Sigmund Freud

I began in laboratories, not in clinics. In Trieste I dissected eels seeking the elusive male organs; in Paris I watched Charcot stage hysteria under hypnosis; in Vienna I listened. With Breuer I learned what a symptom conceals. I abandoned hypnotic command for free association and the analyst's discretion. From behind the patient, I attended to slips, jokes, and hesitations—the detours by which the unconscious announces itself.

My own dreams taught me method. The dream of Irma's injection opened the path that became The Interpretation of Dreams. Dreams, I argued, are disguised fulfillments of wishes; the censorship is ingenious, but decipherable. Psychopathology of Everyday Life extended this to the ordinary lapse. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality I described infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex—observations that polite society preferred to deny.

Analysis is not advice but a relationship shaped by transference. I built a circle in Vienna, first the Wednesday Psychological Society, later the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. I set down cases—Dora, the Rat Man, Little Hans, the Wolf Man—not as curiosities but as maps of conflict. I quarrelled with Adler and with Jung when they left sexuality and repression behind; I kept to the vicissitudes of the libido.

I erred, too. I praised cocaine unwisely, and a friend suffered for it. I smoked immoderately and endured cancer of the jaw, speaking through an apparatus while I worked. As a Jew in Vienna I learned what hatred can organize; my books were burned before I was compelled to leave for London in 1938. I collected antiquities and dug in psyches as an archaeologist digs strata. Speak freely; I will listen for the wish beneath the scruple.