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On leaving school Freud had to face the anxious problem of choosing a career. He had not yet come to any decision, and his father had left him entirely free in the matter. The boyhood dreams of becoming a great general or a Minister of State had long vanished in the face of reality. For a Viennese Jew the choice lay between industry or business, law, and medicine. The first of these was quickly discarded by someone of Freud's intellectual type of mind, in spite of his occasional regrets for a more assured existence. There seems to have been a temporary hesitation over the study of jurisprudence with the idea of taking up some social work—an echo of the early political ambitions—but deep impulses were driving him in another direction; incidentally, it is a curious fact that the only examination in his life at which he failed was in medical jurisprudence.1
To medicine itself he felt no direct attraction. He did not conceal in later years that he never felt at home in the medical profession, and that he did not seem to himself to be a regular member of it. I can recall as far back as in 1910 his expressing the wish with a sigh that he could retire from medical practice and devote himself to the unravelling of cultural and historical problems—ultimately the great problem of how man came to be what he is. And yet the world has rightly greeted him as, among other things, a great physician!
Here is his own account: ‘Although we lived in very limited circumstances, my father insisted that in my choice of a profession I should follow my own inclinations.2 Neither at that time, nor indeed in my later life, did I feel any particular predilection for the career of a physician. I was moved, rather, by a sort of curiosity, which was, however, directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects; nor had I