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One of the pressing problems facing psychoanalysis today is its relationship with the neurological sciences. The educated public in most developed countries (and especially in the United States of America) seem to have concluded that psychoanalytical therapies, research methods and theories are - to say the least - no longer at the cutting edge of mental science. Almost all the generally recognized therapeutic, technical and scientific advances in recent years have emanated from neuroscience. How should we respond to this situation? Is the educated public misinformed? Are the recent advances in mental science not really advances at all? Are they concerned with a fundamentally different subject matter? Do they have nothing at all to teach us? Can we simply ignore them? I want to show how an historical study of the origins and early development of our discipline can shed light on these questions, and thereby guide us in our current and future efforts to grapple with this problem.
Psychoanalysis, we are told by Freud, was born in 1895 or 1900 or somewhere in between. But when we identify the birthdate of psychoanalysis in this way, we should not forget that its birth was preceded by a long period of gestation, which included two decades of painstaking neuroscientific research. During that period (1877-1900), Freud published more than 200 books, articles and reviews (Meyer-Palmedo & Fichtner 1982), including numerous significant contributions (Jellife 1937; Brun 1936; Jones 1953; Vogel 1955; Triarhou & Del Cerro 1985), some of which established Freud as a leading international authority in the specialized fields of aphasia and cerebral palsy (Stengel 1954;