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I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other neuropathologists, I was trained to apply local diagnoses and electro-prognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. Breuer and Freud (1895). Studies on hysteria. S.E.2
Research has afforded irrefutable proof that mental activity is bound up with the function of the brain as with that of no other organ. The discovery of the unequal importance of the different parts of the brain and their individual relations to particular parts of the body and to intellectual activities takes us a step further-we do not know how big a step. But every attempt to deduce from these facts a localization of mental processes, every endeavor to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells and of excitations as travelling along nerve-fibers, has completely miscarried. Freud (1915). The Unconscious, Standard Edition XIV, 174
Understanding how the mind works is one of the most challenging and fascinating goals of humankind. We are all deeply connected to the question of who we are and how this “sense of being” comes about. Questions about the nature of the mind and how it functions have been asked for thousands of years by philosophers and intellectuals, joined later by psychologists and psychoanalysts, and most recently by neuroscientists. But it is psychoanalysis in particular that focuses its efforts on examining individual minds and attempts to understand how they operates in health and disease.
As discussed at greater length below, with the “Project for a Scientific Psychology: [Part I] General Scheme” (referred to as the “Project”) – the cornerstone of what is now called neuropsychoanalysis – Freud aimed to provide some scientific explanation of the mind. He und