ABSTRACT
This chapter traces Freud’s intellectual development through his university years; his studies with Brentano, Brücke, and Meynert; his encounters with Charcot and Bernheim; and his friendships with Breuer and Fliess. In doing so, it highlights the philosophical interests guiding his meandering path towards the development of psychoanalysis and examines the “social sub-text” embedded in his early writings on the psycho-neuroses.
Transferring his adolescent, “revolutionary sentiments” from politics to a reductionistic materialism, and then to a dualistic approach to psychology, which combined the physiological and the mental, Freud hoped to address the deepest problems of religion, philosophy, and cultural life through his scientific work. Forced to abandon a research career in brain anatomy and neurology to prepare himself for a life as a physician treating nervous disorders, Freud found in the paired phenomena of hysteria and hypnosis a pathway back to his fundamental social and philosophical interests. For Freud, as for Charcot, “hysteria” proved to be a useful tool for pathologizing religion; while hypnosis demonstrated the reality of unconscious psychical processes and illuminated the nature of authority and the phenomenon of mass “contagion.” To understand these unconscious processes, Freud turned to the study of dreams.
