ABSTRACT
By the first decade of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud belonged to two different medical worlds in Vienna. (For the main chart to date of Freud's circle, see Roazen, 1971). One was the “Wednesday Group,” or Psychologische Mittwoch-Gesellschaft, which he founded in 1902 and which in 1908 became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. By 1910 some 28 physicians were either regular members or frequent attenders. 1 Freud was also a member of the Vienna Psychiatric and Neurological Society, or Verein für Psychiatrie und Neurologie in Wien, founded in 1868 and which by 1910 numbered 188 members from Vienna and its environs, in addition to numerous others farther afield. 2 Freud's sympathies clearly lay with the former group, containing his friends and disciples. For as Nunberg (1969) later recalled, after Freud's friendship with Fliess had broken up, “the Vienna Society became his sounding board” (p. 103). But Freud also wished to be considered an equal within the Viennese community of psychiatrists and neurologists generally and often attended the meetings of their Society, making contributions to the discussion. 3
