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On October 20, 1909, Surgeon Major-General Edwin Hollerung, a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, gave a presentation to the Society on the neurophysiological basis of mind. In his response, Freud said that he appreciated and admired Hollerung for “working on problems that may be on the agenda a century after us” (Nunberg and Federn, 1962, p. 280). Nearly a century has now elapsed since Hollerung's presentation, and Freud has been proven right: the problem of the neurophysiology of mind is now squarely on the scientific agenda. It was Freud's cherished hope that his psychological research would one day be placed on a sound neuroscientific footing.
Francis Crick and Christof Koch have now pointed out that Sigmund Freud was one of the first neuroscientific investigators to postulate the existence of consciousness-specific neurones, a hypothesis that enjoys their scientific support. Freud's notion of a consciousness module is only one of several fundamental points of contact between his theory of consciousness and the theory proposed by Crick and Koch (and Ray Jackendoff, whose ideas they endorse in large measure). In the present paper I will enlarge upon these aspects of Freud's work, making reference to relevant contemporary contributions to cognitive science where this is germane, and I will go on to specify some of the mechanical properties that Freud tentatively attributed to the consciousness-generating neurones and the information impinging upon them. I will confine myself to the model presented in Freud's “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895) and will, for the purpose of this discussion, ignore later theoretical innovations (e.g., the revisions represented in Freud's letter to Fliess of January 1, 1896).
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the philosopher Franz Brentano argued that the property of intentionality is the distinguishing mark of the mental. Brentano used intentionality in a technical phil