Hysteria, Heredity and Anti-Semitism: Freud's Quiet Rebellion

… and with this the factor of a hereditary disposition regains a sphere of influence from which I had made it my task to dislodge it - in the interest of illuminating neurosis.

The received history of psychoanalysis holds that Freud began his investigations into the baffling subject of hysteria without any preconceived ideas. Indeed, according to his biographer Ernest Jones, the young newly qualified Freud was initially rather ‘shocked’ by the ‘apparently cynical remarks’ of three distinguished physicians who, between 1881 and 1886, all told him that sexual factors were the underlying cause of most of the neurotic disorders.1

Having firmly dismissed these remarks from his mind, Freud went on, in line with the prevailing medical wisdom, to state in an article for Villaret's encyclopaedia, that the aetiology of hysteria ‘is to be looked for entirely in heredity: hysterics are always hereditarily disposed to disturbances of nervous activity, and epileptics, psychical patients, tabetics [a complication of syphilis], etc., are found among their relatives’. Trauma did initiate hysteria, Freud thought, but only in those already predisposed