ABSTRACT
By the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna, once the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, had ‘a stagnating social order based on a feudal Catholic tradition’. What S. Freud began to say was often unacceptable and shocking to a hypocritical turn-of-the-century world where the number of prostitutes in Vienna was astonishingly high, and where, in the opposite corner, was another powerful influence, Rationalism: the argument that everything was available to the conscious, logical mind. Freud spent six years in neuro-physiological research before finally finishing his medical training. Freud analysed his own dreams, discovering in them unacceptable and hidden wishes, which fuelled his research. He began to argue that mental distress and anxiety is the result of emotional conflict: conflict between sexual impulses and morality. Neurological studies confirm Freud’s clinically based discoveries of the disconnection between the organising and verbal capacities and the more instinctive, emotional functions.
