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The question on which day Sigmund Freud was born asks for more than a decision between one indifferent date and another. His own characteristic doctrines emphasized states of doubt about times of birth and death, and consequently about paternity and identity. The hero, that is, the self, traditionally comes into the world under circumstances of doubt, danger and difficulty; often he has to be taken away into some sort of “flight into Egypt” for a time. Moreover, at the very time when Freud was formulating his ideas on the cause of psychoneurosis, he was enthusiastically committed to the biological numeralism of his friend Wilhelm Fliess, who taught that birth or death of a child of particular parents could fall only on certain days. Therefore when we learn that Freud actually had such doubts himself, as shown by his dream-thoughts, and that a real doubt was raised about the date of his own birth, which has never yet been cleared up, it becomes interesting what effect his own case may have had on his views of “Zahlenmystik” and “the myth of the birth of the hero.”
When in 1931 a committee of citizens of the little town of Freiberg, Moravia (now called Pribor, Czechoslovakia) where Freud was born, decided to set up a memorial tablet to Freud on the front wall of the house where he had been born, this committee suddenly announced that the local archives declared that Freud had been born not on May 6, 1856, as he himself, his mother, and all his family had celebrated it all his long life, but on March 6, 1856. When Freud heard this, he resented it, because “somebody had tried to make him two months older.” He said that he had the date from his mother “who ought to know best.” The entire committee thereupon simply “accepted this view,” and Dr. and Mrs. Bernfeld in their monograph on Freud's childhood [- Bull. Mennin. Clinic. 8: 4: 107 (July 1944)] say merely: “So, … although we know the power of such wishes over reason and facts, we too accept the traditional date.”
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