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In the introduction to his Project for a Scientific Psychology Freud (1895) wrote, “The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science” However, after about three months of intense work, he abandoned the Project But he never abandoned his position that psychoanalysis is part of natural science. In 1921 he wrote of analysts that “Instead of waiting for the moment when they will be able to escape from the constraint of the familiar laws of physics and chemistry, they hope for the emergence of more extensive and deeper-reaching natural laws, to which they are ready to submit”
Freud failed in the Project largely because the basic science and neurobiology was still unknown He was a man of his time and he worked within the theory and science of the day Now, almost 100 years later, Gerald Edelman has proposed a global theory that unifies brain and mind This may be the deeper-reaching theory to which, after careful scrutiny, we analysts find we can submit Edelman may have successfully completed the work Freud began in 1895.
If Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS) is proven right, Descartes' dualism is about to be replaced by Edelman's monism, which “.. will have stunning implications for psychoanalysis and psychiatry” (Modell 1994a) If Edelman's TNGS is valid, we are watching, in the sense of Thomas Kuhn, the emergence of a new paradigm in neuroscience and psychoanalysis
In 1972 Edelman shared the Nobel Prize for working out the complete structure of an antibody and proving the theory of clonal selection in the immune system. He then turned his attention to neuroscience, and in 1978 proposed that both brain and mind develop and function by selection, not by instruction, and that Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was so powerful in explaining the behaviour of the immune system, can also be applied to the brain In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire Edelman places the TNGS in a historical context, beginning with Empedocles, who inspired the