Freud's Correlation with Josef Popper-Lynkeus1

Josef Popper-Lynkeus was born 1838 in Kolin, Czechoslovakia, and died in Vienna where he had spent most of his life as did his younger contemporary Freud, who also was born in Czechoslovakia and lived in Vienna for almost eighty years. Popper-Lynkeus was an inventor, a physicist, who studied the flight of birds, preparing in this way the era of the aeroplane. He was also a poet and while he remained almost unknown to the world outside of Vienna, he became particularly dear to a growing circle of friends in that city because of his unique personality. He was our father and our oracle.

Years of his life he devoted to the suggestion of a social reform, a double economy by way of a drafted national subsistence army, which was supposed to produce and distribute food, shelter and clothes for all, whereas the rest of the economy should be left alone, perfectly free without any interference from the side of the government. Others had suggested similar reforms before him, but his own was the combination of dry figures, filling many hundred pages, with the philosophy of the absolute sanctity of the individual. When he said individual, he meant the individual's body, he never spoke of the dignity of self-respect nor of the political, moral, or religious individual. His conviction was that with the end of poverty all other desirable qualifications of the individual would bloom automatically. Nothing in the world—this was the essence of Josef Popper-Lynkeus’ philosophy—could be compared with the importance of the physical individual that “wishes to exist and to exist in his own way.” This he considered self-evident; all else was “microscopic” ethics to him. He started these ideas 1878 in a book against a world of violent resistance almost half a century before Roosevelt's Four Freedoms. He called his book The Right to Live and the Duty to Die.

This magazine would not be the place to discuss Popper-Lynkeus and the cult that surrounded him towards the end of his life, had not Freud