ABSTRACT

One of the questions the study of history poses is whether subsequent ages understand an age better than the age understood itself. Since this question cannot be satisfactorily answered, we may suggest that we understand an earlier epoch differently than the epoch understood itself. We understand Freud’s age differently than the way Freud and Abraham understood it. I invite you to look at familiar facts from a perspective that the two philosophies, Enlightenment and Romanticism, shaped the history of psychoanalysis. To study Freud’s work within a larger context is not to diminish his contribution. In Freud the past was reborn in a new form. To deny Freud his full intellectual ancestry was one of the mistakes of the early Freudian hagiography.