The Concepts of the Pleasure Principle and Infantile Erogenous Zones Shaped by Freud's Neurological Education

Freud acquired a complete education in neurology from his teachers in Vienna. Their neurology was as ambitious as Freud's metapsychology in that they related it to the whole range of human activity: their writings describe the 'nervous' events happening during suicide, the development of homosexuality, and even the appreciation of the play, Oedipus Rex. The usual interpretation of Freud's intellectual development is that he gradually departed from this neurological approach (cf., for instance, Jones, 1953). My view is that Freud's metapsychology remained entirely compatible with the neurology he had learned in Vienna (Amacher, 1965). Some of his theories—on repression most notably—were unaffected by his adherence to orthodox neurology. Others were restatements of orthodox neurology in metapsychological terms. Still others resulted from fitting his clinical findings into the inherited neurological scheme. This last will be discussed here.

Fortunately for the historian, the three teachers with whom this paper is concerned all wrote full expositions of their neurological ideas. Ernst Brücke's lectures in physiology were recorded and published as a book in 1876; the lectures were recorded during the term that Freud attended them as a medical student. Theodor Meynert published his Psychiatry in 1884 when Freud was working in Meynert's laboratory. Sigmund Exner was a teacher and long-time acquaintance of Freud. His Introduction to a Physiological Explanation of Psychological Phenomena was published in 1894, the year before Freud wrote his most explicitly neurological treatise, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895).