ABSTRACT
When Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, John B. Watson, the “father of behaviorism,” was not yet out of graduate school. Freud entered the University of Vienna, in 1873, at the age of seventeen. During his first three years there, he was driven; he later recorded, by a restless “youthful eagerness” to master all subjects at once. Like Freud also, he held the view that hysterical disorders could be traced to psychological sources. It was also that Freud had his most sustained and impressive encounter with “hard” laboratory science. The Physiological Institute was presided over by "the great Ernst Brucke himself"—a man of imposing scientific competence and reputation. Freud’s association with the Physiological Institute was reluctantly terminated in 1882. Freud’s own account of these intervening years gave rather short shrift to the possible influence of the Physiological Institute upon the psychoanalytic theory.
