freud's "Double": Arthur Schnitzler

IT HAS ONLY recently been recognized that valuable new facts and insights are vouchsafed by a study of Freud's relationship with Arthur Schnitzler.1 That Schnitzler, the Viennese physician-poet and contemporary of Freud's, wrote strikingly "Freudian" plays and stories has, of course, long been common knowledge. For many years it was widely assumed that Schnitzler was merely one of the earliest and most perceptive of Freud's many literary disciples. In 1953, however, it was demonstrated that the relationship was more complicated, that in fact Freud and Schnitzler had not only read one another's early publications2 but had then regularly read one another's works as they appeared; that Schnitzler had eventually referred to Freud as his "double"; and that Freud, late in life, had called Schnitzler his "psychic twin, " and described him as a pioneer and independent master of depth psychology (1). It seemed curious that in spite of all this, the two "doubles, " living quite near one another in Vienna and following each other's careers with interest, did not meet until June, 1922, when Freud was sixty-six and Schnitzler sixty.3

With the publication in 1955 of Freud's letters to Schnitzler