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One hundred years ago, in 1891, Sigmund Freud produced a monograph that sealed his place in the histories of both neuropsychology and psychodynamic personality theory. Had he been struck down at the moment of its publication, before there ever was a Freudian slip, a Freudian dream theory, a therapeutic technique of free association, or a Freudian metapsychology — indeed, everything we associate with Freud's system of psychoanalysis — his name would still be cited in texts today for his contributions to clinical neurology and neuropsychology.
Freud's 1891 monograph, On Aphasia: A Critical Study has not received the attention it deserves among scholars of either neuropsychology or psychoanalysis. This is due largely to the fact that, having been relegated to the status of a “prepsychoanalytic” tract, it was not included in the Standard Edition of Freud's collected works. An equally illuminating early work on childhood cerebral palsy (Freud and Rie, 1891) shares a similar fate and is even more obscure to psychohistorians.
The importance of On Aphasia for the later development of psychoanalysis has undeservedly been overshadowed by Freud's (1895) now-famous Project for a Scientific Psychology in which he sketched out a proteoneurophysiological model that was apparently intended only for the eyes of his friend Wilhelm Fleiss. The Project, which lay undiscovered until the middle of the twentieth century (the title was added posthumously by the editors), was however included in the Standard Edition, and for that reason it has been hailed over the ensuing decades as a kind of neuroscientific vindication of psychoanalysis,