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.
This little monograph contains the contributions of a group of distinguished scholars brought together for a conference in Vienna in the Spring of 1997 by the Sigmund Freud Society and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Their purpose was to review Freud's early anatomical and neurological research in the light of discoveries made possible by modern technical advances in neurophysiology and neuro-psychology.
The contributions vary in their accessibility and relevance to a general readership, but two in particular stand out as valuable reviews of their respective topics. Oliver Sachs reminds us of Freud's twenty-year apprenticeship as a neuroscientist before he wrote his visionary Psychology for Neurologists or Project for a Scientific Psychology . In it he attempted to
…bring together the domains of memory, attention, consciousness, perception, wishes, dreams, sexuality, defence, repression, primary and secondary thought processes into a single coherent picture of mind and to ground all of them in a basic physiological framework….
and this was before he embarked on the psychoanalytic project which occupied the remaining thirty-four years of his life!.
Morris Eagle reviews the experimental evidence that validates Repression as a valid psychological construct and coping style which, while it confers the benefit of reduced anxiety levels, exacts a price in increased vulnerability to a wide range of somatic pathology.
These two chapters alone will reward the general reader, while specialists will find much to interest them in the remainder. The seven chapters are separated by facsimile reproductions of Freud's histological drawings.
As a medical student Freud conducted research on the neuro-anatomy of the lamprey, the gonad of the eel and the nervous system of the crayfish in the Physiological Institute headed by Ernst Brücke. Driven by the necessity to earn a living, he specialised in neurology, studying under Charcot in 1886. He wrote a series of well-respected reviews of c