ABSTRACT
Followed by five sisters and a brother, Sigismund Schlomo Freud was the first-born child of Amalia Nathanson, the third wife of Jacob, and, as interpreter of the unconscious, he would later compare himself to Solomon, who was able to speak the languages of animals. At the age of one and a half, Sigismund’s relationship with his mother was disturbed by the birth and early death of another child. This traumatic event fed his periodic tendency to depression and the conviction that he would die young. His father never succeeded in bringing financial ease to his family and the move from Freiberg to Vienna heightened his sense of precariousness and the desire to distinguish himself according to the prophetic expectations of his idealised mother.
Freud’s youthful inhibition towards women, expressed in his letters to his schoolmate Silberstein, was presumably linked to the ambivalence of his affective investment in his mother and sisters, especially Anna, of whom he was particularly jealous. At the age of 26, he discovered the unexpected violence of passionate love with Martha, in a mutual sentimental education. In the same period, Breuer began to tell him about the treatment of Bertha Pappenheim, a friend of Martha.
