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The little boy found encouragement in these stimulation factors. But he found far more (as psychoanalysts see it) in being breast-fed by a doting mother. "A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother," he wrote, "keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success."
But there were complications. Freud was the eldest son, but of his father's second marriage; he was thus born uncle to nieces and nephews older than himself —"one of the many paradoxes his young mind had to grapple with." Like other firstborns, he suffered the pain of having to share his mother with "intruders" (younger brothers and sisters). Author Jones has a lot of tricky unraveling to do for this tangled period, and comes out at the end with a neat ball of womb-symbols, erotic fantasies and thwarted infantile greed. Of this last, "traces . . . remained in [Freud's] later life in the form of slightly undue anxiety about catching trains." This is perhaps an understatement: Freud liked to be on the platform a good hour before the symbolic breast, pulled out.
Men & Crayfish. Father Jakob Freud was a just and kindly wool merchant, but his principal weakness, woolgathering, kept the growing family poor. In 1859, when Sigmund was three, father Jakob abandoned his son's birthplace, the Moravian town of Freiburg, and went after better business first in Leipzig and then Vienna. Freud so hated this uprooting that he detested Vienna ever after. To travel, to leave Vienna behind, became a lifelong passion. But one of the greatest love-hate paradoxes in Freud's life is that while regularly railing at Vienna, he stuck closely to it. For 47 years he lived in the same Viennese house; and when Briton Jones arrived to take him away, on the day after the Nazi invasion of Austria, Freud dug in his heels for a moment. "This is my post and I can never leave it," he said.
At an early age he went in search of "power over men." So, says Jones, does every human being. Like other boys, Freud dreamed first of being a mighty general, switched (at twelve) to dreams of legal and "ministerial" fame. Only at 17, influenced perhaps by the anti-Semitic barriers to Habsburg politics, did he decide that "the ultimate secret of power was not force but understanding," and that understanding, in turn, must begin with the study of the nature of man. Warned by his father's example, he suppressed his natural love of "speculative rumination," and entered (1873) the "exact" science of medicine.
"My life," he said much later, "has been aimed at one goal only: to infer or to guess how the mental apparatus is constructed and what forces interplay and counteract in it." But he began, like any other laboratory neurology student of his day, by dissecting the spines of eels and the nerve fibers of crayfish.
Black-Eyed Martha. Twenty years of work made Freud "a first-class neurologist, a hard worker, a close thinker." But he showed no signs of imaginative genius. This was partly because of his determination to discipline his fanciful mind, but largely because in 1882 he fell madly in love and felt he could not get married until he had built up a solid reputation.