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Whenever I hear people talk about Freud's alleged intellectualism, his biased methods and his reductive thinking, my reaction is to say to myself, 'But what you are trying to say isn't right, or rather, it's only half the truth, since it leaves out the most important element: Freud the man as I knew him during my years as a student in Vienna, when I had a few conversations with him which made a profound impression on me. As a man, Freud had greater breadth, richness, complexity and—I'm glad to say—more inherent contradictions than his teaching.
Recently, when I was talking to some friends about my meetings with Freud, they suggested that I should write down my reminiscences, more or less urging me that it was my duty to make my observations accessible to a wider audience, since, by shedding new light on this controversial genius, they may serve to correct many widely-held misconceptions.
At first I was hesitant. Almost half a century had elapsed since that encounter. As far as I could recall, I had made no notes, and I asked myself dubiously whether time had perhaps made radical alterations to the mental picture which I had carried round with me for so long, so that it was no longer a true record of the facts. But then I reflected that this kind of picture had a positive contribution to make. When, shortly afterwards, I was invited to address a medical gathering about my meeting with Freud, I decided to go and testify about this extraordinary man, even though, in doing so, I knew that I ran the risk of having forgotten a great deal and that a good many things might seem very different to me now from the way they seemed when I was young.
When I tried to recall some of the details of those conversations of long ago, I found that the memories I could still muster were all extremely fragmentary. Then, at that moment, as has so often happened in my life, I was helped by so-called fate. For some totally different reason I was rummaging amongst some old papers in a tr