Bergmann concludes that Freud absorbed ideas from many writers, though he learned most from Friedrich Nietzsche. Heinrich Heine had the greatest influence on Freud's personality. Bergmann makes the point that style is an expression of personality, and in Freud, German and Jewish roots intermingled as they did in Heine.

Psychoanalysis emerged at the crossroads of the Enlightenment and German Romanticism, a rational methodology trying to understand the irrational. According to Bergmann, the fact that the International Psychoanalytical Association was willing to allow the German Psychoanalytical Society to maintain membership only if its Jewish members voluntarily resigned shows that psychoanalysis shared in the spirit of accommodation to Hitler.