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Freud wrote to Fliess on January 30, 1899, “For relaxation I am reading Burckhardt's History of Greek Civilization which is providing me with unexpected parallels.” And on the following day, in another letter to Fliess, he wrote, “I am deep in Burckhardt's History of Greek Civilization.”
In 1937, in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,”(23) Freud mentioned that Empedocles, an ancient Greek philosopher of the fifth century B.C., taught that two principles governed events in the life of the universe and in the life of the mind: love (philia) and strife (neikos), thought of as natural forces, the process of the universe consisting of a repetitive alteration of periods in which first one and then the other principle dominates.
Burckhardt's History of Greek Civilization, (4) which Freud read in 1899, describes Empedocles' concept of love (philia) and strife (neikos) as opposed principles everlastingly at war with each other. There is no certainty that Freud actually read all of Burckhardt's four-volume work on Greek cultural history. However, it does not seem likely that Freud, being so intensely interested in the history of human thought, would have neglected to read Burckhardt's comments on the ancient Greek philosophers and thinkers. Indeed, in The Interpretation of Dreams(10) finished in 1896, he quotes, among others, Aristotle, Plato, Artemidoros and Hippocrates. Yet, not only did he base his remarks regarding Empedocles on a work of Capelle, (5) written in 1935, but he also attributed to Capelle the reference concerning Empedocles' concept of love and strife, which is also to be found in Burckhardt's work, which he read in 1899.
Of his discovery of Empedocles' principles, Freud (23) commented that “this made me all the more pleased when not long ago I came upon this theory of mine in the writings of one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece. I am very ready to give up the prestige of originality for the sake of such confirmation, especially as I can never be certa