FROM CASES OF HYSTERIA TO THE THERAPEUTIC SOCIETY
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its tryouts"-tryouts for Europe's social and political disintegration.
The Habsburg Empire was pulling apart at the seams internally as
Europe was internationally: vertically, on nationality lines; horizontal–
ly, on class and ideological lines.
The liberal Jews of Vienna, who had neither religious affiliations nor strong
convictions, found themselves disliked by the working classes and the peas–
antry-who were strongly nationalistic and held racial prejudices.
Freud was viscerally aware of this lurking anti-Semitism. In order to
support himself and his future wife, he had become a physician rather than
a research scientist. By 1896, he had been married for ten years and was
the father of six children. He had given up neurology, was practicing as a
PrilJatdozent,
and slowly had come
to
elaborate his own system of treat–
ment. But he did not have a prestigious university professorship. He was a
liberal, did not practice his religion, but never denied being Jewish. Thus
he watched the rise of the New Right in Austria and abroad, but unlike
Theodor Herzl who founded the Zionist movement, did not become
politically active. And unlike other liberals, he did not join either the
socialist or the communist party. Instead, he retreated, as it were, into try–
ing to penetrate to the roots of the psychological reasons that led people
to join populist and nationalistic organizations. Undoubtedly, he also took
Le Bon's
Psychologie des Joules
seriously, which was published in Paris in
1895, even though he did not discuss it at length until 1921, in his
Croup
Psychology.
Freud wrote to Fliess on October 15, 1897, that his self-analy–
sis had gotten:
much further. ... being totally honest wi th oneself is a good exercise.
A
single idea of general value dawned on me ... [The phenomenon]
of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now
consider ita universal event in early childhood, even if not so early as
in children who have been made hysterical .... If this is so, we can
understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the
objections that reason raises against the presupposition of fate....
Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and
each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted
into reality, with the fuJI quantity of repression which separates his
infantile state from his present one.
Freud went on to speculate about similar motivations in the case of
Shakespeare's Hamlet-not as consciously intended by the author, but as
