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The circumstances in which Freud obtained a travelling bursary from Vienna University in 1885 are related in detail at the end of Chapter V in the first volume of Ernest Jones's biography of Freud. The grant, which was for 600 florins (worth at that time something under £50 or $250) and intended to cover a period of six months, was allotted by the College of Professors in the Faculty of Medicine; and to them he was expected to make a formal report on his return to Vienna. He is known to have spent about ten days in writing it and had finished it on 22 April, 1886. (Jones, Sigmund Freud, 1, 252.) On the initiative of the late Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld, this report was unearthed in the University Archives by Professor Josef Gicklhorn, and we are able to publish it for the first time, in a translation, through the kindness of Dr. K. R. Eissler, Secretary of the Sigmund Freud Archives in New York. The original, which remains in the Archives of the University of Vienna, consists of twelve manuscript sheets, of which the first contains only the title.
The high importance which Freud himself always attributed to his studies under Charcot is a matter of common knowledge. As Ernest Jones has said, Freud's experience at the Salpêtrière was a critical moment in his life. The following report marks it with the utmost clarity as a turning-point. When he arrived in Paris, his 'chosen concern' was with the anatomy of the nervous system; when he left, his mind was filled with the problems of hysteria and hypnotism. He had turned his back on neurology and was moving towards psychopathology. It would even be possible to assign a precise date to the change—in early December, 1885, when he ceased his work in the pathological laboratory of the Salpêtrière; but the inconvenient arrangements at that laboratory, which he himself puts forward as the explanation, were, of course, no more than a precipitating cause of the momentous shift in the direction of Freud's