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I much agree with Dr. Walsh's fine study of the possible influence on Freud of his wide knowledge of classical literature and philosophy including Empedocles and the early and later Pythagoreans. In fact, I believe that these cryptomnesic influences emphasizing the early Pythagoreans were reinforced in later radical philosophies within the German tradition, especially that of Ludwig Feuerbach whose book, Wesen des Christenthums, on religion, is the companion volume of Freud's The Future of an Illusion.
A scholar of Freud's stature, materialistic and scientific proclivities, and erudition in both the Greek and the Younger Hegelian philosophical traditions must have been keenly aware of other doctrines, besides the Pythagorean, stressing the duality of opposites and the conflict of opposites, together with their resolution where the opposites were somehow “harmonized” or resolved. This is, of course, Hegelian, but neither Freud nor the Younger Hegelians could agree with Hegel's various glorifications (like the German State and the idealistic supremacy of spiritual essences).
Feuerbach's chief contribution in his popularly known revision of the above idealistic dialectic was the notion, which he phrased prior to Freud, of “wish-fulfillment.” It is a pity that Feuerbach's interpretations of religious fantasies as reflecting through “wish” the real needs of people, his notions of catharsis in religion, and of the control of anxiety feelings resulting from unmet and morbid needs are not noted more often by scholars who do note Freud's parallels with classical writers.
I emphasize the reinforcing influence upon Freud of the Younger Hegelians who utilized more realistic and material versions of the dialectic, because the whole trend within Freud's writing leading to his book, The Ego and the Id, is better illustrated by the later examples. For instance, Dr. Walsh comments properly on the manner in which intrapsychic harmony becomes possible through reductions in tensions “betw