One can detect in Schnitzler’s art – as in that of his near contemporary and fellow doctor, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) – the writer as man of science, observing humanity in all its frailty. Its combination of unflinching objectivity, empathetic humanity and seen-it-all tolerance is rather like the perfect bedside manner. But La Ronde also has something of the anatomy lesson about it. We observe (and sometimes wince) as the tissue of pretence is peeled back and the inner organs are laid bare. The characters are left with nothing to hide. Every lie, every self-deception is dissected. Like voyeurs, we watch two people at their most intimate and their most exposed.

Ten Dialogues is the work’s subtitle, and there is significance in Schnitzler’s choice of the term. Ever since Plato and the Socratic Dialogues, this literary form has had pedagogic connotations. The play’s subtitle signals that this is no mere entertainment, but something from which we may learn: that these dialogues are to be treated as exempla. They are reminiscent of the case studies that Freud and Breuer published in 1895 in the seminal Studies in Hysteria. To borrow from Freud, one might even describe La Ronde as a study in the psychopathology of everyday life.

Freud’s gruelling self-analysis formed the basis for all his later work; a similar spirit of self-experimentation seems to have motivated Schnitzler’s candid journals. They are the product not so much of a confessional diarist as of a conscientious clinician keeping a careful note, and (as in the examples above) one can see in them the raw materials of his art. Freud got to the heart of this when he remarked in a letter to Schnitzler in 1922: ‘It seems to me that you have learned through intuition – or rather, from sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other people’ (emphasis added).