Obituary: Sigmund Freud, M.D.

Of the various portraits of Sigmund Freud we have chosen that one which to us represented most concretely his deepest concern; namely his abiding interest in the primitive man within all mankind.

We here see him facing a small collection of figures of the anthropological genre. They are of primitive sculptured design. In them he saw the beginnings of behavior patterns which, expanding, evolving, compounding, finally came to life's shop-window in so-called modern man, with all his trappings, useful and useless, yet all his own.

For although the anthropologists of the Academic schools thought lightly of his more direct anthropological conceptions, we are fairly certain they have misread, misjudged, and distorted Freud's ideas in their special field. Like many “specialists,” they have confused the woods with the trees.

As an analyst of the keenest penetration, he knew the “trees.” He gave over the “woods” to the philosophers and the philosophical anthropologists, although some of his followers, notably Roheim, entered deeply into the anthropological domain with the searchlight of psychoanalysis.

The life history of Sigmund Freud is too well known for us to rehearse the more obvious facts of his development. But some of the almost forgotten ones we would here call to notice. Freud began his work as a student of comparative anatomy and physiology, and his study of Ammocoetes, made when he was a nineteen year old medical student, still remains worth studying, even though buried in a rare periodical. (The New York Academy of Medicine Library has a copy—the pages of which were uncut until the present writer consulted it.)

Then came his work in the wards of the Allgemeine Krankenhaus in Vienna and the classical studies on Aphasia, cited by Goldstein, one of the few neurologists to mention them, as of “the highest order,” patterned as they were upon evolutionary data, and evidencing his wide reading and understanding. It is strange that none of these earlier, highly s