Freud and the Neurosciences: From Brain Research to the Unconscious edited by Giselher Guttmann and Inge Scholz-Strasser with contributions by Oliver W. Sacks, Giselher Guttmann, Harald Leupold-Loewenthal, Malcolm Pines, Cornelius Borck, Morris N. Eagle and Detlev B. Linke ( Verlag der Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 1998, pp.  116); reviewed by Joseph Schwartz1

For an entire century, Freud's training in neuroscience in one of the most prestigious laboratories in Europe, his research into the mechanism of nerve action in the brook lamprey, his work on infantile cerebral palsies, his demonstration that hysterical paralyses correspond to an imagined rather than a real neurophysiology, his collaboration with Joseph Breuer, famous for his elucidation of the Hering-Breuer reflex of the vagus nerve in breathing, has been considered a positivist embarrassment to psychoanalysis.

Concerned to protect the integrity of psychoanalysis against a puerile reductionist scientific establishment, Freud told Jones (1953) that nothing could be more irrelevant for a psychological understanding of morbid anxiety than a knowledge of the neural pathways involved.

Freud knew whereof he spoke. Western science is so ill at ease with the existence of human subjectivity that it excises all traces of the human actor in its passive voice reports: ‘The paraffin blocks were inserted…’; ‘The electrodes were placed…’; The orbits were calculated…’—and locates its understanding of itself as being, as if that were humanly possible, an enterprise that is purely objective. Such a science is, of course, a myth, a myth well analysed by our very own generation of radical scientists, sociologists and historians of science (Young 1977; MacKenzie 1981; Pickering 1984; Latour & Woolgar 1986; Aronowitz 1988; Hubbard 1990; Schwartz 1992; Shapin 1994; Bem & de Jong 1997; Lewontin 2000).

But over the last five years a renewed interest in the history of Freud's relationship to neuroscience has paralleled new advances in cognitive neuroscience achieved by researchers with a deep appreciation of the achievements of psychoanalysis. Damasio (1999) has presented a powerful case for the location in the frontal lobes of the human brain of what he calls extended consciousness, the human capacity not simply to have feelings but to know that we have feelings. Schore (1994) has presented