Abstract

Freud and Conan Doyle. Parallel lives The investigative methods of Freudian psychoanalysis have long been debated, compared with the investigative methods of Sherlock Holmes. Although Freud was an avid reader of Conan Doyle's works, no one has never considered the existential and methodological concordances between the two authors. Both had medical degrees, were steeped in Darwinian science; moreover, they were the favored sons of brilliant mothers who nurtured their creative tendencies, and they had had as teachers clinicians who had become role models (Charcot and Bell). In the early days of the profession the empty days without patients had prompted each of them to imagine new conceptions; furthermore, certain dangerous friendships, accompanied by daring experiments on alkaloids, had been stimuli for knowledge of the human nature and limits. Freud and Doyle touched on each other on two occasions. Between the two, who was a writer masquerading as a doctor and vice versa?