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Fifty years ago, in 1905, Edward Hitschmann registered at the University of Vienna for a course of lectures named "Einführung in die Psychotherapie." The lecturer was Sigmund Freud, and with inspired prescience, Hitschmann saved the "hearer's card" that admitted him to the lectures and to a new life. Freud invited him to join the study group that met each Wednesday evening at Freud's home, which included Federn, Stekel, Adler, Reitler, Meisl, and later Rank and Wittels. In the same fateful year, he read to this small coterie his first psychoanalytic lecture entitled "On Friendship."
The title was symbolic. For Freud was quick to appreciate Hitschmann's good qualities and to admit him to an uninterrupted friendship. Hitschmann, then thirty-four years of age, was already respected for his abilities as an internist. Beyond this, however, Freud was attracted by the younger man's interest in literature and the arts—by his deep knowledge and understanding of Goethe particularly—and by his wit and charm. Freud's effect on him, Hitschmann says, was "enormous"—a compact word, yet weak semantically through its very compactness. For Freud, then forty-nine years of age and in the full powers that had come to him from his years of development and analysis, beggars description by a word. This was the Freud, one might put it, who had published The Interpretation of Dreams only five years before. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was one year old; the Three Contributions and the book on wit appeared in that very year of 1905. The important clinical publications were somewhat older, but the mere listing of these extraordinary performances conveys coldly the experience, Freud. To evoke this requires more lyric