ABSTRACT
Freud’s career began inauspiciously with a huge setback. In the fall of 1886, after returning from Paris where he had gone to study with Charcot, Freud gave a lecture on male hysteria at the prestigious Vienna Society of Physicians. Wishing to share with his colleagues what he had discovered in Paris, he presented a case that he had followed at the Salpêtrière Hospital; it was the traumatic hysteria of a man who had fallen from a scaffold. Freud expounded on Charcot’s observations that there was no link between hysteria and genital organs or any difference between male and female hysteria (Jones, 1953, pp. 229-230). As a matter of fact, Freud’s lecture was poorly received. One old surgeon objected: How could Freud talk of “hysteria” in males when the very word came from the Greek word for “womb”? The rejection exasperated Freud, intensifying his sense of alienation from his Austrian colleagues. Irritated and impatient, he abandoned hope of being recognized by the local medical society and concentrated on establishing his private practice. Freud wrote or published relatively little between 1886 and 1891, but he continued rening his treatment of hysteric patients. His exposure to Charcot’s work on male hysteria and other neuroses in men, however, played a signicant role in his later formulation of a general theory of psychosexuality and on the non-gender-specic idea of universal bisexuality (Micale, 1995, p. 166).
