‘Through Hardship to Knowledge’: Unknown Documents of Freud's University Years

In 1911, the ‘Society for the Support of Jewish Students without Means in Vienna’ published a Denkschrift in celebration of the 50th anniversary of its foundation. Apart from historical data about the Society, it contained a large collection of literary and artistic contributions by personalities from cultural and intellectual circles, expressing their support for the Society's humanitarian aims. The contributors included the poet Arthur Schnitzler, the philosopher Theodor von Gomperz, and the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, to name but a few. Freud wrote an aphorism wherein after a brief excursion to stoicism he turned to the question of who would be deserving of charitable support. He stresses the importance of a willingness to undergo privation in order to achieve one's given aim. His aphorism reads as follows:

In the past asceticism - renunciation, privation - was seen as a means to power; today it is knowledge. It would be appropriate to support those who are willing to undergo their way through hardship to knowledge.

In German:

Einst gait Askese - Entbehrung, Entsagung - als Mittel zur Macht, heute das Wissen; es ist zweckmaessig, jene zu unterstützen, die durch Entbehrung zum Wissen gelangen wollen.1

Is there a hint of an autobiographical allusion, an unexpressed