ABSTRACT

The first psychoanalysts belonged to a group of erudite and intellectual people who by their education were well versed in history. It should be of no surprise, then, that we find allusions to and quotations from historical personages in the writings of Freud and his followers from the very beginning. I counted 40 different historical names in the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg & Federn, 1962–1975)—which I edited—between 1906 and 1918. The systematic application of psychoanalytic concepts to history, however, came relatively late. The first seems to have been by Karl Abraham on Amenhotep IV (Ikhnaton) in 1912, Ernest Jones on Louis Bonaparte in 1913, and Ludwig Jekels with a study on Napoleon I in 1914.