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Psychoanalysis has always been about language and about the brain. Freud was fluent in several tongues, wrote prolifically in a style more literary than scientific, emphasized that psychological liberation came from the expression of feelings and images into words, and won, not the Nobel Prize in science to which he had aspired, but the Goethe Prize for literature.
Freud loved the brain. Before he ever cured a hysterical symptom or analyzed a dream Freud published over one hundred neuroscientific works, and by the end of the 19th century had earned a world-wide neuroscientific reputation for which, even decades later, he voiced his pride:
In the course of the following years, while I continued to work as a junior physician, I published a number of clinical observations upon organic diseases of the nervous system. I gradually became familiar with the ground; I was able to localize the site of a lesion in the medulla oblongata so accurately that the pathological anatomist had no further information to add; I was the first person in Vienna to send a case for autopsy with a diagnosis of polyneuritis acuta. The fame of my diagnoses and their post-mortem confirmation brought me an influx of American physicians, to whom I lectured upon the patients in my department in a sort of pidgin-English. (Freud, 1925, p. 19).