Freud's Earliest Theories and the School of Helmholtz

Although Freud's early papers1 are written for the most part in simple, untechnical language, and the expressions he coined (repression, defense) have an everyday sound, sometimes such obscure phrases occur as a 'quantity of excitation', 'discharge', 'detachment', and the like, which appear to be relics of the neurology of 1890.

Freud evidently alludes to a theory of which he has a high opinion, a theory from which many concepts of psychoanalysis are derived. Freud did not expound this theory beyond communicating the very general idea, 'that among the psychic functions there is something which should be differentiated (an amount of affect, a sum of excitation), something having all the attributes of a quantity—although we possess no means of measuring it—a something which is capable of increase, decrease, displacement and discharge, and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body. We can apply this hypothesis which, by the way, already underlies our [i.e., Breuer-Freud] theory of "abreaction", in the same sense as the physicist employs the conception of a fluid electric current. For the present it is justified by its utility in correlating and explaining diverse psychic conditions' (17, p. 75). Clearly he is dealing here with the nucleus of the 'economic standpoint' and of the 'psychic apparatus'.

A knowledge of the historical origins of Freud's theories should lead to a better understanding of them. The 'concept of the excitation which is discharged' is elaborately discussed in the Studies in Hysteria (7) as part of Breuer's contribution.2 It