Freud–Meynert relationship

The Freud–Meynert relationship began in admiration and ended in open intellectual conflict. In Freud’s account of a dream, Meynert reappears concealed behind the figure of Freud’s father: a displacement that links the senior colleague’s hostility and their dispute over male hysteria to Freud’s anxieties about recognition, career progress, and the time required for achievement.

Early Reverence and Reversal

Freud followed Meynert’s intellectual footsteps with profound respect. That favorable relation changed after a brief period of support: Meynert became openly hostile toward him. The account gives no detailed chronology of the change, but its sharp contrast—reverence followed by undisguised antagonism—made Meynert a charged figure in Freud’s recollection.

Dispute over Male Hysteria

Their conflict became explicit in a bitter literary dispute about whether men could suffer from hysteria, a condition Meynert denied. During a visit to Meynert in his final illness, Freud asked how he was; Meynert described his condition at length and then admitted that he himself had been one of the finest cases of male hysteria. The admission both confirmed Freud’s position and astonished him, because Meynert had resisted that view for so long.

Meynert Behind the Dream-Father

In Freud’s dream, his father recalls having once been drunk and needing to be confined. Freud says this part of the dream does not refer to his father’s real life: the father’s figure is covering Meynert, whose youthful use of chloroform as an intoxicant had led to a stay in an institution. The dream’s substitution is not, Freud insists, based simply on a perceived likeness between the two men. Its deeper warrant lies in a conditional thought: if Freud had been the son of a professor or Hofrat, he might have advanced more quickly. The dream accordingly makes his father a professor and Hofrat while using the father’s image to carry material about Meynert.

Career, Time, and Dream Interpretation

The dream’s treatment of the years 1851 and 1856 turns a difference of five years into an apparent non-difference. Freud connects that interval with the length of time he had enjoyed a colleague’s support, the wait before his marriage, and the time he was then making a close patient wait for a complete cure. The recurrence of the interval gathers distinct experiences into a defense against the accusation that he was not progressing quickly enough. Meynert’s concealed presence therefore belongs to a wider dream structure: figures and circumstances are displaced, while an indirect association allows the dream to express a professional grievance it does not state openly.

Significance

The relationship matters in the book not only as a clash between former admirer and hostile senior colleague, but as an instance of Freud’s method at work. A dream figure cannot be read as a transparent portrait: the father’s apparent story masks Meynert’s, and the disguised material links a private conflict to questions of professional standing and delayed advancement. Meynert’s late admission also gives the dispute an ironic reversal: the man who had denied male hysteria recognized himself, at the end of his life, as a case of it.