Chapter 1 Sigmund Freud

In the beginning, my statements about infantile sexuality were founded almost exclusively on the findings of analysis in adults which led back into the past. I had no opportunity of direct observations on children. It was therefore a very great triumph when it became possible years later to confirm almost all my inferences by direct observation and the analysis of very young children—a triumph that lost some of its magnitude as one gradually realized that the nature of the discovery was such that one should really be ashamed of having had to make it. The further one carried these observations on children, the more self-evident the facts became; but more astonishing, too, did it become that one had taken so much trouble to overlook them.

Sigmund Freud’s discovery and elaboration of psychoanalysis was something which took much longer than is generally recognized.

When, with the help of a bursary, the young Sigmund Freud went to attend Charcot’s courses in Paris in 1885, he was 29. He had already done considerable work in the field of neuro-pathology, histology in particular, but, as he himself said: ‘I understood nothing about neuroses at that time’ (1925a). However, he did become interested to some extent in young children early on and published a number of works on both unilateral and bilateral cerebral paralysis in children (Freud and Rie, 1891; Freud, 1893). In 1886, he spent several weeks in Adolf Baginski’s paediatric department in Berlin. He was then appointed head of the new neurological unit at the public Institute of Paediatrics in Vienna run by the paediatrician Kassowitz. ‘Freud held this position for many years, working there for several hours three times a week and he made there some valuable contributions to neurology’ (Jones, 1953, Vol. I:233). At the same time he set up in private practice as a ‘specialist in nervous disorders’. His patients became less and less ‘neurological’ and more and more ‘nervous’. For the former there was no eff