The author argues that it was Freud's ambition to discover the ‘caput Nili’ in neuropsychology and that his discourse of anxiety informed his early dialogues with the Zurich School at the Burghölzli as he tried to persuade Bleuler and Jung, experts in dementia praecox (paranoia), to replace their toxic theory with his psychosexual theory. Although Karl Abraham adopted the libido theory, Freud's campaign to persuade Jung backfired on the eve of the First International Psychoanalytical Congress in Salzburg in 1908. Freud denied Jung's theoretical apostasy by reconfiguring an Abraham–Jung plagiarism dispute into a priority dispute and then insisted that both men collude with his narration. It is argued that Freud's narrative tyranny, his ‘cover-story', recycled by Jones, occludes the significance of Salzburg from the psychoanalytic discourse.