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APA 52(1):311-317 (2004)

Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914. By Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, 334 pp., $27.95.: Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas. By Arthur Schnitzler; translated by Margret Schaefer, with a foreword by John Simon. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002, 288 pp., $28.50.

Author: James W. Barron

Abstract

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was an inveterate diarist and a prolific novelist, short story writer, and playwright in fin-de-siècle Vienna. He was also an underappreciated figure in the history of psychoanalysis. Born into the Jewish upper middle class, he developed an early interest in creative writing, but obediently followed in the footsteps of his physician father, a prominent laryngologist and university professor. What Schnitzler found most interesting about his medical training was psychiatry. He wrote a review of Freud's translation of Charcot's work (Jones 1957, p. 84) and studied hypnosis as a clinical technique with Theodor Meynert, who was also Freud's teacher. Nonetheless, Schnitzler's attachment to medicine was never as strong as his passionate interest in the arts.
Page 311
Schnitzler took his course from duty rather than inclination, for he was, and always remained, in love with words, with their uncanny capacity for masking as well as revealing the truth. He had been scribbling plays and poems since he was a boy; by the time he was eighteen he had completed twenty-three dramas and started thirteen more. “I feel it already,” he noted as a first-year medical student; “science will never become for me what art already is.” He would say so again, often. He haunted theaters and concert halls; at the end of 1879, summing up the seasons as he would later count his orgasms, he logged fifteen visits to the Stadttheater, fourteen to the Burgtheater, eleven to the opera, and at least nineteen concerts. Medicine had too few attractions to compete with music and the stage. Significantly, foreshadowing the psychological explorations that became the hallmark of his fiction, the only department of medicine that really interested him was psychiatry, with its esoteric methods: hypnotism and suggestion [p. 37].

For five years he worked as his father's assistant, but after the death of his father in 1893 he drifted away from medicine altogether and devoted himself full-time t

APA 52(1):311-317 (2004)

Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914. By Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, 334 pp., $27.95.: Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas. By Arthur Schnitzler; translated by Margret Schaefer, with a foreword by John Simon. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002, 288 pp., $28.50.

Author: James W. Barron

Abstract

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was an inveterate diarist and a prolific novelist, short story writer, and playwright in fin-de-siècle Vienna. He was also an underappreciated figure in the history of psychoanalysis. Born into the Jewish upper middle class, he developed an early interest in creative writing, but obediently followed in the footsteps of his physician father, a prominent laryngologist and university professor. What Schnitzler found most interesting about his medical training was psychiatry. He wrote a review of Freud's translation of Charcot's work (Jones 1957, p. 84) and studied hypnosis as a clinical technique with Theodor Meynert, who was also Freud's teacher. Nonetheless, Schnitzler's attachment to medicine was never as strong as his passionate interest in the arts.
Page 311
Schnitzler took his course from duty rather than inclination, for he was, and always remained, in love with words, with their uncanny capacity for masking as well as revealing the truth. He had been scribbling plays and poems since he was a boy; by the time he was eighteen he had completed twenty-three dramas and started thirteen more. “I feel it already,” he noted as a first-year medical student; “science will never become for me what art already is.” He would say so again, often. He haunted theaters and concert halls; at the end of 1879, summing up the seasons as he would later count his orgasms, he logged fifteen visits to the Stadttheater, fourteen to the Burgtheater, eleven to the opera, and at least nineteen concerts. Medicine had too few attractions to compete with music and the stage. Significantly, foreshadowing the psychological explorations that became the hallmark of his fiction, the only department of medicine that really interested him was psychiatry, with its esoteric methods: hypnotism and suggestion [p. 37].

For five years he worked as his father's assistant, but after the death of his father in 1893 he drifted away from medicine altogether and devoted himself full-time t