Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Allan N. Schore

Author:Allan N. Schore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

CHAPTER 6

A Century After Freud’s Project:

Is a Rapprochement Between

Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology at Hand?

ON APRIL 27, 1895, SIGMUND FREUD wrote his friend Wilhelm Fliess that he was rapidly becoming preoccupied, indeed obsessed, with a problem that had seized his mind. In what would turn out to be a creative spell he was attempting to integrate his extensive knowledge of brain anatomy and physiology with his current experiences in psychology and psychopathology in order to construct a systematic model of the functioning of the human mind in terms of its underlying neurobiological mechanisms. In the preceding month he had completed the final chapter on psychotherapy for Studies on Hysteria, and at this point in time, 20 years into his professional career, he had produced over 100 scientific works. Yet in his letter to Fliess he openly admitted that “I am so deeply immersed in the ‘Psychology for Neurologists’ as to be entirely absorbed until I have to break off, really exhausted by overwork. I have never experienced such intense preoccupation. I wonder if anything will come of it?” (in Jones, 1953, p. 380).

Throughout the summer Freud continued to relay to Fleiss messages of both his progress and frustration on the Project, describing his mood as alternately “proud and happy” or “ashamed and miserable.” Breuer wrote to Fleiss in July 1895, “Freud’s intellect is soaring at its highest” (in Sulloway, 1979, p. 114). In September he feverishly began to write it out, and within one month he had filled two notebooks totalling 100 manuscript sheets that he sent to Fleiss in early October. In a letter of October 20, commenting on his ambitious attempt to work out the direct links between the operations of the brain and the functions of the mind, he wrote:

One evening last week when I was hard at work, tormented with just that amount of pain that seems to be the best state to make my brain function, the barriers were suddenly lifted, the veil drawn aside, and I had a clear vision from the details of the neuroses to the conditions that make consciousness possible. Everything seemed to connect up, the whole worked well together, and one had the impression that the Thing was now really a machine and would soon go by itself. . . . Naturally I don’t know how to contain myself for pleasure. (in Jones, 1953, p. 382)

The state of elation and excitement would not last. A month later he admitted to Fleiss, “I no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched out the ‘Psychology’, and I can’t understand how I came to inflict it on you” (in Jones, 1953, p. 383). In fact, he never asked for the return of the manuscript and never wanted to see it again. Fleiss kept it, however, and after Freud’s death it was finally published in 1950 under a title devised by Strachey, “Project for a Scientific Psychology.”

Despite Freud’s repudiation of and disappointment with this work, Strachey characterized the essay as an “extraordinarily ingenious working model of the mind and a piece of neurological machinery” (Freud, 1895/1966, p.

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