ABSTRACT
As a young man, Freud had been given a taste of the Victorian faith in progress by Heinrich Braun, a future socialist leader, who had advised him to read two popular British authors of the day. The first of these was Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62), whose History of Civilization in England, first published between 1857 and 1861, Freud remembered reading on Braun’s recommendation.1 Buckle commended a great principle he called ‘scepticism’, by which he meant enquiry untrammelled by received opinion:
In his autobiography and elsewhere, Freud prided himself on scepticism of this kind, crediting the outsider status Austrian anti-Semitism conferred on him for strength ening his independence of mind.3 The other British author to whom Braun directed his friend’s attention was William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903). Freud could not remember the title of the work in question; it was probably Lecky’s popular History of the Rise and Inf luence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865), in which Lecky celebrated ‘the great critical movement which has renovated all history, all science, all technology’. This movement, he claimed,
Freud had learnt about ‘the guilt of error’ the hard way, for he had more than once had to abandon a cherished theory under the weight of contrary evidence. In his early days he sometimes f led into denial and cooking the books — but in his more truthful prime he had accepted the Lord’s dictum in Goethe’s Faust (‘Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt’) and stressed the positive value of errors: they could lead to necessary correction.
