Pater (Father) Schmidt and the Catholic ChurchNear the end of his life, Freud referred a number of times in his correspondence to a certain “Pater Schmidt.” The most striking reference was in a letter to Jones in June 1936: That my chief enemy P. Schmidt has just been given the Austrian Award of Honor for Art and Science for his pious lies in ethnology I claim as my credit. Evidently he had to be consoled for Providence having let me reach the age of eighty. Fate has its own ways of making one altruistic. When my Master Ernst Brücke received this award I became aware of a wish that I myself might sometime attain it. Today I contentedly resign myself to having indirectly helped someone else to do so.112 From Freud’s remarks, I originally assumed that this Schmidt must have been some local Catholic priest of minor intellectual significance who had made a small reputation, perhaps by criticizing Freudian theory. This assumption was reinforced further when I read Jones, and also Schur, who denigrates Schmidt “as a monk with an interest in ethnology.”113 By chance, I stumbled across a reference to Schmidt in another context and soon discovered that the facts are very different. Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954), besides being, like Freud, a professor at the University of Vienna, was a scientist of world renown. Historically, he was one of the great ethnologists (cultural anthropologists), and a great linguist of primitive cultures; indeed, he was a founding father of both disciplines.114 (Among his other accomplishments, he founded the international institute Anthropos and the world-renowned journal Anthropos.115) His first love was linguistics, and perhaps his greatest contribution was in the field of comparative language.116 Very early he immersed himself in the languages of Australia and the South Seas, and his studies of these tongues, primarily published between 1900 and 1920, led him to discover the inner connections between the languages of the peoples in Southeast Asia and those of the South Seas. A biographer has described his contribution: This, the discovery of a genius, is one of the major accomplishments in the field of linguistics, which ranks in importance with the proof of the relationship among all of the Indo-European languages…. [T]he language group proposed by Father Schmidt as the “austric linguistic stock” embraces almost two-thirds of the inhabited area of the earth.117 He continued publishing important articles on languages of the South Seas until shortly before his death. In Schmidt’s over 600 publications, references to topics close to those of concern to Freud appear to be very uncommon.118 |