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In the summer of 1897 the spell began to break, and Freud undertook his most heroic feat—a psycho-analysis of his own unconscious. It is hard for us nowadays to imagine how momentous this achievement was, that difficulty being the fate of most pioneering exploits. Yet the uniqueness of the feat remains. Once done it is done for ever. For no one again can be the first to explore those depths.1
In the long history of humanity the task had often been attempted. Philosophers and writers, from Solon to Montaigne, from Juvenal to Schopenhauer, had essayed to follow the advice of the Delphic oracle,2 but all had succumbed to the effort. Inner resistances had barred advance. There had from time to time been flashes of intuition to point the way, but they had always flickered out. The realm of the unconscious, whose existence was so often postulated, remained dark, and the words of Heraclitus still stood: ‘The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored.’
Freud had no help, no one to assist the undertaking in the slightest degree. Worse than this: the very thing that drove him onward he must have dimly divined, however much he tried to conceal it from himself, could only result in profoundly affecting—perhaps even severing—his relations with the one being to whom he was so closely bound and who had steadied his mental equilibrium. It was daring much, and risking much. What indomitable courage, both intellectual and moral, must have been needed! But it was forthcoming.
It is only from a distance, however, that the dramatic aspect