His point of view changed, however, when he began treating women who were diagnosed as being “hysterical.” They suffered from what appeared to be suppressed sexual desires. These cases and others prompted him to discard his own model of the brain as a kind of neuronal machine and replace it with a model of the mind as an entity driven by secret desires. Freud constructed his fantastic theories of dreaming, repression, and ego and id based on years of listening to troubled patients tell of their woes while lying on his office couch–a career move from the brain lab motivated primarily by Freud’s need to make enough money to support his rapidly expanding family. And yet in his final writings, he acknowledged his own repressed hope that one day science would recast his maxims in neurology.
Rooted in Biology Sigismund Schlomo Freud came into the world on May 6, 1856, as the first of eight children. He was born in Freiberg in the Austro-Hungarian Empire–today the town of Pribor in the Czech Republic. Four years later his mother and father, a wool dealer, moved the family to Vienna for good. The wool business never went well, and like most Eastern European Jewish immigrants the family struggled against anti-Semitism and poverty. Yet the Freuds set great hopes on their firstborn and nurtured his ambitions.
Young Freud, called Sigmund for short, enrolled as a medical student at the University of Vienna in 1873. The place had some of the finest minds in medical education. Among Freud’s teachers was Ernst Brücke, a prominent physiologist, and at age 20 Freud entered his lab as an assistant, dedicated to studying the nervous systems of lower animals. His early publications included titles such as “On the Origin of the Posterior Nerve Roots in the Spinal Cord of Ammocoetes.”
Neurophysiological research was a new but rising discipline. Brücke was a member of the Berlin Physical Society, whose motto was, “We have pledged ourselves to make this truth known: that within the organism no other forces are at work beyond normal physical-chemical ones.” Freud, armed with a dissection knife and a microscope, strived to inform this strictly biological model.
In the summer of 1882–a year after receiving his degree–Freud was engaged to Martha Bernays, who came from a prominent family. The gifted but penniless physician now urgently needed money and status before he could marry Bernays, five years his junior. He wanted to continue in research but saw no prospects for rapid promotion in the university. So that same year he took a position at Vienna General Hospital, where over the next three years he would make rounds in all the important departments, including surgery, internal medicine and psychiatry.
The psychiatry department was headed by Theodor Meynert, a world-renowned brain researcher and a proponent of the idea of cerebral localization. This school of thought, much in vogue at the time, held that every psychopathological symptom–whether a speech defect, hallucination or mental illness–originated from a physical defect in the brain. An investigator’s most important task was to locate such defects during autopsies. Meynert was convinced that psychiatric illness could be traced back to neuronal sources. He was suspicious of any patient’s complaint that lacked a recognizable, organic cause; without such evidence, a patient’s claim must simply spring from imagination or even be deliberately feigned.
Talk Therapy Begins During his years with Meynert, Freud became an expert in cerebral localization. But soon his career would take a completely different path. Thanks to a traveling fellowship from his department, he left Vienna in 1885 to spend six months at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, where psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot was searching for a therapy for a disorder common among women: so-called hysteria.
The victims of hysteria suffered from sudden attacks of paralysis and aphasia (inability to comprehend speech). Some of them babbled as if delirious or became highly aroused sexually. The cause of this odd disorder was obscure, and the usual treatments–hydrotherapy or massage–seldom helped. So the charismatic Charcot hypnotized his patients and suggested to them that they were, right then and there, experiencing the symptoms. Often the patients acted “hysterical,” but once they were awakened from hypnosis they reported feeling improved. Freud was so caught up in Charcot’s enthusiasm that he would later name his first son after the French doctor.
As soon as Freud returned to Vienna, he married Bernays, and the couple had six children in rapid succession. To earn enough to feed his growing family, Freud gave up research to become a neurologist in private practice. In 1891 the clan moved to larger quarters in Vienna–a house big enough to accommodate a room to treat patients. They stayed there for almost 50 years, until they had to flee the Nazis in 1938.
Soon after the move Freud furthered his relationship with Joseph Breuer, a physician who was experimenting with hypnosis as treatment for various mental ills. In 1895 the two jointly published Studies on Hysteria. This classic book of case studies marked the birth of psychoanalysis. The two doctors explained that hysterical women suffered, above all, from “reminiscences”–fragmentary memories of traumatic events such as sexual abuse–that broke into their conscious minds in the form of anxiety fantasies. This experiential, unconscious process contradicted the then dominant localization theory that every mental illness was traceable to a physical origin.
Freud developed the technique of “free association” as a means to gain access to the repressed memories of hysterical people and of those who exhibited compulsive behavior. Because the content of these memories was generally “hidden” in the unconscious and repressed from breaking through to the patients’ conscious awareness, Freud told his patients to relax on his couch and challenged them to tell him whatever came into their heads. The analyst noted everyday experiences, dreams and feelings. Even his patients’ jokes and casual remarks were sources that could unveil the dramas of the unconscious mind. Freud’s postulate was that bringing a neurotic disturbance into conscious discussion through therapy would cause the troubling notion to dissolve, by way of a mechanism he called the “cathartic” effect of psychoanalysis.
Freud’s heart was not in treating patients, however. The tedious therapy sessions served above all as a laboratory for the refinement of his theories. Freud readily took the knowledge he obtained and applied it to people in general. As he wrote: “What analytic research originally had in mind was no more than finding the causes of a few pathological mental conditions, but in achieving this we were able to discover relationships of fundamental significance, and thus create a new psychology.”
