Freud, the Problem of Quality and the 'Secretory Neuron'

In 1895 at the dawn of psychoanalysis Freud cast a lingering last look at neurophysiology in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (4). The Project was an attempt to delineate the neurophysiological basis of psychological processes. It was written in an astonishingly short time considering its range and complexity—a matter of weeks. Freud quickly lost interest in this approach and years later had this to say on the matter: '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 passing along nerve-fibres, has completely miscarried' (3). The view expressed in the closing sentence of this statement is valid (provided one accepts a dualistic approach) in the strict, logical sense that ideas and mental processes are subjective, nonmaterial configurations which are intrinsically different from, and therefore not comparable to, matter-energy phenomena. However, a looser usage of the concepts involved would insist that there exists localization of brain processes with consequent localization of psychical processes and that ideas are indeed 'stored up in nerve-cells' or, more accurately, in neuronal circuits or mechanisms. An extreme, monistic view, of course, would assert that one or the other, idea or mechanism, does not exist. At any rate, Freud may have been