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In 1872 Freud, then aged sixteen, wrote to his friend Emil Fluss: ‘It gives me pleasure to apprehend the thick texture of connecting threads that accident and fate have woven around us all.’ He was, coincidentally, drawing on the central metaphor of a novel published in the same year — one that during his courtship he was to value, to weep over, and to write about to Martha Bernays: Middlemarch. There, George Eliot writes of ‘that inextricable web of affinities’:
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web … (ch XV)
Freud and George Eliot would doubtless have agreed that, as she put it,
In natural science … there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life. (The Mill on the Floss, Bk First, ch I)
This rejection of a narrowly internalist view of things — whether in relation, most broadly, to history itself, or, most intimately, to the history