Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [106]
He was born in 1856 in Freiberg, a small town in Moravia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), the son of an impoverished itinerant Jewish trader in woolens, cloth, hides, and raw foodstuffs. At home, as a boy, he heard nothing of science, let alone modern psychology, and none of his ancestors had ever attended a university or even a gymnasium; by all odds, he should have become a small-time merchant like his father, Jacob.
For his first several years, he, his middle-aged father—who had been married before and raised another family—and his young mother lived in a single rented room that was soon further crowded by a baby sister. When Sigmund was four the family moved to Vienna, where, though his father’s business gradually improved, the family’s growth—eventually there were seven children—made for many hard years.
Freud thus had reason for his lifelong anxiety about money. And about his place in society; although by the 1860s legal reforms in the empire had freed Jews to live outside the ghetto and to attend gymnasia and universities, they remained social outcasts and were barred from practicing most professions or holding high public office.
Freud was doubly an outsider. His father had thrown off the Orthodox faith of his forebears and become a freethinker, possibly in the futile hope of being assimilated into Gentile society, and although Freud always considered himself a Jew and consorted mainly with fellow Jews, he was, he once told a Protestant friend, “a totally Godless Jew,” belonging to no congregation and taking no part in the life of the Jewish community. It is not surprising that he would later seek from psychology answers to questions so unlike those asked by Helmholtz, Wundt, and James, the outstanding psychologists of his youth. In their separate ways they asked, “How does the mind work?” while Freud would ask, “What am I and what made me that way?” But he would do so only after many years of trying to become a scientist in the mold of Helmholtz.
At Freud’s birth, a peasant woman had prophesied to his mother that he would become a great man, and his parents often told him the story during his boyhood. Whether for that reason or others, he early became extremely ambitious and diligent in his studies and was first in his class in the gymnasium for seven years. Law and medicine were the two professions then open to Jews, and in his final year at the gymnasium, after reading an inspiring essay by Goethe on Nature, he decided to spend his life in science. In 1873 he enrolled in the medical school at the University of Vienna; there, despite his exclusion from the fellowship of his anti-Semitic classmates—or perhaps because of it—he excelled as a student.
But medicine, he discovered, had little intellectual appeal for him, and as for actual practice, he found the prospect repellent. Partway through medical training he came under the spell of Ernst Brücke, professor of physiology and a co-founder, with Emil Du Bois-Reymond, of the Berlin Physical Society, the nucleus of the mechanist-physiological school that had dominated psychology for a generation. Freud was impressed by Brücke’s presentation of physiological psychology and charmed by his warm and fatherly demeanor. Brücke, nearly forty years older than Freud—as was Freud’s own father—took a personal interest in his brilliant young student and became both scientific mentor and father-figure to him. Freud later said that Brücke “carried more weight with me than anyone else in my whole life,”7 a remarkable statement for one who spent nearly fifty years developing a subjective, introspective psychology totally unlike Brücke’s.
But Freud’s concern with introspection would come later. As a serious, hardworking medical student, he had no time for and no interest in inward-looking psychology; indeed, he was so taken by the physiological approach to psychology that he delayed the completion of his medical studies to do research in Brücke’s Physiological