Sigmund Freud 5

Freud’s self-analysis lasted four years. He did not manage to cure himself of every neurosis, but he did overcome his travel phobia. In 1901, he made the first of many trips to Rome. More importantly, Freud, drawing largely from his own memories and dreams, wrote what he regarded as his most important work:the Interpretation of Dreams(1),in effect(2), a record of his self-analysis. The book was published in 1899, but Freud had the publisher mark the date as 1900. He wanted it to usher in(3)the 20th century. No one noticed. The dream book, containing ideas that would shake the modern era, sold just three hundred copies in six years.
By 1900, Sigmund Freud had pieced together a handful of dazzling insights into what he viewed as nothing less than a new science – the science of psychoanalysis(4). Freud’s primary aim was now to establish psychoanalysis in the world, to develop it into an international movement. His biggest fear was that
anti-Semitism would get in the way, that analysis would be dismissed as a Jewish science. Certainly only Jews showed any interest in Freud at the turn of the century (5). By 1902, he had attracted a small circle of followers, all of them Jewish, and they began to meet every Wednesday in Freud’s waiting room, forming w hat became known as the Wednesday Society. The subject of their first gathering was one dear (6) to Freud – the significance of smoking cigars. Freud himself was now smoking between twenty and twenty-five a day.
Another interesting topic might well have been doodles (7), specifically, Freud's doodles, unconscious images and signs like these, which he liked to scratch(8) out during society meetings. Freud continued to write during these years, and he had surprising popular success with the book that illustrated the unconscious with examples from everyday life, and that introduced his most famous idea –the Freudian slip(9).
Dreams, slips, which now we all think of as Freudian slips, and jokes, I mean, is this the stuff of which serious science was to be made? He turned it into, into that. But that was a remarkable performance.
I was fully aware of grandfather’s ideas, I mean, Freudian slips, for instance. If you meet somebody and say goodbye, you’d rather not meet him.
Someone Freud was eager to meet was Carl Jung,(10) a brilliant Swiss psychiatrist who had taken up Freud’s ideas, and whom Freud came to regard as his most gifted follower. What made Jung really special, however, had nothing to do with his ideas.。