Endnote 3 – Freud

Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in SE 5:548–549. While studying at the University of Vienna, Freud was exposed to the writings of the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who espoused the (now discredited) doctrine that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—the theory that a higher animal develops by passing through the evolutionary stages through which its species has passed. (For a highly readable essay that shows how Haeckel fudged his data to support this thesis, see Stephen J. Gould, “Abscheulich! (Atrocious!): Haeckel’s Distortions Did Not Help Darwin,” Natural History 3 [2000], pp. 42–49.) That this maxim applied to human culture as well as the human organism seemed self-evident to men like Freud. This is another reason for Freud’s profound interest in antiquity, as well as for the evidentiary function it had in his own thought.