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This is rather the history of the accidental circumstances that Freud's doemon turned to such psychological profit, of the origin and growth of psycho-analysis, than a study of the author's own personality. Freud has indeed revealed himself, more candidly than is the wont of autobiographers, in his earlier works. The book affords no insight as to the nature of Freud's genius; he has pointed out, in his essays on Leonardo Da Vinci and Dostoieffsky, that analysis has no explanation to offer as regards the artistic gifts, and we may add the scientific gift.
His father's ancestors were long settled at Cologne, fled to Lithuania owing to persecutions of the Jews during the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and returned to German Austria via Galicia. From the age of four he has lived in Vienna. His first interests were more towards human concerns than towards natural objects; it was probably to this interest that we owe the first of Freud's publications—a translation of some of John Stuart Mill's Essays. However, he abandoned this first interest for a devotion extending over many years to physiology. His disinclination towards a medical career was shown by his reluctance to take his degree of doctor of medicine; he put it off till 1881—eight years after joining the University.
A year later he became junior resident physician at the General Hospital and gradually began to work at nervous diseases with this qualification: 'I understood nothing about the neuroses'.
When, in 1881, he was appointed lecturer in Neuropathology, he journeyed to Paris, working under Charcot at the Salpêtrière, where, during the whole time of his visit 'Janet's name was never so much as mentioned'.
He returned to Vienna with a conviction of the genuineness of hysterical phenomena, of their occurrence in man; this was too much for the profession in Vienna. With this knowledge, and with (to the visible eye) little else, Freud settled down in Vienna as a nerve specialist. Hypnotism became his chie