My dear Doctor:
I shall make you a confession ... I have been struggling with the question of why I have never, in all these years, made an effort to meet you ... I think I have avoided you out of a kind of fear of finding my own double [Doppelgänger Furcht] . . . When I read one of your beautiful works I seem to encounter again and again, behind the poetic fiction, the very presumptions, interests and conclusions so well known to me from my own thoughts . . . Your ability to be deeply moved by the truths of the unconscious, the recurrence of your thoughts to the polarity of love and death—all of this had for me an uncanny familiarity . . . Forgive me for straying into analysis—that is, after all, all I know.
The writer of this letter was none other than Sigmund Freud, and he sent it to famed Viennese Playwright Arthur Schnitzler on May 14, 1922, the eve of Schnitzler's 60th birthday. The letter (printed in Germany in 1955 but not previously published in the U.S.) has now been brought to light by Los Angeles Psychoanalyst Herbert I. Kupper, to make a point about Freud and his theories. It suggests, Dr. Kupper told the American Psychoanalytic Association, not only that Freud was capable of believing in the mystical concept of the Doppelgänger,* but that his teachings themselves had a striking Doppelgänger in art.
Youth in Step. Schnitzler, like Freud, was born soon after mid-century in Franz Josef's Austro-Hungarian Empire. Each was his mother's eldest child; each was soon handed over to nursemaids because mother was pregnant again; each was soon bereaved by the death of his next-born brother (Schnitzler at 14 months, Freud at 19). The Schnitzler family was the better off; Freud's father was an unsuccessful wool merchant, while Schnitzler's was a fashionable ear, nose and throat specialist, who basked in limelight reflected from theatrical patients. Both young men became physicians and took up neurology; both went to Nancy to study hypnosis under French psychiatrists; both worked in the Vienna clinic of Neurologist Theodor Meynert. Largely because of their experience there, both abandoned the conventional practice of medicine. (Wrote Schnitzler: "Meynert tried to convince patients with delusions that they could not possibly have them.") There the parallel in their lives ended—at least on the surface.
Freud plunged into psychology and self-analysis, declared himself dedicated forever to the scientific search for the "naked truth." Having lived ascetically before marriage, he lived monogamously thereafter. Schnitzler discovered what he called "fictional truth," had a series of well-publicized affairs with glamorous actresses, and feverishly wrote about a character named Anatol (a thinly disguised self-portrait) who was a gay yet morbid epicure, a dandy with a death wish who thought he had to die to be truly free. Through the turmoil of world war and revolution, Schnitzler wrote play after play (notably Der Reigen or La Ronde) in which the characters were driven by unconscious impulses and riven by unconscious conflicts.