1897

1897 was a turning point in Sigmund Freud’s work: as he withdrew from a theory of childhood sexual abuse, he investigated his own memories and developed the idea that early love for one parent and hostility toward the other were widespread features of childhood. This self-analysis, undertaken amid grief and overwork after his father’s death, supplied the beginnings of the Oedipus complex and helped shape the intellectual project of The Interpretation of Dreams.

Abandoning the seduction theory

Freud had attached great importance to the theory that hysterical symptoms arose from buried memories of sexual abuse in childhood, likening its discovery to finding the source of the Nile. By 21 September 1897, however, he had confided to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that he no longer believed the theory. It had not helped him cure his patients, seemed to require an implausibly widespread incidence of abuse, and failed to account for the way patients could confuse reality and fantasy—especially when Freud’s own questioning might prompt them.

This change was a substantial defeat for Freud’s ambitions, but it was not a denial that child abuse occurred. The account distinguishes his rejection of a general explanation from any claim that abuse was unreal; Freud may instead have underestimated how frequently it happened. His retreat from the theory coincided with a different inquiry, directed not primarily at patients’ histories but at his own.

Grief, overwork, and self-analysis

Freud’s father died on 23 October 1896. In the aftermath, grief, overwork, and worry brought on what has plausibly been described as a creative illness: an inwardly isolating and painful period that nevertheless ended in an exhilarating conviction that he had found a major truth. He worked through the crisis by probing his past, recalling sexual arousal in infancy by his nurse, remembering that he had seen his mother naked during a train journey when he was two and a half, and recognizing hostility toward his father.

On 15 October 1897, Freud described to Fliess the result he considered decisive: he had found in his own case love for his mother and jealousy of his father, and regarded the pattern as universal in early childhood. The formulation turned autobiographical material into a general theory. Freud proposed that these primordial emotions could help explain the power of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The Oedipus complex and classical tragedy

The 1897 self-analysis thus gave rise to the germ of the Oedipus complex. In the account’s formulation, the theory makes ordinary development tragic: becoming like one’s father requires opposing and overcoming him, while guilt marks the cost of maturity. The theory’s claim to universality is also identified as a point of contention, raising questions about women, non-European cultures, and whether a masculine account of development had been generalized from Freud’s personal experience.

Freud’s appeal to classical literature gives the theory a cultural dimension. The Oedipus story offered an account of why the tragedy could move modern audiences: its family conflict was not merely an arbitrary fate imposed from outside, but a pattern Freud believed spectators could recognize in themselves. In his reading of Hamlet, the same material is less openly enacted. Hamlet’s hesitation to avenge his father is interpreted as a consequence of repressed childhood wishes: the man he is commanded to punish has taken his father’s place beside his mother, and so embodies desires Hamlet cannot consciously acknowledge. The play’s delay and inhibition become, in this interpretation, signs of conflict rather than evidence that Hamlet is simply incapable of action.

From personal crisis to a theory of dreams

The self-analysis helped Freud through his personal crisis, while the principal therapeutic activity of that period was writing The Interpretation of Dreams. The book draws on dreams that provided material for his self-analysis, making its theoretical argument, in part, a disguised autobiography. The account therefore connects Freud’s personal investigation in 1897 to the structure and purpose of his major work on dreams.

Freud’s use of classical authors also served a broader intellectual purpose. In establishing the scholarly standing of his book, he surveyed earlier writing on dreams and invoked figures such as Aristotle, Lucretius, and Cicero, placing the subject in a cultural tradition rather than treating it as narrowly medical. His account of dreams linked individual psychic life to literature and inherited stories; the Oedipus complex was the most consequential expression of that connection. The year’s importance lies in the convergence of a theory relinquished, a personal crisis examined, and a new explanation of childhood and tragedy taking shape.