Sigmund Freud* Read Free

about everything in print—German classics, literature from ancient Greece and Rome, contemporary writers and philosophers. He mastered one language after another in school—Latin, Greek, French, perfect English (devouring and memorizing Shakespeare’s plays in English), then taught himself Italian and Spanish.
    One of his favorite writers was Ludwig Borne, especially an essay of his called “The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days.” Borne advised a writer to take paper and write down “everything that comes into your head” with total honesty and without thinking about it: “You will be quite out of your senses with astonishment at the new and unheard-of thoughts you have had.” Automatic writing, this was called.
    Freud was a born writer. Like many people, he found his dreams interesting, but he actually took the trouble of writing them down in a notebook every day. No one knew what dreams meant or didn’t mean, but to him they were worth putting on paper.
    He and his best friend, Eduard Silberstein, exchanged endless letters with poetry and word games, gossip, titles of books they were reading, thoughts about girls.
    But he didn’t exactly date. “Young ladies are boring,” he confided to Eduard. The two teens had formed a secret society they called a “Spanish Academy,” speaking Spanish and taking on names of dogs from Cervantes’s classic novel, Don Quixote . Freud called himself Cipion, a smart, moralistic dog. He felt he had a good grasp on right and wrong. At fifteen, he led a student revolt against a teacher accused of not knowing his material.
    Sometimes Freud lectured Eduard on behavior—against tempting a girl into sex before marriage, for example: “A thinking man is his own legislator. . . . But a woman, let alone a girl, has no inherent ethical standard; she can act correctly only if she keeps within the bounds of convention.”
    As a big brother, Sigi was pompous, even bossy. He helped his younger siblings—a brother and five sisters—with their homework and freely gave advice on how they should behave. He warned one sister against listening to compliments, saying that praise made young girls “vain” and “insufferable.” He told another sister that the novels she read were improper for a girl her age.
    Disappointed by his weak, unsuccessful father, Freud was dazzled by strong men in history, especially those who combatted their foes. As a little boy, he would reenact battles with his toy soldiers, labeling each with the real names of soldiers. Later he admired military leaders who fought against great odds, like Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian Empire; Hannibal, the North African general who crossed the Alps to challenge Rome; Oliver Cromwell, a commoner who became ruler of England; and Napoleon, emperor of all Europe. One of Freud’s biggest heroes was the Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci—so intellectually curious, so fiercely independent.
    He also much admired his mother, who continued to brag about her oldest son. While the rest of the family did without, Freud was allowed to run up debts at the bookstore. His greatest pleasure was in adding one book a month to his personal library.
    At sixteen, during his last year at the gymnasium, for his final exam, he translated Sophocles’s famous play Oedipus Rex , which tells of the Greek hero’s tragic end. Oedipus was the fellow in Greek mythology who had become king by answering the riddle of the Sphinx. This monster, half-woman and half-lion, was terrorizing the city of Thebes. The only way to stop her was to solve her riddle: “What walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?” Oedipus correctly replied that it was man—who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and uses a cane in old age.
    So Oedipus vanquished the Sphinx, but during this adventure he ended up killing a man and then marrying his widow. The man turned