[My father] told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. ‘When I was a young man’, he said, ‘I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace [Freiburg]; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: “Jew! Get off the pavement!”’ ‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I went into the roadway and picked up my cap’, was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies. (Freud, 1900, p. 197)
Freud (as I will now call him) had good reason to hope that, despite being Jewish, he might do well in life just as Hannibal had many centuries before. Prior to Freud’s birth, the revolutions of 1848 in Europe had been followed by the Austro–Hungarian empire, of which Vienna was the capital, granting full civil and political rights to Jews. Freud could therefore realistically hope to make a career for himself in Vienna as a doctor or lawyer.
The Jewish population in Vienna was also increasing. During Freud’s years at secondary school, where he was top of his class for seven years in succession, the proportion of Jewish to other students increased from ‘44 to 73 percent of the total school population’ (Gay, 1988, p. 20). There was also considerable anti-Semitism, not least when in May 1873 a financial crisis occurred resulting in bankruptcies and business failures for which the Viennese Jews were ‘accused of destabilizing the markets’ (Roudinesco, 2016, p. 25).
The same year Freud registered, aged seventeen, as a student at Vienna University where he later recalled,
I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew. I refused absolutely to do the first of these things. I have never been able to see why I should feel ashamed of my descent or, as people were beginning to say, of my ‘race’. I put up, without much regret, with my non-acceptance into the community; for it seemed to me that in spite of this exclusion an active fellow-worker could not fail to find some nook or cranny in the framework of humanity. These first impressions at the University, however, had one consequence which was afterwards to prove important; for at an early age I was made familiar with the fate of being in the Opposition and of being put under the ban of the ‘compact majority’. The foundations were thus laid for a certain degree of independence of judgement. (Freud, 1925c, p. 9)
Being his mother’s favourite child must have helped. He had a room to himself while his parents, together with their six other children, had to make do with three bedrooms between them in the larger apartment to which Jacob moved the family during Freud’s student days. Furthermore, so devoted seemingly were Freud’s parents to him that, when he complained of the noise made by his sister Anna’s piano playing, the piano was removed.
Freud was not keen on music. But he certainly benefited from other aspects of the artistic and cultural life of late nineteenth-century Vienna where there were many Jewish publishers, editors, gallery owners, theatre and music promoters, poets, novelists, conductors, virtuosos, painters, scientists, philosophers, and historians. In later life Freud’s friends included the novelists Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, and he was consulted in his work as a psychoanalyst by the composer Gustav Mahler.
As a student, Freud’s travels took him in early 1875 to England where he visited his half-brothers, Emanuel and Philipp, in Manchester. Following his return to Vienna, and thanks to work there in the zoology laboratory of Carl Claus, Freud did research, beginning in March 1876, in an experimental laboratory of marine biology in Trieste into the sexual organs of eels.
On his return to Vienna he did research in a laboratory headed by the German doctor and physiologist Ernst Brücke. Here, as well as getting to know a fellow researcher, Josef Breuer, who would become a major influence on his subsequent clinical work, Freud’s research included evolutionary-based investigation of the nervous system of fish, this resulting in one of his first scientific publications.
Following a year’s compulsory military service in 1879 and 1880, and after completing his medical degree in 1881, Freud continued doing physiology research with Brücke. But this ended when, after falling in love with, and getting engaged in June 1882 to marry one of his sister’s friends, Martha Bernays, Freud was persuaded by Brücke to get the medical training needed to qualify as a doctor so as to earn the money needed to support a family.
To this end Freud got work in Vienna’s general hospital. Here, while completing his medical training and qualification, he did research with the psychiatrist, neuropathologist, and anatomist Theodor Meynert. In May 1884, Freud achieved the rank of junior doctor and soon after qualified as a university lecturer.
By then he had done research into medical uses of cocaine. This resulted in an article, ‘On Coca’, published in June 1884. But his hopes of doing well in research into cocaine were, it seems, crushed by another researcher, Carl Koller, being credited with discovering the value of cocaine as an anaesthetic in eye surgery. Freud’s research into cocaine was also brought to an end, apparently, due to what in retrospect turned out to be his ill-judged prescription of cocaine to ease problems of his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow.
Freud had meanwhile learnt about his above-mentioned friend Josef Breuer’s treatment of a case of hysteria. This may have contributed to Freud going, in October 1885, to study in Paris with Martin Charcot. By then Charcot was famous not only for demonstrating that hysteria occurs in men as well as in women. He was also famous for overturning previous neurological accounts of this condition by using hypnosis to demonstrate its psychological cause.
After leaving Paris in February 1886, Freud studied children’s diseases in Berlin before returning to Vienna. Here, that April, he began work as a doctor specializing in the treatment of patients with hysteria and other nervous or psychological problems. Money from this work, together with financial help from his fiancée Martha Bernays’s family, enabled him to marry her that September.
Their first child, Mathilde, was born the following October. They went on to have five more children – Jean-Martin, Oliver, Ernst, Sophie, and Anna. By the time Anna was born, on 3 December 1895, Freud’s first book – an account of the psychology of aphasia affecting the ability to speak, read, and write – had been published. The same year, 1891, the Freud family moved to a large flat in Vienna, Bergasse 19. It remained Freud’s home for the next forty-seven years.