Bildung or the Formation of the Psychoanalyst

In Reminiscences of a Vienna Psychoanalyst, Richard Sterba (1982) described the humanistic tradition in which early members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society were nurtured:

To be considered gebildet, one had to be able to speak at least two living languages (predominantly English and French) besides German … The knowledge of ancient Latin and Greek, the obligatory studies at the Gymnasium, was taken for granted. A gebildeter Mensch had to be familiar with the most important works of Western literature and the most important events of the history of Western culture. He had to be familiar with its outstanding artists and their chefs-d'oeuvre. Interest in and information about current events should not be missing. One expects a Gebildeter to be well mannered and to use the vocabulary of the gebildete circle. A great deal of the behavior, interests, and mentality of the Gebildete is absorbed from childhood on if he is brought up in a gebildete milieu; it is difficult to acquire it later. Of course, the gebildete Mensch as I have described him here was an ideal; however, most of the society members attained some degree of this Bildung. A few of them, like Bernfeld, Hartmann, Kris, and Waelder, even attained an unusual degree. Sigmund Freud was above all of us; his Bildung was of the highest level … (Sterba 1982, pp. 80-1)

Similar adulation was attributed by Eduard Hitschmann to Freud. ‘[Y]ou are for us,’ Hitschmann (1956, p. 357, 359) wrote on the occasion of Freud's sixtieth birthday, ‘a magnificent model of the great free spirit, the upright independent man, the unprejudiced investigator, the truly complete scholar (des wahrhaft vollendet Gebildeten) and the all-understanding, all forgiving individual …’. In reply, Freud admitted that these qualities were what he had striven to achieve, but he was not certain if he had yet succeeded (1956, p. 361). Acknowledgement of this kind has its historical implications. For those who were no