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In recent years, a number of psychoanalytic scholars — Morton Reiser, Fred Levin, Andrew Schwartz, and June Hadley, to name only the more widely quoted among them—have made a serious effort to recommence the enterprise of Freud's 1895 Project, the development of a scientific psychology on neurophysiological foundations. Laurence Miller's Freud's Brain constitutes another building block in constructing such a theory, although (for reasons I find incomprehensible) he makes no reference to the authors who have preceded him on this terrain.
Miller has chosen to focus his book on a particular segment of the vast field of neuropsychodynamics, that of Freud's principal topics around the turn of the century: hysteria, dreams, and parapraxes. Although evoking Freud as a forerunner legitimates Miller's choice for the book's title, in a contemporary context the boundaries of the latter's research agenda of the late 1890s seem somewhat arbitrary. Nowhere does Miller acknowledge that Freud pursued that particular course of investigation because he believed that the three clusters of phenomena share certain psychological features — in fact, purely psychoanalytic considerations of that kind play no role in Miller's discussion. In terms of his agenda, it is by no means clear why he has chosen to deal with dreams and not with obsessional symptoms, for example. However, the limitation may well be mine: I am equally discomfited when a production of a 19th-century opera uses a decor in the style of Magritte.
Miller is a neuropsychologist by training, and he has brought to his task an impressive mastery of the neurological literature. For mental health professionals with little or no knowledge of the functioning of the nervous system, Miller's careful demonstration of the fact that the full range of phenomena covered by his triad of topics may arise as a result of tissue pathology or physiologically caused malfunction is a vitally important reminder never to lapse into complacent “mentali