Allport's Visit with Freud

Footnotes to the history of psychoanalysis can be very revealing. In Gordon Allport's brief “Autobiography”1 there is one to be found which lights up all sorts of things, like the personalities of Allport and Freud, the way in which psychoanalysis was regarded fifty years ago, the dynamics of the transference relationship, the significance of free association, the ego's mechanisms of defense, and more. Allow me to reproduce a few paragraphs of Allport's essay, and then to interpret them in a few paragraphs of my own. Allport writes:

En route from Constantinople to Cambridge, an event of pungent significance occurred, namely, my one and only encounter with Sigmund Freud. I have told the story many times but it must be repeated, for it had the character of a traumatic developmental episode. My brother Fayette was at that time(1920) in the United States trade commission in Vienna. It was during the period of Hoover relief activities. My brother invited me to stop for a visit. With a callow forwardness characteristic of age twenty-two, I wrote to Freud announcing that I was in Vienna and implied that no doubt he would be glad to make my acquaintance. I received a kind reply in his own handwriting inviting me to come to his office at a certain time. Soon after I had entered the famous red burlap room with pictures of dreams on the wall, he summoned me to his inner office. He did not speak to me but sat in expectant silence, for me to state my mission. I was not prepared for silence and had to think fast to find a suitable conversational gambit. I told him of an episode on the tram car on my way to his office. A small boy about four years of age had displayed a conspicuous dirt phobia. He kept saying to his mother, “I don't want to sit there … don't let that dirty man sit beside me.” To him everything was schmutzig. His mother was a well-starched Hausfrau,