This text is a construct proposing an alternative version of the story of the discovery of psychoanalysis.

It depicts Freud involved in self-analysis, at a time when a professional drama resonates with a psychic trauma of his childhood, and with the distressing situation of an assimilated Jew in an antisemitic milieu.

The effects of this psychic trauma are revealed in the October 15, 1897 letter in which the same passage refers to both Œdipus and a dramatic memory bereft of its affect —sign of a threat of annihilation.

Oedipus emerges in this context as a defence against the abyss glimpsed in self-analysis.

In this position, Freud, the first analysand, comes to join together splitting and repression, and elevate Œdipus, the grandmaster of post-traumatic splitting, to the status of a conceptual hero.

In this light, the trauma theory on the one hand, and the metapsychology of drives and « nuclear complex of the neuroses » on the other, can be seen as traces, as symbols of Freud’s search for the two parts of his own self looking for each other — the work of symbolisation of a lifetime.