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By Timothy Lenoir. Boston: Kluwer, 1982, 314 pp., $60.00.
Freud said that in order to understand someone we need to feel our way into their lives, to develop some sense of where they are coming from and what they are after. The strange thing is that we are so uninformed about the scientific tradition in which Freud developed and then, late in his career, invented psychoanalysis. Timothy Lenoir has written a very good book about German biology at the beginning of the 19th century.
Lenoir shows that Romantic Medicine was one stream in a tide of many "Nature Philosophies" which dominated German medicine and biology. They shared a firm belief that there were organizing principles common to all forms of life which could be intuited while studying an intact system. This clear and fruitful assumption powered the work of some accomplished biologists and physicians who searched for the characteristic relations of organic parts to one another, for what Johann Christian Reil called "purposeful order" or "efficient organization" (zweckmässige Ordnung). Lenoir has discerned a need, which all scientists probably feel, but which became unfashionable and went underground two generations before Freud's time.
When we break up a functioning system, it is much easier to prove something about a few variables, but we no longer are able to understand how the whole thing worked. Freud's distaste for experiment and therapeutic intervention flows in the observing and describing research tradition of Johannes Müller's physiology. As Freud worked out his own kind of science, he clearly preferred Müller's stance.
Another "Romantic" assumption Freud used for a time was the notion that a person has some privileged insight into his own mental organization and therefore into the inherent nature of everything else through a kind of intellectual intuition—from the "inside," as it were. Karl Friedrich Burdach's "self intuition" (Selbstanschauung) survived in Freud's early assumption about wha