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No Bath, No Apple. A traveling fellowship to study in Paris under the famed Jean Martin Charcot in 1885 turned
Freud's mind upon the inner workings of the human mind, and especially upon hysteria and the hypnosis that Charcot used in treating it. It was a long series of hesitant and even devious steps from there to psychoanalysis. Freud was no Archimedes rushing from the bath and shouting "Eureka," not even a Newton, blasted into wakeful inspiration by the fall of an apple. He was a plodder.
The case of hysterical Anna O. (real name: Bertha Pappenheim, 1859-1936), a patient of his friend and colleague, Josef Breuer, gave Freud the first hint of how a troubled person may ease or banish symptoms by talking about them. From Patient Emmy von N., Freud realized that a victim of hysteria becomes emotionally attached to her (or his) physician. It occurred to him that there was a sexual basis for emotional upsets, so they could be resolved by analysis in a laboratory-style emotional attachment. When Freud interrupted the "stream of consciousness" recital of Patient Elisabeth von R., she complained and said that it was better to let her ramble on, because one idea led to another in her mind. Thus another insight, free association, came to Freud. The couch, with its comfortable encouragement to talkativeness, became the workbench of psychoanalysis.
The world stirred only fitfully at first. Freud's key book, The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he set forth his gospel, sold only 600 copies, netted the author $250 in royalties in the eight years after its publication in 1900. He had the ear of only a small group of devoted admirers among Vienna psychologists and psychiatrists (among them Alfred Adler), who met weekly at his home on the Berggasse as the "Psychological Wednesday Society." A few tentative references to Freud's work were beginning to appear in English (more in Britain than the U.S.); he was ridiculed in Germany.
From Switzerland came better tidings. At Zurich's famed Burgholzli Mental Hospital Carl Gustav Jung had learned Freud's methods from his writings and had begun to apply psychoanalysis to patients, including a few suffering from psychoses. Better yet, he had developed a set of word-asscciation tests that seemed to him to confirm some of Freud's basic views. Then early in 1907 there came to Vienna in pilgrimage the first of the few disciples who were to remain loyal to Freud through all the storm and stress of later years: Max Eitingon, Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs and Ernest Jones. In 1909 recognition crossed the Atlantic: Freud and Jung, Ferenczi and Jones attended the 20th anniversary celebration of Clark University in Worcester, Mass, on the invitation-of psychologist G. Stanley Hall. For all his favorable reception in the U.S., Freud detested the country and expressed his feelings in petty ways. Tobacco, he once sneered, was the only excuse for Columbus' great mistake.