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We know less of this period of Freud's life than of his childhood. He had not the same motive to investigate it or write about it as he had with his early development when he embarked on it at the age of forty-one.1 What little we know comes from his mother and sister2 and from occasional remarks of his in later life. From these impressions one gets a picture of him as having been a ‘good’ boy, not an unruly one, and one much given to reading and study. His mother's favourite, he possessed the self-confidence that told him he would achieve something worth while in life, and the ambition to do so, though for long the direction this would take remained uncertain.
The early years in Vienna were evidently very unpleasant. Freud said later that he remembered very little of the early period between the ages of three and seven: ‘They were hard times and not worth remembering.’ He greatly missed the freedom and enjoyments of the countryside, which he was not to see again for thirteen years. There were the parks in Vienna, and later on occasional visits to a spa, Roznau, in Moravia, necessitated by his mother's tuberculosis, but all that was very different from the open country where he had once been so happy. It gave a good reason for his dislike of Vienna, to which two further powerful motives were added later.3
Freud's continuous memories began at the age of seven. There are only five incidents in the years between three and seven of which we have any record. The first, related by his mother,4 was of his soiling a chair with his dirty hands, but