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It can be said that the epistemology of psychoanalysis were a life-long preoccupation and problem to Freud. But curiously, although he was rejected by the medical establishment, especially by his chief and admired teacher Meynert (who turned violently against Freud's early papers and attacked him as a “hypnotist”), Freud made only minimal defensive explanations in his papers. And, just about a hundred years ago, he turned to the endeavor which he carried on from the “project” to the end of his life: to create (i.e., to study) a scientific psychology. In 1891, in his book on aphasia, he clearly stated his convictions:
The relationship between the chain of physiological events in the nervous system and the mental processes is probably not one of cause and effect. The former do not cease when the latter set in; they tend to continue but, from a certain moment, a mental phenomenon corresponds to each part of the chain, or to several parts. The psychic is, therefore, a process parallel to the physiological, a “dependent concomitant.” (1891, p. 55)
It would follow, from this early insight, that Freud would, as indeed he did, expect that as the knowledge of chemistry, physics, physiology, and all the things we now call neuroscience would progressively explain more of phenomenology, we would have to revise our views of the “dependent concomitant,” that is, the science of psychological phenomena, and keep them in harmony with the biological substrate. In Freud's letter to Fliess (No. 96) he wrote that he had “no desire at all to leave the psychology hanging in the air with no organic basis … I have no idea yet why I cannot yet fit it together” (1954).