A Note on Freud's Scientific Imagination

One of the striking, and as yet uncomprehended aspects of genius, is its ability to generate the necessary mental voltage to throw an illuminating spark across poles of knowledge that are apparently unrelated. This rare quality, distinguishing genius from talent, is seen in several of Freud's contributions, but nowhere more strikingly than in his schema of the basic functioning of the psychic apparatus, as developed in the seventh chapter of the Interpretation of Dreams. Convinced by numerous analyses that dreams, like hysterical symptoms, were meaningful and amenable to scientific interpretation, and persuaded by general concepts of evolution that they represented a primitive form of mental activity, Freud developed an hypothesis that enabled him to pass from the content of the dream and the rules for its interpretation, to the form and function of the total 'machinery' of the mind.

Approximately a half century later, the distinguished neurophysiologist Adrian, in the first Ernest Jones lecture, 1 proposed a theory of brain functioning which is substantially identical with Freud's hypothesis of the functioning of the psychic apparatus, as published in 1900. My brief note proposes to demonstrate this similarity, since it is both of biographical and psycho-analytic interest.

Essentially both hypotheses aim to provide answers to the same questions, but Adrian's formulation of these questions is somewhat more explicit. 'The problem is to explain how fresh activity arises, how it is directed to a particular purpose … and why it ceases when the aim is accomplished.' Freud is interested in answering another question: why the instinctual energy offered by the unconscious during sleep is only in the service of wish fulfilment. But in the course of answering this question, Freud actually follows the same lines stated in more detail by Adrian.

Freud utilizes his basic assumptions: the tendency of the primitive psychic apparatus to keep itself as free of excitation as pos