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This issue of The Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis emerges from the meetings of the Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience Study Group of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. First organized in 1990, monthly meetings between invited neuroscientists and senior psychoanalysts have promoted ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue concerning the brain-mind interface.
The interrelationship of these disciplines is not new. Perusal of the history of post-Enlightenment science indicates that Freud's development and that of the modern neurosciences were, broadly speaking, coterminous. Charles Bell's Anatomy of the Brain was published in 1811, ten years before the births of Pasteur, von Helmholtz, and Charcot, and only forty-five years before the birth of Freud. Freud was himself an accomplished neuroscientist, a neurobiologist steeped in zoology, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology. Noteworthy in this connection were Freud's laboratory teachers and colleagues: Dubois-Reymond, Bruche, Von Marxow, and Exner, all direct intellectual offspring of the great physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz. Prior to his first articulation of psychoanalytic theory, Freud had published over three hundred neurobiologic papers plus five books on clinical neurology. Two of the latter, On Aphasia (1891) and his textbook on childhood paralyses (1897), remain of substantive interest to the clinical neurologists of today.
Of equal import was Freud's fascination with the theories of Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911), at the time a relatively obscure British neurologist. Jackson's model of “control levels” for CNS excitation were to provide the intellectual armature for Freud's initial models of psychic structure. Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology