Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)

Early Developmental Influences

Emmanuel had two children, John and Pauline, who were close to Freud's age. In a 1899 paper on screen memories (i.e., memories of early life experiences that presumably are a cover for even earlier psychologically significant memories that are censored from awareness because they are more painful), Freud described an incident in which he and John, rivals for Pauline's attentions, snatched away the bunch of yellow flowers Pauline was picking in a mountain meadow. He connected this incident with the early awakening of his sexuality. (Freud reports that a yellow flower was the only one that he had difficulty identifying on his medical school examination, an instance of a “neurotic inefficiency.”)

Freud's parents had eight children. Freud's next youngest brother, Julius, and his mother's brother Julius both died as young Freud approached his second birthday. His mother was emotionally preoccupied with mourning her losses and transferred Freud's care to a succession of governesses. When Freud was 2½ years old and still acutely suffering the loss of his mother's emotional support, he lost this favorite governess, who was arrested for petty theft. When Freud was 4, his father decided to move the family to Vienna. Biographer Peter Gay recounted that years later, while in the midst of his self-analysis following his father's death, Freud recalled that he had shared a bedroom on the train with his mother and saw her naked while preparing for bed. The wish stimulated by this encounter, together with the social prohibitions against awareness of this wish, led Freud to experience anxiety which was displaced onto train travel, and this accounts for Freud's lifelong phobia of train travel.

It is striking how much these early childhood experiences shaped Freud's writing and clinical technique. Mothers are almost always missing from Freud's most well-known case studies. Further, Freud insisted that personality development does not begin until sometime between ages 3 and 5. At this age the little boy experiences rivalry with his father for the attention of his mother, and the little girl experiences rivalry with her mother for her father's attention. Freud devoted little study to the quality of the very young child's tie to his or her mother.

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