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and Fleischl. All were Gentiles except the last: Fleischl was an assimilated Jew.67 Because of Fleischl’s illness—to which I return later—he was the least scientifically prominent of the group, but he was Freud’s best friend at the lab. By contrast, the world into which Freud was moving—the world of private practice and informal intellectual networks that would culminate in the group of psychoanalysts centered around Freud himself—was primarily Jewish, and would remain so throughout Freud’s life.
At the end of this decade of change from the university-science biology world into his specialization in psychopathology, Freud was to start on his self-analysis, which took place roughly from 1896 to 1899. The death of Freud’s father on October 23, 1896, was a most important event that apparently accelerated this analysis, for (among other things), it brought back the meaning of his father to him as a child. It also freed Freud to face his own attitudes toward his father in a way that would not have been possible if Jakob had still been living. Whatever one may think of psychoanalysis, it is important to recognize the courage that this first analysis required—the toughness to investigate alone early hatreds and sexual desires, mostly directed at members of one’s immediate family. Freud received real help and encouragement during this time from Wilhelm Fliess. This aid was mostly from a distance, through the exchange of letters, although the two men did have very important occasional visits together. Fliess was a friend of Freud’s; he was also a doctor and secular Jew, with interests similar to Freud’s.68 He lived in Berlin, and the two carried on a lengthy correspondence, which was fascinating and brilliant, but often bizarre. Fliess was, at the time of the friendship, a rather prominent physician and intellectual; certainly he was much better known than Freud. Sulloway, in a major biographical treatment of Freud, has shown that many fundamental “Freudian” concepts had their origin with Fliess. Among these concepts were infantile sexuality, latency, sublimation, reaction formation, bisexuality, and others.69 (Fliess also had other ideas, which by today’s standards are quite strange—e.g., that the nose is closely connected to the origin of both physical and psychological illness.70) Sulloway convincingly demonstrates the essential intellectual importance of Fliess for Freud, and he dispels the earlier myth of Fliess as an obvious intellectual “kook” who apparently appealed to Freud only because of obscure personal reasons and because he gave Freud a sympathetic, noncritical hearing of his ideas when others were rejecting them.71 As a person, Fliess is described as a man of considerable personal charm and charisma to whom many were attracted.72 Eventually he and Freud quarreled bitterly. The relationship began to deteriorate in 1898, and it was over by 1902.73 Part of the quarrel, as Sulloway makes clear, was fueled by Fliess’s anger that some of his ideas about bisexuality had |