Sigmund Freud* Read Free Page B

food, ward off prey, and bear young to whom their useful traits would be passed on. Organisms without useful traits were more likely to die before they could reproduce.
    Darwin’s ideas were reverberating throughout biology and all the sciences—not to mention coffeehouses, parlors, and churches. In university classrooms, the search for physical and chemical forces in nature was on—more natural laws that governed the world of living things.
    Darwin’s theories were enormously controversial, but Freud was firmly in the camp of those who believed they amounted to “an extraordinary advancement in our understanding of the world.” Darwin for Freud was always “the great Darwin.”
    Once at the university, Freud “evolved.” He switched from zoology to medicine. He didn’t exactly see himself as a traditional doctor tending to patients’ physical ailments, although eventually he would have some experience doing this. All Austrian men had to serve in the army, and near the end of his time at college he had to take a year off to nurse sick soldiers. Official reports called him “very considerate and humane” with patients.
    But what really motivated him was a general “greed for knowledge.” He simply believed that by studying medicine he could learn more.
    He took all the required classes for a medical degree and beyond—physiology (the study of the functions of living organisms), physics, botany, chemistry, and every available course in biology. He memorized long passages from medical textbooks. His favorite time was in the laboratory, using a microscope, always careful not to contaminate a specimen with foreign matter of any kind. At first all he wanted in life was “a laboratory and free time.”
    Later he would change his goal to “a large hospital and plenty of money.” From the very beginning, Freud’s medical curiosity had unusually lofty aims: He wanted to “restrict some of the evils which befall our bodies.”
    He was attracted to bacteriology, the new branch of biology dealing with the study of bacteria. Scientists in this field were the first to realize that infectious diseases were caused by small living organisms such as bacteria and other germs. One of the pioneers was German doctor Robert Koch, who was currently trying to isolate the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis. This new germ theory of disease was fascinating—imagine such tiny things, invisible to the naked eye, causing such havoc in the body. Louis Pasteur, the great French biologist, had proven the theory correct, that germs indeed caused disease (and also fermentation). Pasteur was perfecting the process—called pasteurization in his honor—of destroying harmful germs with heat, and was on his way to developing useful vaccines that could actually protect an organism from germs.
    Freud admired both Pasteur and Koch, but he was most interested in Darwin. And Nicolaus Copernicus, the fifteenth-century Polish astronomer who theorized that the earth was not the center of the universe, as everyone thought, but rather the sun. And Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer who built on Copernicus’s work and proved that the earth’s orbit is oval in shape. Men like these made fundamental changes in the way people saw the world. Freud wanted to be like them, working in a huge arena. Though he was studying medicine, he did not want to heal as much as to be a hero—a scientist-hero, someone who would make a gigantic breakthrough.
    Like all of his professors, Freud was a positivist. Positivism was a philosophy that defined real knowledge as only what could be perceived by the senses. People could accumulate such knowledge about themselves and their world, and exercise rational control over both. The dominant trend in Europe during his day, positivism discounted mysticism and spirituality as magic, hocus-pocus, nonsense. The positivist method relied on observation, experimentation, comparison—proof in the form of hard data. Very