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Freud's letters to Fliess were like a daily diary of his self-analysis, the place where he recorded his earliest fundamental discoveries. His letters to Silberstein seem to mirror his internal world in a particularly delicate period — the phase of transition from adolescence to early adulthood. In these letters Freud mentions a whole gallery of people and friends and quotes an enormous quantity of books. This gives us greater insight into his original cultural background, into the philosophical and literary influences underlying his subsequent adherence to the scientific school of E.W. von Brücke, as well as into the cultural humus and sensitivity from which his psychological interests proper would later be derived.
The Freud we come to know in these letters is an adolescent who reads passionately the works of Lessing, Goethe and Shakespeare. Moreover, among those he has elected to be his cultural heroes are two leading exponents of the Jewish liberation movement, Ludwig Borne and Heinrich Heine; it is through them that he becomes familiar with the works of the Sefardi “heretic” of Amsterdam; this is a young man who follows Brentano's courses keenly, and as a result he is temporarily obliged to question his own atheism; he devours Tyndall, Huxley, Lyell, Darwin and Thomson; he reads and translates the works of Mill and openly declares his “pro-English” cultural bias. He numbers Kant among his teachers and he is wholly won over by the works of Feuerbach; he is well-versed in the Bible and the Psalms, quoting them freely and light-heartedly, as do the characters in the works of Shalom ‘Aleichem, the leading figure in the contemporary Jewish renaissance.
In these letters Freud practices his written Spanish, signs his letters with the name of a character in Cervantes, and calls the Jews