[From reflex arc to psychic apparatus: neurology and psychoanalysis around 1900].
As a disciple of Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke and Theodor Meynert, Sigmund Freud was familiar with 19th century physiology and neurology. He started his career with laboratory work and began later on, when being a young medic to develop an explicit psychological method for curating hysterics. These cases of hysteria ask riddles to the established medical discourse and practice. Freud's long time unpublished Entwurf einer Psychologie (1895) makes the attempt of a "psychology for the neurologist". He tried to give a sufficient theory of the psychic apparatus on the basis of natural science. At the same time he (together with Josef Breuer) published his Studies on Hysteria, which--in addition to his earlier essay on Aphasia (1891)--argued, that there is no clear cut relation between body and soul. Despite the dubious, non-reductive character of the soma-psyche-relation, Freud gave reason to search for a complex field of interrelations between the physiological and psychological knowledge, beyond the divide of natural sciences and humanities. Not until his groundbreaking Traumdeutung (1900) Freud gave up the claim of reintegrating psychological knowledge into the neuroscientific field for now. But up to his latest work he always adheres to the principal project of unifying the natural and the psychical being of the subject. In the gap between the two spheres, for long occupied by the discursive figure of the 'psycho-physical parallelism', Freud situated the Unconscious. In the passage to a psychoanalytical theory of psychic events Freud took up the model of the reflex arc well known from neurology. The transmission into psychoanalysis complexifies the unilinearity of reflexes, so that the psychic apparatus can be analysed as a cybernetic mechanism 'avant la lettre'. It is interesting enough that inhibition as well as consciousness play a key role in the regulation of the psychic apparatus. In this context Freud stresses the importance of speech and language within the self-organising processes concerning the claims and aims of basic needs and drives.
Porath
Erik
E
Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin. porath@zfl-berlin.org
D005619:Freudian Theory / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D007046:Hysteria / Q000266:history; D009462:Neurology / Q000266:history*; D011572:Psychoanalysis / Q000266:history*; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011601:Psychophysics / Q000266:history*; D011603:Psychophysiology / Q000266:history*; D012018:Reflex