In this contribution I outline some of Schrödinger’s initial resistance to the complex nature of his wave function. It is shown how he first attached physical meaning only to its real component and even tried to avoid the explicit appearance of the imaginary unit in his fundamental (timedependent) equation. This attitude is quite understandable, since he was committed to the classical framework of wave theory, not only ontologically, but also formally. Around two years after the publication of his famous papers on wave mechanics, Schrödinger seems to have accepted that the wave function must be complex and that the physical interpretation is to be related to its absolute square. This is justified by him both due to equivalence considerations with matrix mechanics and in analogy with Maxwell’s equations. This episode can be of special pedagogical relevance as students often struggle with the complex nature of the wave function on their first encounter with it.