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In other respects, too, said Dr. Kupper, "Schnitzler's use of psychoanalytic concepts seems to exhibit the same progressions as Freud's scientific investigations." His early works, e.g., Paracelsus (1897), use hypnosis "as a comic and plot device to penetrate the realms of the unconscious." This was the period when Freud still hoped to put hypnosis to good medical use. Later plays, e.g., Intermezzo, Comedy of Seduction (1905, 1924), stress unconscious motivation of behavior not unlike Freud's Studies in Hysteria (1893). These, says Dr. Kupper, were followed by works involving concepts of resistance, transference and repression during the time when Freud was developing the same ideas and giving them wide currency.
Introspection & Intuition. Freud himself summed up this continuing similarity in his letter to Schnitzler: "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition—though actually as a result of sensitive introspection—everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons. I even believe that basically you are yourself a depth psychologist."
But Analyst Kupper suggests a question: If Poet Schnitzler was really a psychologist, was Psychologist Freud perhaps really a poet? For a long time before Freud, the soul had belonged in the domain of poets more than of physicians, who had increasingly concerned themselves with the physical being. Freud tried to subject the intangibles of the soul to the discipline of scientific materialism and determinism. And yet his insights may have been closer to the truths of poetry than to the truths of science.
-Or spiritual double, a concept that can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians, who believed that every man had a soul (ka) which was his exact double. Often in the portrait of a king there was a little man behind the king with the ruler's features and dress.