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Gordon Allport6a saw his single meeting with Sigmund Freud as “an event of pungent significance,” having “the character of a traumatic developmental episode.” The meeting “started a deep train of thought” that taught Allport “to give full recognition to manifest motives before probing the unconscious.” M. D. Faber8 suggests that Allport's exaggerated response to this encounter came from an unwillingness to recognize his own motives in seeking out Freud, manifest and otherwise, as well as from his prior misconceptions of Freud and psychoanalysis. Faber's reading of the encounter is both ingenious and persuasive, but it may be possible to probe somewhat more deeply the event's significance for Allport.
Allport described the meeting not only in his “Autobiography,” quoted by Faber, but also in a filmed interview with Richard I. Evans.7 The conversational account diverges only slightly from the written one (Allport said he had “told the story many times”): the recent college graduate arrives in Vienna on other business, writes Freud a note announcing his presence, and is given an appointment.
At exactly the appointed time, Freud opened the door of his inner office, invited me in smilingly, sat down, and said nothing. It suddenly occurred to me that it was up to me to have a reason for calling on him, but actually I didn't have any. I was just curious. I fished around in my mind and came up with an event which occurred on the tram-car on the way to his office that I thought would interest him. There had been a little boy about four years old who obviously had already developed a dirt phobia. His mother was a Hausfrau, well starched and very prim, and the little boy would say he didn't want to sit there; it was dirty. He didn't want that
Page 627man to sit next to him; he was dirty. And so it went throughout the whole trip. I thought this might interest Freud since the phobia seemed to be set so early in this case. He listened till I finished; then he fixed his very therapeutic e