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In a tribute to the Leopoldstädter Realgymnasium which he attended between the ages of 9 and 17, Freud wrote that the classical learning acquired there had brought him ‘as much consolation as anything else in the struggles of life’ (SE xiii. 241). He advertised the importance of Greco-Latin antiquity most strikingly by giving the name ‘Oedipus complex’ to what he considered his central discovery.
Jacques Le Rider has now undertaken to place Freud's classicism in its cultural context. A prolific and widely-read scholar, Le Rider is best known for his Modernité viennoise et crises d'identité (1990), which has been translated into German and English, but he has also published books on Otto Weininger, on Hugo von Hofmannsthal, on Nietzsche's reception in France, on the concept of Central Europe (Mitteleuropa), and on aesthetic theories of colour. He habitually shows both encyclopaedic learning and an enthusiasm for pursuing the most unexpected scholarly byways. The present book frames Freud in an almost comprehensive account of the reception of the classics in nineteenth-century Austria and, in particular, by the first generation of Viennese modernists, notably Hofmannsthal and Hermann Bahr. Anyone interested in turn-of-the-century Vienna will find this a rich storehouse of information. If you are interested exclusively in Freud, you may not want to accompany Le Rider on all his excursions, but fortunately the list of contents, with chapters and sub-sections, provides orientation in a work whose structure—not to its detriment—is less linear than arabesque.
Classicism was imported into Austria from Germany. There was no indigenous equivalent to the Weimar Classicism of Goethe and Schiller. Secondary education, dominated by the Catholic Church, concentrated on Latin. In Prussia, Wilhelm von Humboldt's Weimar-inspired school reforms provided that in the classical Gymnasium schoolboys should spend eight hours a week on Latin and (from the fourth form onwards) six hours on Gre