A comparison of the lives of these contemporary figures reveals interesting corroborations of Freud's expressed feelings of having a Doppelgänger in the playwright and author, Arthur Schnitzler. Both were the first born of large, Jewish, middle-class families and experienced the loss of a younger male sibling before reaching age two; both became physicians, then neurologists with special interest in hypnosis and the French school of psychiatry. In a common setting of Viennese culture each went on to develop a sensitive awareness of unconscious processes, and to explore, in his own field, a knowledge of self and of the unconscious instinctual processes that constitute psychic conflict. Each employed in his conceptualizations the key idea that character is fate, and both were preoccupied with the polarity of love and death.