It was primarily due to the traditional humanist education he received at the Sperl Gymnasium in Vienna that Sigmund Freud was so steeped in classical European literature. Here he was exposed to Homer and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Milton, and, of course, Goethe and Schiller, amongst many others. An equally important factor, though, was his own life-long passion for books. He was reading Goethe and even Shakespeare well before he went to secondary school, and his veneration of these authors was certainly more intense than that of most of his contemporaries who enjoyed a similar education. Although on leaving school he chose a career as a scientist, this by no means indicates that his literary interests had somehow waned. Not only was he fond of claiming that his inspiration to study medicine came from the public reading of an – albeit apocryphal – Goethe essay, ‘Nature’, his most enduring role models were men who, like Goethe and Leonardo da Vinci, excelled in both scientific and artistic fields of endeavour.

Freud certainly began his medical career as a strict materialist and empiricist, and he never relinquished his faith in nineteenth-century scientic values. It would be easy to surmise that the stern discipline of his medical training, received under the aegis of the pioneering ‘Helmholtzian’ Ernst von Brücke, stifled his youthful literary interests and thwarted forever his ambitions to emulate the Renaissance men he so admired.