ABSTRACT
Franz Brentano came from a brilliant German family, who were also devout Roman Catholics. Sigmund Freud attended his courses in philosophy from 1874 to 1876. Freud would have been attending Brentano's lectures at the age of 19 to 21—important years in his intellectual formation. Freud replied, in a letter dated June 9, 1932, that Gomperz had inquired at a party for someone to replace Eduard Wessel, the young translator of the twelfth volume who had died suddenly, and that Brentano had given him Freud's name. Jones also says that Freud stated many years later that he knew very little of Plato's philosophy. Freud preferred to acknowledge people like J. M. Charcot and H. Bernheim, who did recognize the existence of the unconscious. All the physicalists, especially someone like Brucke, under whom Freud studied, held that observation was the stuff of science, and therefore if psychology was a science then it was also concerned with this.
