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The Salpêtrière School! About eighty years ago the great Charcot, the most celebrated neurologist of his time, made this name famous in every medical centre of the world. He roamed the ancient rooms of this old hospital and gave names to diseases before unknown and unnamed, as it is said our ancestor Adam did to the animals which peopled the Garden of Eden. Charcot was a keen observer, a great clinician, above all an outstanding personality. It is just this personality which impressed Freud so much. The three months the young Viennese doctor spent at the Salpêtrière were, in my opinion, a decisive turning-point in his life. By his example Charcot inspired him with the courage to consider hysteria, that disconcerting illness until then disparaged, as worthy of investigation by a man of science. Freud of course knew, before coming to Paris, about the application of hypnosis for nervous complaints. His friend Joseph Breuer had told him of the remarkable results obtained in treating his patient Anna O. by the cathartic method which was to become the seed of psycho-analysis. Freud even tried to interest Charcot in this method, but being a neurologist Charcot was little inclined to psychology. It is, however, what he saw at the Salpêtrière and the memory of it he took back to Vienna which encouraged Freud, three years later, to engage in the researches into hysteria which were to lead him to discover the fundamental laws, until then unknown, about deep human psychological phenomena.
On my first visit to the Salpêtrière, fifty years ago, I had the good fortune to meet the greatest psychopathologist of France, Pierre Janet, whom Freud had not had the opportunity to see at the time of his stay at the Salpêtrière, Janet arriving there only after Freud's departure. Therefore the work of these two learned men developed along the same lines without influencing one another.
Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for having invited me today to this celebration in honour of the