[3] Jones also wrote of Stekel that he was "a naturally gifted psychologist with an unusual flair for detecting repressed material".

Stekel was born to Jewish parents in 1868 in Boiany (Yiddish Boyan), Bukovina, then an eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but now divided between Ukraine in the north and Romania in the south.

His parents, who were of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic background, were relatively poor, a fact which restricted his life choices.

He then enlisted as a "one-year-volunteer" with the 9th Company, Prince Eugen's Imperial Infantry Regiment No 41 in Czernowitz [today's Chernivtsi, Ukraine].

He was therefore free to enrol at the University of Vienna in 1887, and studied under the eminent sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Theodor Meynert, Emil Zuckerkandl, (whose son would later marry Stekel's daughter, Gertrude), Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, Hermann Notnagel, and Max Kassowitz.

[7] Stekel wrote a book called Auto-erotism: A Psychiatric Study of Onanism and Neurosis, first published in English in 1950.

[14] Freud credited Stekel as a potential forerunner when pondering the possibility that (for obsessional neurotics) "in the order of development hate is the precursor of love.

This is perhaps the meaning of an assertion by Stekel (1911 [Die Sprache des Traumes], 536), which at the time I found incomprehensible, to the effect that hate and not love is the primary emotional relation between men".

[16] Less flatteringly, Fenichel also associated it with "a comparatively large school of pseudo analysis which held that the patient should be 'bombarded' with 'deep interpretations,'"[17] a backhanded tribute to the extent of Stekel's early following in the wake of his break with Freud.

[19] Complaining of Freud's tendency to indiscretion, Ernest Jones wrote that he had told him "the nature of Stekel's sexual perversion, which he should not have and which I have never repeated to anyone".

[20] Stekel's "elaboration of the idea that everyone, and in particular every neurotic, has a peculiar form of sexual gratification which is alone adequate"[21] may thus have been grounded in personal experience.

[25] In connection with the psychoanalytic examination of the roots of art, however, he emphasised that "...the Freudian interpretation, no matter how far it be carried, never offers even the rudest criterion of 'artistic' excellence...we are investigating only the impulse which drives people to create".

[28] Stekel committed suicide in Kensington by taking an overdose of Aspirin "to end the pain of his prostate and the diabetic gangrene".

See also L. Mecacci, Freudian Slips: The Casualties of Psychoanalysis from the Wolf Man to Marilyn Monroe, Vagabond Voices 2009, pp.