ABSTRACT
In most evaluations of Sigmund Freud's work it is customary to trace his debt to the tradition and methods of medicine, psychiatry and neurology at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter discusses three persons who have given Modernism its peculiar and specific bias as well as character: Michel de Montaigne, Rene Descartes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Essays of Montaigne establish a revolutionary departure in European man's attempt to study and know himself. The genius of Montaigne's style in The Essays is its capacity to sustain an enigmatic undecidedness in the myriad contradictions of self-experience. It was to be Freud's unique contribution to the responsibility of psychotherapeutics that he found a method, psychoanalysis, by which the symptoms of the hysteric could be deciphered through interpersonal discourse. Freud was the first psychiatric clinician who, instead of explaining away symptoms, looked for their meaning for the patient.
