ABSTRACT
According to the obituaries in the Viennese newspapers, Viktor von Dirsztay led the bohemian, romantic life of the cafe literati, an eccentric aesthete, and art lover from a wealthy background. The centre of Dirsztay's life in 1916 must have been the preparation for the publication of his book, which appeared in 1917 under the title Lob des Hohen Verstandes. Dirsztay describes how a man threatened by the dissolution of his ego seeks help from his father and by thinking of his father. One can only briefly indicate a parallel between Ernst Freud's theory and Dirsztay's mental problems, namely the concept of the superego or, alternatively, the doppelganger. In "The 'Uncanny'" a short work from the first half of 1919, Freud discusses the time the phenomenon of the doppelganger.
