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I object to all of you to the extent that you do not distinguish more clearly and cleanly between what is psychic and what is biological, that you try to establish a neat parellelism between the two.… We must keep psychoanalysis separate from biology just as we have kept it separate from anatomy and physiology. —Freud (1935, p. 329)
A variety of historians of psychoanalysis have noted the influence of Freud's neurological education in shaping his thinking. Loyalist historians such as Bernfeld (1944), Jones (1953, pp. 379-380), and Strachey (1955, p. xxiv) have asserted that, before Freud's systematic self-analysis of 1897, he was uncomfortable explaining things psychologically. He was allegedly committed to the desideratum of correlating psychical processes with brain anatomy and physiology. Freud's self-analysis was supposed to have freed him from a need to “neurologizen” his psychological insights. Revisionist historians such as Amacher (1965) and Holt (1965), also have stressed the impact of Freud's neurological education. They argue that Freud never really gave up neurologizing many of his psychological insights at all; Freud's meta-psychology is seen to be full of earlier neurological concepts hidden in psychological terminology.
From the point of view of the loyalists, Freud's 1898 statement to Fliess1 that he must behave as if he were “confronted by psychological