You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Freud's neurological training and his contributions to neuroanatomy and neurophysiology cannot be disregarded as an influence on his psychoanalysis. On Aphasia was first published in German in 1891. Four years later Freud1 was attempting to explain mental functioning by a reconciliation between psychology and neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. As Kris points out this effort was 'a coherent attempt to describe the functioning of the psychical apparatus as that of a system of neurons and to conceive of all the processes concerned as in the last resort quantitative changes. These processes are not confined merely to perception and memory but include thought, emotional life, psychopathology and normal psychology, as well as a first restricted but in some respects well-rounded theory of dreams.' The seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1896), which is the first psychoanalytic exposition of mental functioning, could not have been written had Freud not first written these two other works. This fact is made clear in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess (letter 6-12-96). '… Our psychical mechanism has come about by a process of stratification: the material present in the shape of memory traces is from time to time subjected to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—is, as it were, transcribed. Thus what is essentially new in my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is registered in various species of "signs". (I postulated a similar rearrangement some time ago, in my study of aphasia, for the paths leading from the periphery.)'
On Aphasia briefly reviews Wernicke's contributions (1874) to the understanding of so-called sensory aphasia. Broca had previously suggested that motor aphasia is caused by lesions of the left frontal convolutions. Wernicke showed that in sensory aphasia