The spectacular and influential nature of Freud’s work is sufficient justification for devoting some space to a brief account of his standpoint and his innovation in method. As we shall have occasion to illustrate, his method is of more general application to practical problems of political research and political practice than is usually understood. When Freud was a student in the University of Vienna, the triumphal progress of microscopic methods of studying cellular structure was sweeping all before it. Congeries of mental symptoms in the living were frequently found to be correlated with the discovery of certain definite cerebrospinal lesions on autopsy. The future seemed to rest wholly in the hands of those who used the dissecting knife and the lens. Before Freud graduated from the University, he became demonstrator to Brücke, the eminent physiologist; and he labored in the laboratory of Meynart, the distinguished psychiatrist of his day. Freud’s first publication was a result of laborious laboratory work. While materialism reigned, psychological phenomena were degraded to the status of trivial epiphenomena. But at this very time a revival of psychogeneticism arose in French psychiatry under the impetus of Charcot. Charcot had achieved eminence in pathological anatomy before he turned in middle life to the study of mental maladies. By 1883 he had demonstrated the possibility of producing hysterical symptoms by means of ideas (verbal stimuli). Time and again he hypnotized individuals and produced muscular contractures, hypersensitivity, and hyposensitivity, together with allied symptoms of hysteria. Breaking away from the laboratories of Vienna, Freud journeyed to the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris to work with Charcot, where he stayed from the autumn of 1886 to the spring of 1887. Here he was thrown in touch with the current of ideas which was giving concrete content to the notion of the “out of conscious” and its dynamic consequences for human behavior. Pierre Janet was busily accumulating the observations which were published to the world in 1889 under the title, _L’automatisme psychologique_. Early chapters appeared in the _Revue philosophique_ as early as 1886. Freud had just missed a spectacular rise to fame when he failed to recognize the anaesthetic possibilities of cocaine in surgery. He published a review of the literature on cocoa; and a young Vienna colleague, Koller, struck by some of the data which Freud had assembled, announced the discovery in 1884 which immortalized his name in medical history. Freud pondered for many years on why the idea should have eluded him, and perhaps his desertion of the laboratory was due to his sense of partial failure.