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There can be no doubt that because of the tangled age-sex relationships in his family, Sigmund Freud was early preoccupied with the riddles of sex. Yet it was not all damaging. He was breast-fed and, as firstborn, remained his mother's favorite throughout her long life (to 1930). Freud wrote: "A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success." Mother was indulgent: it was not she but his father who scolded him at the age of two for bedwetting. Father was firm without being harsh. There is no reason to believe that he ever threatened Sigmund with mutilation for masturbating, though this seems to have been a common threat in Europe then. Yet Freud was eventually to decide that every man suffers from a fear of being castrated.
Sigmund's constant companion was his nephew John, and (says Jones with unanalytical British understatement) "there are indications that their mutual play was not always entirely innocent." Their lack of innocence extended to play with John's sister Pauline, and Freud (as he told later) had fantasies of her being raped by both John and himself. Outstanding in his early relationships was his attitude toward a father old enough to be his grandfather. By putting him on a pedestal of eld and aloofness, and absolving him of "blame" for his mother's pregnancies, little Sigmund had few or no conscious wishes to replace his father in his mother's affections and/or bed. His Oedipal feelings were displaced upon Philipp. This may have made it easier for him to see Oedipus in others—perhaps to the point of exalting the notion beyond its true value. It was a shock when, subjecting himself to history's first psychoanalysis at 41, he discovered that he had had unconscious Oedipal feelings like any other patient.
Delayed Degree. When Sigmund was four, the family moved to Vienna. A bookworm, he graduated from high school summa cum laude at 17. It was then the fashion in polite strata of most European society to lock sex in a darkened bedroom and pretend that otherwise (except for haut-monde libertines and the licentious "lower classes") it did not exist. For whatever inner need, the adolescent Freud accepted this viewpoint, once even warned his sister Anna off Balzac and Dumas.
There is no clear explanation of Freud's choice of medicine as a career. His own best version (one of several) is that "I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live, and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution.'' Even after he had finished his medical courses (at 22), he remained in the laboratories with zoology, chemistry, physiology and neurology. In the end it was no mission to relieve suffering humanity that took him out of the lab into practice as an M.D., but a combination of romance and economics. At 25 he fell in love with Martha Bernays. To marry and raise a family, he had to earn a living instead of continuing to live off his aged, impoverished father and on loans. So Freud plunged into the practice of neurology, and then, after four years of penny-pinching and passionate correspondence with his fiancee, he married.