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Almost seventy years after its publication, Freud's
essay 'Zur Auffassung der Aphasien' in Stengel's excellent translation still makes good reading for everyone who once has been or is still interested in problems of aphasia and cerebral localization. At the time Freud wrote this monograph (1891) the first great discoveries on cerebral localization (Broca, 1861; Fritsch and Hitzig, 1870; Wernicke, 1874; Munk, 1877–1880) were still recent enough to have kept alive the great expectations aroused by them. Wernicke, taking his starting-point from his investigations in the field of aphasia, never slackened in his attempts to interpret psychic disturbances as neurological symptoms. His pupil Kleist, in spite of the frustration Wernicke suffered in these endeavours, continued these efforts for some further decades.
Freud's essay opens with a highly readable and enlightening criticism of the 'classical theory' of aphasia (Wernicke-Lichtheim), in which he concludes that aphasic disorders cannot be understood as mere problems of localization, pointing out that Wernicke and Lichtheim also had to resort to functional factors for the explanation of aphasia. Especially his critical examination of cases of so-called transcortical motor aphasia convinced Freud that it could not be attributed solely to a circumscribed lesion of tracts or centres, but that functional changes also had to be taken into account. Freud therefore advances the hypothesis that the centres of the speech apparatus react as a whole with an alteration of function to partial lesions, causing a reduction of excitability, and refers to Bastian, who distinguished three states of reduced excitability of a centre.
Freud's attempt to arrive at a new concept of aphasia certainly forms the most important part of his essay. This concept greatly influenced the thinking of later investigators; in the light of later acquired knowledge we can only admire Freud's perspicacity and sagacity. To localize the physiological