ABSTRACT
There are several possible options to date the beginning of psychoanalysis. Not the least feasible among these is to focus on October 15, 1897: the day when Sigmund Freud, unknown yet highly ambitious, communicated his belief that he had discovered the key to what he believed to have been the secrets of the psyche. He wrote a letter to his Berlin-based friend, Wilhelm Fliess, and described the basic pattern of what would later be called “personality dynamics”: a particular form of relationship boys form with their parents between the ages of three and five. He expressed his pride at deciphering Oedipus Rex (Sophocles, 429 BC), the tragedy that tortured nineteenth-century German culture (see Rudnytsky, 1992), interpreted in the same vein Shakespeare’s (1603) Hamlet, which had become the major puzzle of European intellectuals roughly a century earlier (see, for instance, Shapiro, 2010), and provided an important piece of self-analysis: “I have 82found, in my case too, being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood” (cited in Masson, 1985, p. 106).