In 1899 Freud laid the foundations of psychoanalytic theory in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. The script presented a set of ideas that has influenced modern thought just as strongly as has Darwin’s theory of evolution or Einstein’s theory of relativity. In later decades Freud would revise, expand and even discard individual ideas within the theory; after World War I he postulated a second source of psychic energy–in addition to the libido–that he called Thanatos, or the “death instinct.” The division of the psyche into three interactive parts–the driven id, the moralistic superego and the ego that negotiated between the two–was chiefly delineated in the 1920s. But psychoanalysis persevered.
Dreams marked a complete turn away from neurology, treading purely in psychology. In it, Freud wrote, “We shall wholly ignore the fact that the psychic apparatus concerned is known to us also as an anatomical preparation, and we shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine the psychic locality in any anatomical sense. We shall remain on psychological ground.” This position affected not just therapy but research methodology. The interpretation of reported dreams, for instance, had nothing in common with the search for brain injuries or arousal of the central nervous system.
Nevertheless, when it came to the “psychic apparatus,” Freud continued, as before, to see both psychological and biological principles at work. This conundrum led him to the heart of the ancient mind-body problem–whether the mind is purely the outcome of neurons firing throughout the nervous system or whether it arises as a higher state. Freud had already imagined resolving it in 1895, when he drafted a report called Project for a Scientific Psychology. “The intention,” he wrote, “is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychic processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction.” The “material particles” were most likely neurons, which were in contact with one another via synapses. What Freud meant by “quantities” was the level of psychic energy flowing through the neurons. The energy arose from arousal either by a sensory organ or–far more important–by the body’s own drives. Discharging this energy–in the sex act, for instance–creates pleasure for the individual, whereas blocking its discharge creates displeasure.
Even this terse description makes it clear that Freud’s metaphor for the organ of the mind was an electric motor. His psychodynamic model resembles an internal relay station that directs constantly flowing “current” into a complex, highly branched system. Occasionally, in some unknown way, this current quantity was transformed into quality–conscious experience. “Every psychic act begins as an unconscious one,” Freud declared in his draft report.
Conflicted Despite seemingly certain statements, Freud struggled mightily with whether to place his faith in biology or psychology. While working on Project for a Scientific Psychology in October 1895, he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in Berlin: “Everything fell into place, the cogs meshed, and the thing really seemed to be a machine which in a moment would run of itself.” Yet just five weeks later he admitted his disappointment: “I no longer understand the state of mind in which I concocted this psychology.” At the end, Freud discarded his plan for a neuronal machine, and the unfinished Project manuscript disappeared into a drawer.
Freud failed to reconcile the brain and mind because he saw no possibility of finding a neurological basis for distinguishing between conscious and unconscious processes–the magical hub around which his entire psychology revolved. The dead end is not surprising, given that research into brain function was still primitive. No one knew how the brain worked. Wilhelm Waldeyer had just introduced the concept of the neuron in 1891. The big question was whether the dense tissue of the brain was a single, spongelike mass, as Italian physician Camillo Golgi believed, or whether it was made of many tiny units, the concept favored by Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Golgi developed a staining method that allowed scientists to study thin sections of brain under a microscope. Using it, Ramón y Cajal was able to identify narrow gaps between neuron cell bodies, leading him to the image of a myriad of intercommunicating units in the brain. This advancement brought Golgi and Ramón y Cajal the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906.
Scientists were also largely in the dark about anatomical brain function. It had been 20 years since losses in certain regions of the mysterious gray organ had been linked to specific pathological symptoms. Paul Broca, a French neuroanatomist, investigated an aphasic who had unusual speech problems. The patient understood most of what was said to him yet could not produce a single intelligible sentence. After the patient died, Broca autopsied his brain and discovered lesions in a part of the left frontal lobe, known today as Broca’s area; the ability to produce speech is located there. Broca’s German colleague, Carl Wernicke, discovered the neurological seat of speech understanding–a part of the frontal lobe far above Broca’s area; a patient with damage there cannot understand even the simplest speech but can still produce grammatically correct, though often meaningless, sentences.
Few other anatomical associations had been found by 1895, however. Physicians hoped every one of the gyri and sulci–the characteristic hills and valleys of the cerebral cortex–might be charted according to its function, but Freud was skeptical. What would that say about the psychic events taking place within them? His answer: Nothing. “We know two things concerning what we call our psyche or mental life: firstly, its bodily organ and scene of action, the brain (or nervous system) and secondly, our acts of consciousness, which are immediate data and cannot be more fully explained by any kind of description. Everything that lies between these terminal points is unknown to us, and, so far as we are aware, there is no direct relation between them. If it existed, it would at the most afford an exact localization of the processes of consciousness and would give us no help toward understanding them.”
These words are found in the opening of An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud’s last work, which he began shortly before his death in 1939. Here again Freud collected the most important points of his psychology. “The phenomena with which we have had to deal do not belong to psychology alone; they have an organic and biological side as well…. We have adopted the hypothesis of a psychic apparatus extended in space, appropriately constructed, developed by the exigencies of life, which gives rise to the phenomena of consciousness only at one particular point and under certain conditions. This hypothesis has put us in a position to establish psychology on foundations similar to those of any other science.”
Was Freud’s flirtation with biology no more than a “self-misunderstanding,” as philosopher Jrgen Habermas wrote? Or did it merely serve as a pretext he used to endow his teachings with the prestige of science? There is a great deal of evidence that Freud did believe that psychoanalysis would, one day, have empirical foundations.
Some experts today are indeed attempting to lay the groundwork of “neuropsychoanalysis.” Modern neuroscience, they claim, possesses the necessary methods and findings to support Freud’s assumptions. Yet Freud himself realized that the converse might be true: “Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information, and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind that will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis.”
(The Author) STEVE AYAN has a degree in psychology and is an editor at Gehirn & Geist.
(Further Reading)
