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The dark, intense young man ambling through the great arcaded court at the University of Vienna was caught in fantasy. He was still a student, a nobody, a Jew in Franz Josef's Austria. Yet, as he admired the statues of great professors in the university's hall of fame, Sigmund Freud dreamed of a day when his own likeness would be there among the great; he even envisaged the inscription for it.
Today, 80 years since the dream and 100 years since Freud was born, his bronze image stands in that dusty hall of fame, and below, just as he had conceived it, is the inscription from Sophocles: (Who divined the famed riddle and was a man most mighty).*
The riddle that entranced Sigmund Freud was the same that had entranced man through the ages—What am I?
Freud did not divine it. But he penetrated so deeply and so disturbingly into its dark recesses as to earn permanent membership in that small fraternity of men who, by thought alone, have shaken and shaped man's image of himself.
Day of Eulogy. Sigmund Freud's membership in that fraternity will be formally recognized a fortnight hence, on May 6, when ceremonies at seats of learning in the Western world will commemorate the centennial of the birth of the man who devised psychoanalysis—the exploration of the Unconscious—and thereby opened the way to modern psychiatry and the treatment of man's aberrations. In Vienna, where Freud made his great exploration, there will be three memorial meetings. and wreaths will be laid at the base of his statue. From the University of Chicago some of Freud's most earnest disciples, among them his devoted follower and biographer, Britain's Dr. Ernest Jones.*will broadcast talks on the impact of Freud on psychiatry and medicine. A transatlantic hookup will join London and New York in a commemoration of Freud's impact on the arts, literature and science.
No day of eulogy is needed, however, to dramatize the legacy of Sigmund Freud to his generation and generations to come. Christianity brought to Western civilization the conviction that man is governed by his God through his deathless soul. Along came the Renaissance and then the 18th century rationalists to counter this doctrine with another faith: man is re sponsible to reason alone; there is no God. no immortal soul. Then came Sigmund Freud to champion a newer hypothesis: man. without a God. is largely governed by a strange, little-known power called the Unconscious. It was a startling, indeed a discomfiting theory (though it had been hinted at even before Oedipus confronted the Sphinx), for it asked man to alter his vision of himself and almost everything that he valued, from his religion to his mode of dress.