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Dr. Walsh's intriguingly titled paper has bestowed dignity and respectability on an otherwise bemusing academic phenomenon. Teachers of Greek philosophy, often desperate to render their esoteric subject matter relevant to bored undergraduates, have strained every intellectual nerve to claim some defenseless Greek as precursor to the latest development in quantum physics, economic theory, depth psychology, or whatever. Recently I listened to a distinguished colleague propose the thesis that Socrates was the first genuine hippie in the European tradition. To this we have stooped. But now Dr. Walsh has proposed seriously, and after some careful thought, the view that Freud may indeed have been influenced by the early Greeks rather more than he himself was able to acknowledge.
In fact, Dr. Walsh's paper offers two theses which it will be useful to distinguish for discussion. The first is the question of a possible cryptomnesic influence of Pythagorean thought on Freud mediated via Freud's early reading of Burckhardt and Theodor Gomperz, influences which Freud's conscious memory “warded off.” This proposal is quite original.1 The second proposal involves the assertion that the Greek influence (other than Pythagorean) on Freud was considerable, though it has been disregarded by psychoanalytic authors. This, of course, is not original. Although I find much that is interesting in Dr. Walsh's paper, I disagree with both theses.
Dr. Walsh suggests that the Pythagorean influence on Freud is to be found mainly in the three areas of Freud's personal and professional ethical standards, the ethos of the psychoanalytic method, and Freud's catharsis doctrine. In my opinion, Dr. Walsh states the two areas so generally (belief in equality of mankind, responsibility to the patient, the importance of honesty to the viability of a movement) that an equally plausible case could have been made for the influence of a dozen other sources on Freud. As for the (early) catharsis doctrine, if one