The Shadow of Movement in Psychoanalysis

Reading the first prepsychoanalytic texts could suggest that Freud has imagined the movement as the first model of mental function. The concept of motor image allowed him to use the notions of neurophysiology for elaboration of a new psychic organization. If Charcot described hysteria and its motor facts, Freud used these descriptions to elaborate his theory, but the symbolic value of hysterical motor signs was understood in the light of their relationship with Meynert's ideas.

Meynert () was a Viennese university neuroanatomist and neuropsychiatrist. In 1873 he accepted Sigmund Freud to be one of his students. In “Psychiatry-Klinik der Erkrankungen des Vorderhirns” , Meynert described a psychic function which corresponds to the motor brain neuroanatomy. He maintained that the motor image was, first, the base for thinking about our actions prior to their realization of movement, and then the base for creation of a “primary ego.” At the outset of the nineteenth century, Darwin's theory of evolution influenced the transition from anatomy to a comprehensive model of mental functioning. Moreover, J. H. Jackson's theory (cited by Henri Ey, 1975) was also based on a motor behavioral shape within a hierarchical system: “Evolution is a passage from the most rudimentary to the most organized, from the simplest to the most complex, from the lower to the upper brain centers” (p. 55). By contrast with brain localization theory, an idea of global psychic functioning was linked to the motor image, as it is not located