"The scenes themselves which lie at the bottom of the story:" Julius, circumcision, and the castration complex

In this paper I developed a description of Freud's childhood environment and the events surrounding the life of his brother Julius. I examined some of Freud's dreams, letters, and theoretical writings for clues regarding the effect of his early traumatic life events related to Julius. As Alice Miller (1990) suggests, "... how fruitless historical research can be if the psychological significance of external events is not taken into consideration" (p. 9). Miller (1981) also remarks, "... every childhood's conflictual experiences remain hidden and locked in darkness, and the key to our understanding of the life that follows is hidden away with them." I offer this analysis with the expectation of opening a search for the key; that identifying and interpreting Freud's own repressed material will lead to a fuller understanding of the prehistory of psychoanalysis and lend perspective to the meaning of his theories.