ABSTRACT
Freud’s reading of eighteenth-century British texts continued the interest he had shown in British empiricist traditions. This led him to John Locke (1632-1704), whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) had prepared the way for the British Enlightenment of the next century. It also provided a good example of a gentlemanly style — it had, after all, originated, as Locke explained, in conversations and discussions between like-minded friends. As Freud explained in a letter to Silberstein dated 15 March 1875, he had been alerted to Locke’s writings by the philosopher Franz Brentano, whose lectures he had attended in the University of Vienna, and with whom he had also had some private contact. Brentano had declared Locke’s argument ‘höchst geistreich’ — spirited, intelligent, and ingenious. He followed up the interest Brentano had aroused by buying a copy of Locke’s Essay and underlining some passages in its opening section — the section that set itself to refute the notion that there were ‘innate principles in the mind’. Whether Freud, who stressed the imprinting of the human mind not only by experiences in infancy but also by the experience of previous generations, could wholly assent to Locke’s conception of the neonate mind as a tabula rasa is difficult to make out, though his stubborn adherence to the Lamarckian belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics and his views on predisposition to homosexuality might argue against it. His psychoanalytic practice and the theories based upon it were not materially affected by the epistemological problems Locke’s Essay had raised.
