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Freud's unpublished "Project for a Scientific Psychology" is intimately related to his greatest, published, theoretical works, such as "The Interpretation of Dreams" and his metapsychological papers. This
is how Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks are related to his paintings and other creations. Neither the "Project" nor the Notebooks were supposed to see the light of day—in fact, Leonardo wrote his Notebooks in mirror writing with his left hand. The "Project" seems to have been Freud's notebook in which he sketched out most of his ensuing concepts and hypotheses, largely in neuronal terms. Later, he disclaimed on several occasions that Mind could be described in neuronal or neural terms. Perhaps, with his fine taste, that is why he never published the "Project."
As the authors of this reassessment of the "Project" point out, the "Project" has not been taken seriously in academic circles since first published and translated. Yet the problems it addresses are central to the concerns of anyone interested in the mind. In the United States particularly, concerns about the mind have only recently reasserted themselves in academic circles—concerns with judgment, thought, attention, perception, memory, motivation, and intention, rather than only with learning, conditioning, and behavior.
The "Project" is a rich source book for psychologists. It is tailor-made for the historian of ideas, of psychology, and of psychoanalysis. Yet it is a truly curious document: rich in its connotations, an essential guide to most mental phenomena, laden with passages that are almost beyond comprehension (as many works of genius are), and crucial to an understanding of all the problems that metapsychology poses. To put it bluntly—it is an inspired and perplexing work of genius.
Freud begins slowly in the "Project," building on suppositions that seem to come from nowhere. Could he have known about Ramon y Cajal's lecture in 1889, or Waldeyer's "neuron doctrine," both of which proclaim th