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Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-1898) was a Swiss-German poet and novelist, whose publications during the period 1871-89 were quite popular, and who used narratives of history as a way of expressing aspects of his own personality and life experience. His most common themes were conflicts about loyalty to his father, attachment to and fear of his mother, and erotic attachment and distrust of his sister. He became psychotic and required hospitalisation on two occasions in his life; firstly, in 1852, when he was 27, after several years of self-seclusion, and then again, in 1892, when he was 77, at the end of his period of literary productivity.
Meyer's father died when he was 15, and his mother, who had often been depressed, killed herself in 1856, when he was 31. His sister was for many years the manager of the household and also his editor. Meyer married when he was 50. His wife was 38, wealthy, with good connections in Zurich society and they had one child, a daughter. His wife and his sister were in sharp conflict, particularly expressed in their differences about the importance of his writing; his wife seeing it as destructive to his peace of mind, and his sister as vital to the expression of his life's purpose.
Wilhelm Fliess brought Meyer to Sigmund Freud's attention in 1892, when he and his new wife sent Sigmund and Martha Freud a copy of Meyer's Gedichte. Freud made brief references to Meyer in his letters to Fliess during the period 1898-1900—perhaps the most intense one of his self-analysis—and in one of those letters included a somewhat more extended commentary on Meyer's novella The Judge (Die Richterin). He thought of writing more extensively on the relationship between Meyer's life and his stories and read a biography of Meyer written by one of his friends, but was disappointed at its lack of useful detail. Then he no longer seemed interested, but he did include one of Meyer's narrative poems among a list of ten good books solicited from him by a boo